By: Ethan Goldberg
Irmgard Furchner hardly looks the part of the “the secretary of evil.” The pictures from her trial in the small German town of Itzehoe simply depict a tiny, frail, woman confined to a wheelchair.[i] In fact, Fuchner’s 2022 trial was one of the first trials in Germany in decades that sought to convict a woman for her role in perpetrating crimes for the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.[ii] At 97-years old, “it had taken nearly eight decades to convict the former camp typist, now a . . . care home resident.”[iii]
During the Holocaust, Furchner worked as a secretary for the Nazi commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, Paul Werner Hoppe.[iv] The trial court found that Furchner “worked as a typist in the commandant’s office of Stutthof near Gdansk from June 1943 to April 1945, assisting those in charge of the concentration camp in the systematic killing of inmates.”[v] Furchner’s husband was also a Nazi, and worked alongside Hoppe as an officer.[vi]
At the Stutthof camp, in Nazi occupied Poland, “the Nazis imprisoned more than 100,000 people in bleak conditions.”[vii] By the end of the war, “roughly 65,000 people died at Stuffhof . . . among them ‘Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war,’ according to the indictment read out by public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen.”[viii] On December 20, 20222, “the Itzehoe state court gave Irmgard Furchner a two-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.”[ix]
Furchner, who was between the ages of 18 and 19 when she worked at Stutthof, was tried before a German juvenile court.[x] The prosecution was unable to charge her as an adult as the court “couldn’t establish beyond a doubt her ‘maturity of mind’ at the time”[xi] she committed her alleged crimes.
Even though Furchner did not directly kill any of the prisoners at Stutthof, prosecutors were successful in bringing charges against her through “a German legal precedent established over the last decade that allows anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific killing.”[xii] This precedent was established in the 2009-2011 Demjanjuk trial in Munich. Demjanjuk faced charges of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp.[xiii] In that case, German prosecutors for the first time “argued that a guard at a facility whose sole purpose was mass murder shared responsibility for the deaths of those killing during his service there.”[xiv] After Demjanjuk’s conviction, “German prosecutors successfully prosecuted subsequent cases against killing center and concentration camp guards using the same theory tested in the Demjanjuk case.”[xv]
In Furchner’s trial, the prosecution argued that “as Hoppe’s secretary, it was Furchner’s job to ‘process, sort, prepare and type all of the camp commandant’s documents’, thereby facilitating ‘the seamless operation of the camp.’”[xvi] The prosecution also argued that Furchner’s “clerical work ‘assured the smooth running of the camp’ and gave her ‘knowledge of all occurrences and events at Stutthof.’”[xvii] The prosecution highlighted the fact that “Hoppe’s work included sending prisoners to Auschwitz. He also held ‘selections’ at Stutthof, following which many of those deemed unfit, including women and children, were murdered through lethal injections, gassings, shootings, and beatings.”[xviii]
Finding Furchner guilty, the presiding Judge sentenced Furchner to a two-year suspended sentence, the maximum allowed sentence seeing as Furchner was tried as a juvenile.[xix] The Judge “found that ‘nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her’ and that she was aware of the ‘extremely bad conditions for the prisoners.’”[xx] Lamenting on the trial, the Judge noted that “we would have preferred a defendant who spoke-she chose to remain silent.”[xxi] Refusing to testify as to her participation in the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime, Furchner finally addressed the court at the end of her trial, stating “I’m sorry for everything that happened and I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. That’s all I can say.’”[xxii]
Despite the expected guilty verdict, and the disappointing sentence, this trial has immense significance, even though the Holocaust took place around 80 years ago. Because of the age of the remaining survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust, the crimes of the Holocaust will soon be a distant memory. Furchner, unfortunately, will likely be one of the last Nazis to be brought to justice through the German legal system.[xxiii]
Criminal law encompasses theories of punishment for criminal prosecutions, including “deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, and restitution.”[xxiv] These theories, however, “largely have to do with preventing future crimes. Those fade away when a perpetrator is 90 or 100 years old.”[xxv] Instead of seeking to prevent future crimes, Furchner’s trial, and punishment serve as an important reminder of the mass atrocities that took place during the Holocaust.
Furchner’s trial and conviction was gratifying for the victims of the Holocaust.[xxvi] During the trial, eight survivors of Stutthof provided witness testimony, many of them telling their stories publicly for the first time.[xxvii] This trial truly was a last opportunity for these survivors to publicly share their testimony and to seek justice for the horrors they suffered; some of those who testified at the trial sadly passed away before the conclusion of the trial.[xxviii] Overall, “this trial might have a healing effect in particular for the victims and their families. Here, before a German court, their suffering and their terrible experiences in the camp are recognized.”[xxix]
Trials for genocide and mass-atrocities can be “important venues for the presentation of history, even though a trial is not a history book, and a trial is not an archive. But it still presents a part of what happened, and it uses documentation and sometimes brings new testimony or new documents to light.”[xxx] Trials for genocide and mass atrocities “can hardly avoid creating a historical record.”[xxxi] Furchner’s trial also served the role in bringing the Holocaust back into the collective memory of the German public by forcing the German judiciary and public to confront the “heinous crimes which took place during the Holocaust.”[xxxii] This trial also helped to further establish what exactly took place at Stutthof during the Holocaust.
Criminal trials for the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust, and those who perpetrate genocides, serve an important role of resurfacing “atrocities that shouldn’t be forgotten.”[xxxiii] President Cassese of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia famously said that “forgetting means the victims are murdered twice: first, when they are exterminated physically, and thereafter when they are forgotten.”[xxxiv]
Furchner has appealed to a German appellate court.[xxxv] Hopefully, the German legal system affirms the conviction of the trial court and does not provide this Nazi secretary with the relief she seeks. Regardless of what happens on appeal, the fact remains that “two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was extinguished.”[xxxvi] While the trial court did its job in finding Furchner guilty, many view this trial as simply a gesture. Only the survivors and victims of Stutthof and the Holocaust can truly judge Furchner, and the crimes she assisted in as part of her role as the secretary of evil.[xxxvii]
[i] See Sebastian Bronst, Prosecution at trial of Nazi camp secretary: Gas chamber cries ‘clearly audible’ The Times of Israel (Oct. 19, 2021, 3:17 PM), https://www.timesofisrael.com/prosecution-at-trial-of-nazi-camp-secretary-gas-chamber-cries-clearly-audible/
[ii] See Agence France-Presse, German Court Convicts 97-year-old in One of Last Holocaust Trials, Voice of America (Dec. 20, 2022, 6:44 AM), https://www.voanews.com/a/german-court-convicts-former-nazi-camp-secretary/6883837.html
[iii] Katja Hoyer, Was this Germany’s last ever Nazi war crime trial?, UnHerd (Dec. 21, 2022), https://unherd.com/thepost/was-this-germanys-last-ever-nazi-war-crime-trial/
[iv] See Bronst, supra note i; Wilhelmine Preussen, Nazi camp secretary found guilty in potentially final Holocaust trial, Politico (Dec. 20, 2022, 12:45 PM), https://www.politico.eu/article/ex-nazi-camp-secretary-holocaust-germany-convicted-in-potentially-last-trial-in-germany/
[v] Preussen, supra note iv.
[vi] See Agence France-Presse, supra note ii.
[vii] Preussen, supra note iv.
[viii] Bronst, supra note i.
[ix] Anna Noryskiewicz and Haley Ott, Former Nazi camp secretary, 97, appeals conviction of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders, CBS News (Dec. 28, 2022), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/imgard-furchner-former-nazi-camp-secretary-appeals-conviction-97-years-old/
[x] See Preussen, supra note iv.
[xi] Noryskiewicz, supra note ix.
[xii] Id.
[xiii] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, John Demjanjuk: Prosecution of a Nazi Collaborator, Holocaust Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/john-demjanjuk-prosecution-of-a-nazi-collaborator
[xiv] Id.
[xv] Id.
[xvi] Hoyer, supra note iii.
[xvii] Deutsche Welle, German court convicts ex-Nazi camp secretary, Law and Justice Germany (Dec. 20, 2022), https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-convicts-ex-nazi-camp-secretary/a-64159732
[xviii] Hoyer, supra note iii.
[xix] Agence France-Presse, supra note ii.
[xx] Id.
[xxi] Id.
[xxii] Id.
[xxiii] See Hoyer, supra note iii.
[xxiv] Lenora Chu, Nazi criminals, convicted decades later. Is justice served?, The Christian Science Monitor (Oct. 19, 2022), https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2022/1019/Nazi-criminals-convicted-decades-later.-Is-justice-served
[xxv] Id.
[xxvi] See Agence France-Presse, supra note ii.
[xxvii] See Luisa von Richthofen, Opinion: Historic verdict in one of the last Nazi trials, Deutsche Welle (Dec. 20, 2022), https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-historic-verdict-in-one-of-the-last-nazi-trials/a-64169966
[xxviii] See Noryskiewicz, supra note ix.
[xxix] Von Richthofen, supra note xxvii.
[xxx] Chu, supra note xxiv.
[xxxi] Fergal Gaynor, Evidence, Truth and History in Atrocity Trials, B.C. L. Rev. E. Supp. Online, Vol. 63 (Mar. 30, 2022), https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/law/academics-faculty/law-reviews/bclr/e-supp-online/evidence-truth-and-history-in-atrocity-trials.html
[xxxii] Chris Jewers, ‘Secretary of evil’, 97, says she is ‘sorry for everything’ as she breaks her silence for first time during trial into her role in 10,000 deaths at Nazi death camp, Daily Mail (Dec. 7, 2022 11:16), https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11512855/Germany-Secretary-evil-97-says-sorry-breaks-silence.html
[xxxiii] Chu, supra note xxiv.
[xxxiv] Gaynor, supra note xxxi.
[xxxv] See Noryskiewicz, supra note ix.
[xxxvi] Chu, supra note xxiv.
[xxxvii] See Noryskiewicz, supra note ix.
