He is 96 years old and escapes a trial for complicity in the Holocaust. The story comes from Germany, where Irmgard Furchner, former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp, is accused of aiding and abetting the massacre of 11,000 people between 1943 and 1945. The old woman was intercepted by the German police in the early afternoon.
The trial began today, after 70 years, in the court of the town of Itzehoe, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, where the old woman lives in a retirement home: the 96-year-old, however, instead of appearing in the courtroom escape by taking a taxi. About 50 journalists and 12 representatives of the 30 people who took part in the civil action were waiting for her, including some survivors of the camp. At that point, Judge Dominik Gross issued an arrest warrant against the 96-year-old. Authorities tracked her down
She is the first woman in decades to be tried for crimes related to the Third Reich, but similar cases are not rare in Germany, where justice does not stop despite the very advanced age of the accused. Irmgard Furchner started working in Stutthof camp in occupied Poland in 1943, when he was only 18, as a secretary and typist.
The judicial precedent on which the trial is based is that of 2011, in which the then 91-year-old Ukrainian John Demjanjuk was sentenced to 5 years in prison simply for having been present in the Sobibòr camp during the massacres. The man was a Red Army soldier captured by the Nazis, and was the lowest-ranking subject ever to be tried for Holocaust-related war crimes. On that occasion the judge motivated the decision by explaining that no matter how small a person’s role may have been, it is enough to have evidence that it was a “cog in the machine of destruction” to arrive at a conviction.
Furchner’s defense will push on the fact that the woman’s tasks were only to write telegrams and send radio communications, without ever physically contributing to the massacre.