Judgment in the trial of 97-year-old German Nazi

A German court found the former Nazi camp stenographer and typist guilty.

A 97-year-old woman who was a Nazi concentration camp secretary was found guilty by a German court of aiding and abetting the killing of more than 10,000 victims.

Irmgard Furchner was given a two-year suspended sentence on Tuesday after being found guilty by the district court in the northern German town of Itzehoe.

Due to her age at the time of the offenses, she was tried in a juvenile court. Furchner, who was between the ages of 18 and 19, worked as a civilian typewriter at the Stutthof concentration camp from 1943 to 1945.

The Nazi-era factory at Stutthof was the first of its sort to be built on German-annexed land that is now part of the Polish city of Gdansk. Between September 1939 and May 1945, about 65,000 prisoners died there because they were starved, had illnesses that weren’t treated, had to work in horrible conditions, were mistreated, or were put to death.

During the trial, Furchner’s attorneys contended that the prosecution had not established beyond a reasonable doubt that Furchner knew about the deliberate killing of the prisoners at the time. The woman apologized “for everything that happened” and her attendance in Stutthof in a brief statement before the court.

Due to Furchner’s brief escape from her nursing home on the first day of the scheduled hearings in September and her subsequent arrest by the police, the trial was delayed and finally began in October of last year.

A 101-year-old man who worked as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was given a sentence in June by a court in the German town of Brandenburg. Reports say that he is the oldest Nazi criminal in the country who has been found guilty.