Irmgard Furchner worked in a camp near Gdańsk from 1943 to 1945 as a secretary, scribe and stenographer for the local commander, Paul Werner Hoppe. Among other things, according to the prosecutor’s office, she rewrote his execution orders or lists of deportees, who then headed trains to Auschwitz. She was 18 and 19 at the time she was employed at Stutthof, so her case ended in juvenile court in Itzehoe.
The process, which was to begin with it on Thursday, is considered perhaps the very last, which concerns the staff of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, notes the Czech Television correspondent Martin Jonáš.
No one took the woman’s threats seriously
According to him, Furchner announced in advance that she would do everything she could to avoid having to attend the trial in person, she did not want to experience the shame of sitting on the dock. “None of the judiciary took these threats seriously until this morning, when the judge surprisingly appeared before journalists, saying that the defendant was currently on the run,” Jonas described the situation.
At her retirement home, Furchner has announced that she is leaving to take part in the trial. “She took a taxi, went to the Hamburg metro station and tried to escape. The court issued an arrest warrant for this. Her escape lasted only a few hours, she was detained at 13:50, “the reporter added.
The woman’s medical fitness was then examined by a doctor and the court decided that the arrest warrant would be invoked. “The court informed the defendant of the arrest warrant. It will now be placed in a detention facility, “said court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer. The trial is adjourned until October 19.
Tens of thousands murdered
Stutthof originally served as a so-called labor-education camp from 1940, with tens of thousands of Poles and citizens of the Soviet Union passing through, but also interned political prisoners, people suspected of forbidden homosexual intercourse, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
From mid-1944, thousands of Baltic Jews or Polish civilians arrested after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising headed to Stutthof. By the end of World War II, 65,000 people had died in Stutthof, its subsidiary camps and local marches. The facility also included a gas chamber, and many prisoners were murdered by gunfire or phenol injections into the heart. Thousands starved to death.
Last year, the court imposed a two-year suspended sentence on a man who worked as a supervisor in the Stutthof camp during the war. He was 93 years old at the time of the verdict. The prosecution accused him of aiding the murder of more than five thousand prisoners.
– .
