76 years after the war ended, Irmgard Furchner fled the nursing home. She is accused of involvement in 11,000 murders.
The alarm went off when the 96-year-old disappeared from the nursing home in North German Quickborn. She is probably the last German to stand up for her role in the Nazis’ crimes against humanity.
After a few hours, the police found her on the street in Hamburg.
Irmgard Furchner was taken into custody while awaiting trial.
For the last two years of World War II, she was secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp. This was a very brutal camp. It is estimated that 65,000 of the approximately 100,000 prisoners died.
Furchner must have known about the misdeeds, according to the prosecution.
Norwegian experiment
In December 1943, 254 Norwegian police officers came to Stutthof. The German occupation forces thought they were “unreliable” police officers. In the concentration camp, they were to be “retrained” to become good Nazis.
Norwegian SS soldiers were to be in charge of the training.
“The project was a total failure. The prisoner group resisted the massive pressure, “writes the historian Terje Emberland.
The Norwegian prisoners were put in a separate part of the camp and not subjected to the same gross abuse as the other prisoners.
Four of the Norwegian prisoners died in Stutthof. Eight others died after returning home in 1945.
Most of those who sat in Stutthof were Eastern Europeans, the Nazis considered “subhumans”. The camp was established in northern Poland right after the German invasion. By then, the Germans already had lists of leading Poles to be interned.
–The last trial
Irmgard Furchner was a young lady when she got a job at Stutthof. She became secretary of the camp commander Paul-Werner Hoppe. The prosecution believes she became aware of details about the extermination program through her job, but did nothing to help the prisoners.
In 1954 she testified in the case against Hoppe. Then she claimed that she did not know what was happening in the camp. The mare was sentenced to nine years in prison.
The trial is receiving a lot of media attention in Germany, and it is not because of the escape attempt. Many believe that this is the last time anyone will have to defend themselves against crimes committed during the war. This is because there are no longer many survivors left.
In March this year, a German court ruled that the case against Johann Rehbogen should be stopped. He was a guard in Stutthof. Rehbogen is a little older than Furchner, and the court has concluded that he is too weak to complete the case.
Last summer, Bruno Dey was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence. As a guard in Stutthof, he is said to have contributed to the murder of 5,232 people.
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