German prosecutors have sought a suspended sentence for a 97-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary in what they described as one of the country’s last trials over the Holocaust.
Public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen told a court in the northern town of Itzehoe that Irmgard Furchner was guilty of complicity in the “cruel and malicious murder” of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.
She asked the judges to hand down a two-year suspended sentence, the longest possible without jail time.
“This trial is of outstanding historical importance,” Ms Wantzen said, adding that it was “potentially, due to the passage of time, the last of its kind”.
The first woman to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes in decades, Furchner sat impassively in a wheelchair in the courtroom, wearing a red beret and jacket.
The defendant was a teenager when her alleged crimes were committed and is hence being tried in juvenile court.
Lawyer Wolf Molkentin said the sentencing request was “no surprise” and his client did not plan to speak to the court before the verdict was announced.
Furchner has declined to testify, but several Stutthof camp survivors have offered wrenching accounts of their suffering.
Read the article in The Australian (AFP).