The 97-year-old was tried in a juvenile court as she was 18 when she started working as a stenographer at Stutthof concentration camp, which is now part of Poland.
A court in Germany found a former secretary in a concentration camp guilty of accessory to murder, the latest in a string of convictions targeting low-level members of the Nazi’s extermination effort.
In what could be one of the last criminal cases against individuals who participated in the Holocaust, the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany, handed Irmgard Furchner, 97 years old, a suspended two-year prison sentence for her role as a junior employee of the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, now part of Poland, between 1943 and 1945.
Because she was age 18 when she started working at the camp, Ms. Furchner was tried in a juvenile court, which followed the recommendation of the prosecution.
For decades, many people with junior roles — and some with more prominent ones — in Adolf Hitler’s effort to exterminate European Jews didn’t face justice because of laws and precedents that required them to be tied to specific victims to be convicted.
That changed in 2011 when a Munich court found John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. auto worker, guilty of helping murder almost 28,060 people while working as a guard at the Nazi Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland.
Read the article by Bertrand Benoit in The Australian.