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Defendant Furchner before the Itzehoe Regional Court
Photo: Christian Charisius / POOL / EPA
When Irmgard Furchner is pushed into the courtroom, all the lenses and cameras are pointed at her.
The lenses capture what the old lady looks like, whether she is hiding who she is looking at.
That's what the 96-year-old supposedly wanted to avoid: being shown.
She wears her white hair under a headscarf and sunglasses over the FFP2 mask.
She is sitting in a wheelchair from an ambulance, strapped to her shoulders and forearms.
The former secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp fears scorn and ridicule.
So she put it herself in a letter to the presiding judge and asked him not to appear at the trial in the Itzehoe district court.
But defendants have to endure it, their presence in criminal trials is essential.
With her escape at the start of the trial at the end of September, Irmgard Furchner really drew attention to herself.
When the ambulance commissioned by the court was supposed to pick up the pensioner from her retirement home in Quickborn, the 96-year-old was gone.
"Ankle cuffs" on the wrist
Furchner was searched for with an arrest warrant.
In the afternoon she discovered a police patrol near a busy street in Hamburg and arrested her.
When she subsequently showed herself to be unreasonable, the judge sent her to the Lübeck correctional facility and only suspended the warrant after four days.
Since then, Irmgard Furchner has had to wear an "ankle cuff".
In her case, she is attached to the wrist and anyone can see her.
With Irmgard Furchner, a civil employee of a Nazi concentration camp is on trial for the first time.
At 10:20 a.m., public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen rises and explains why Furchner is answerable here.
She is said to have assisted the insidious and gruesome murder in 11,412 cases and aiding and abetting attempted murder in 18 other cases.
Irmgard Furchner avoids eye contact with the audience.
She rests her chin on her left hand, bows her head and seems to be listening.
For her protection, she is sitting in a box made of Plexiglas, she has not had a corona vaccination.
According to a medical report, she is able to negotiate for two hours a day.
Knowledge "partly down to the last detail"
For almost two years, Irmgard Furchner worked in the headquarters of the Stutthof concentration camp, Department 1, the headquarters of the concentration camp.
From June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945, she wrote down what SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Werner Hoppe dictated to her.
"One of their tasks was in particular the recording, sorting, preparation and drafting of all correspondence from the camp commandant," says Wantzen.
With her work, Furchner had ensured "the smooth functioning of the camp."
The public prosecutor is convinced that Irmgard Furchner had "partial knowledge of the details" of the crimes in Stutthof.
The 65,000 murdered camp inmates were shot with a shot in the neck, they were hanged and gassed with Zyklon B.
They were tortured, frozen to death, starved, and worked their way to death.
Wantzen explains how the shot-in-the-neck system worked: how the prisoners were led to believe it was a medical examination;
how they had to stand against the wall, unsuspecting, until they were shot from behind;
how their corpses were hurriedly disposed of - piecework murders.
And Wantzen explains how the gassings worked: how the prisoners, mostly women, were led to believe that they were being "cleaned" for hygienic reasons;
how an SS man poured the poison gas into the chamber through a shaft in the roof.
Wantzen describes the agony of those affected.
It is quiet in the room.
Irmgard Furchner was the first stenographer.
She was subordinate to the camp administration with commanders and adjutants.
She was there voluntarily, no one had forced her, before she worked at Dresdner Bank.
She was 18, 19 years old when she was sitting at her desk in the concentration camp.
Could a secretary who didn't pick up a gun herself contributed to the murder of thousands of people?
"Radicalized SS men with experience of violence"
Furchner's answer to this question can be found in the letter she wrote to Judge Dominik Groß on September 8th.
It says that she did nothing more than seven decades ago that she could be accused of today.
She is silent in court. Her defense attorney Wolf Molkentin says his client will not comment "at this point in time" or answer any questions. But he gives an explanation. "Irmgard Furchner is not Ursula Haverbeck," says Molkentin, referring to the well-known Holocaust denier. "She does not deny the crimes of the Shoah, not even those horrific acts that have just been brought back to our eyes by reading out the indictment." Furchner merely countered the accusation that this trial was about: "also personally to have incurred a criminal debt «.
During the trial, the fact that Furchner was surrounded by "radicalized SS men with many years of experience of violence" at her workplace will come up, says Molkentin. But does that mean that the murders were also "handled openly"? That Irmgard Furchner was an accomplice?
The lawyer refers to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and his speech from 1943, which in its "inconceivable abomination can hardly be surpassed".
In it, Himmler talks about "a very difficult chapter": the mass murder of European Jews in the "Third Reich" and the silence about it.
Molkentin calls it "the perverted gentlemen's" morality "of the SS and the National Socialists in general."
Could this silence also apply to a typist like Irmgard Furchner?
"From the point of view of the defense, the fact that she was shielded from the murder and its administrative facilitation in this sense cannot be ruled out from the outset," said Molkentin.
"She noticed everything"
Her former superior, Hoppe, had been sentenced to nine years in prison for aiding and abetting murder, and he had served three and a half years. Molkentin argues that anyone who personally poured Zyklon B into the gas chamber through a skylight should only have been an assistant in the end. In recent years there have been trials against concentration camp members such as John Demjanjuk, Oskar Gröning and Bruno Dey, and Josef S. is currently being tried at the Neuruppin Regional Court - does Irmgard Furchner fit into this series?
The answer from the joint plaintiffs is clear.
“She saw everything.
Without people like Frau Furchner, the machinery of murder was not possible in this perfection, ”says Stefan Lode.
The lawyer from Düsseldorf represents several survivors, he is convinced that Furchner, as the assistant to a camp commandant, asked that she knew what, for example, »special treatment« meant, as the Nazis called the murder of their opponents in a covert way.
His colleague Christoph Rückel applies to visit the Stutthof concentration camp.
He himself was there in 2018.
Anyone who knows Auschwitz will be surprised how "small" the facility in Stutthof is, says Rückel.
The then concentration camp secretary must have noticed what the SS had done there.
