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Accused in court: The public prosecutor accuses her of aiding and abetting murder in 11,380 cases
Photo: Marcus Brandt / dpa
Irmgard Furchner was sitting on the bed in her room in the Quickborn-Heide nursing home and was watching TV when she received an unexpected visitor one morning in early 2017.
A public prosecutor and two officers from the State Criminal Police Office in Kiel introduced themselves and had questions.
It was not the first time that Irmgard Furchner was questioned by investigators about a period in his life that went back decades, far away in what is now Poland, and which is one of the darkest chapters in German history: Irmgard Furchner's time as a typist in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, in around 65,000 prisoners lost their lives.
For almost two years, Irmgard Furchner was the secretary of the camp commander - an important witness in the years after the war, when the prosecution of Nazi crimes got off to a slow start.
She was asked about her work in Stutthof three times, in 1954, 1964 and 1982.
"Mentally awake"
But the two men and the woman standing in their room at the retirement home on that winter day in 2017 not only had questions, they also had a search warrant.
Irmgard Furchner was no longer a witness, but suddenly an accused.
She was confronted with suspicions of being an accessory to murder in 11,380 counts.
Irmgard Furchner was outraged.
This is how the public prosecutor describes it this Tuesday in the Itzehoe district court.
He describes how the then almost 92-year-old sat on her bed, "mentally alert and active", only hard of hearing.
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Your defender Wolf Molkentin intervenes.
He had achieved that the testimonies from the fifties, sixties and eighties may not be used;
The court rejected his application not to be able to use Furchner's statements from 2017 either.
And so the public prosecutor reports on meeting the former civilian employee of the SS five years ago.
This reacted "very emotionally, surly" and "with stubbornness".
He had the feeling that she had misjudged the seriousness of the situation.
"Clean conscience"
This is one of the reasons why he informed her in detail about her rights and explained to her why, after so many decades, she was now being investigated: that the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg had initiated the proceedings;
that in 2016 the Federal Court of Justice upheld the verdict against the Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning and that this decision paved the way for people like her to be prosecuted.
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According to the prosecutor, the pensioner had little understanding that she was being investigated after such a long time.
She described it as "ridiculous," spoke of a "clean conscience," and stressed that she hadn't killed anyone, hadn't noticed any killings, had never set foot on the camp site herself, and had no contact with the inmates.
She was repeatedly assured that she "didn't do anything wrong".
Camp commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe wrote execution orders, made the duty rosters for the guards, issued deportation lists for the trains to Auschwitz.
As a typist, Irmgard Furchner is said to have written down what Hoppe dictated to her.
What did you get from the torture and the systematic murders of the National Socialists?
The public prosecutor told the court that she admitted to having worked as a typist in the Stutthof camp headquarters.
She also remembered the names of two telephone operators, but not details about her paperwork, only one letter: an order for garden supplies, Hoppe was a "passionate gardener."
"I don't have all day!"
For the representatives of the accessory prosecutor, that sounds like mockery.
Lawyer Markus Horstmann asks the witness whether he felt he was being taken seriously.
He didn't believe it, but accepted it, replies the prosecutor.
"Frau Furchner is a resolute lady, at least that's what she was back then." He hasn't forgotten how she called out to him: "Young man, go ahead, I don't have all day!"
She had been "conscripted," she said.
And: “I was called and had to go.” This contradicts the statements of the historical expert Stefan Hördler, an expert on Wehrmacht and SS structures, who says that the commandant’s staff was over at the time Irmgard Furchner began her work female civilian employees has been expanded.
They would have started there voluntarily, both their consent and that of the employment office had to be available.
There were no forced transfers there.
The search of the "sparsely furnished, small single room" in which Ms. Furchner lives did not take long, says the LKA officer who accompanied the public prosecutor at the time.
Diary entries, photos and other documents relevant to the proceedings could not be found.
Furchner said she wasn't able to take much with her when she fled, and her son destroyed the rest when he moved to the senior citizens' home.
The presiding judge, Dominik Groß, repeatedly asked what condition Ms. Furchner was in.
"For her age, she was in very good condition," says the LKA official, she was "able to follow."
In the end, her defense attorney contradicts the use of both testimonies.
According to Molkentin, doubts remained as to whether his client was aware of the consequences of her statements during the interrogation.
Incidentally, at the end of the unwanted visit in 2017, Ms. Furchner threatened the officials that she would inform "a major German daily newspaper," says the prosecutor.
He did not say which medium she meant.