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Convicted Irmgard Furchner on December 20th, the day of the verdict
Photo: Christian Charisius / AP
There is no doubt about the terrible crimes in the Stutthof concentration camp, but there is no doubt about the allegations against the client: Irmgard Furchner's defense lawyers have appealed to the Itzehoe district court.
Former concentration camp secretary Furchner was convicted last week of being an accessory to the insidious and cruel murder of more than 10,000 prisoners.
A co-plaintiff also appealed.
The judgment of December 20 is not yet final.
The 97-year-old was sentenced to two years in prison.
The sentence is to be suspended.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner had worked as a shorthand typist for the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe – and, according to the court, had helped in the systematic killing of thousands.
The verdict stated that Furchner, who was 18 or 19 at the time, was sitting at a “central interface” in the camp.
It is impossible that she did not notice the ubiquitous smell of corpses or did not overhear the conversations of the SS men.
It was "simply beyond imagination" that the accused had not noticed anything about the mass killings.
Lawyers don't see Furchner in the "chain of command"
Furchner's lawyers are now complaining that, as a typist, she was not part of a "chain of command".
The question of which requirements are to be made for a conviction for aiding and abetting must be clarified in principle.
However, the court did not position itself on the legal issues raised and "reasoned its findings largely with very compact assumptions and conjectures".
With its verdict, the court followed the request of the public prosecutor.
The two defense attorneys, on the other hand, had demanded an acquittal for their client.
They justified this by saying that it could not be proven beyond a doubt that F. knew about the systematic killings in the camp.
The trial against Furchner had attracted international attention because of the old age of the accused.
He had also raised questions about whether extensive trials against alleged Nazi accomplices decades after the crime without direct involvement in the crime were proportionate.
The 2011 trial of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp, paved the way for such trials.
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