The court in Germany today (Tuesday) sentenced Irmgard Forchner, 97, who served as a secretary at the Stotthof concentration and extermination camp and was accused of aiding the murder of more than 11,000 Jewish inmates of the camp, to two years of probation. Forkner will be the last war criminal to be convicted of crimes committed during the Holocaust.
She was recruited into the SS service during World War II and when she was 18 years old, she was sent to serve as a secretary to the commander of the camp, which is now in the territory of Poland near the city of Gdansk.
Forkner in court, photo: E.
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The prosecution in the trial claimed that Forchner "aided and helped those who ran the camp during the systematic killing that was carried out there between 1943 and 1945. She served as a typist and recorder in the camp commander's office and was behind the logistics of the killing."
More than one hundred thousand prisoners, most of them Jews from Poland and Germany, passed through the Stotthof camp and almost 60 thousand of them were murdered in the camp.
Others were transferred from it to other extermination camps in Poland.
The camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
The Stutthof extermination camp where she served, photo: AFP
Forchner, for her part, refused to answer the prosecution's questions and said that she regrets what happened during World War II and that she regrets having taken part in it.
Forchner's prosecution was made possible thanks to a change in the German Penal Code and the definition of cooperation and responsibility for the acts of killing also for those who assisted in the support system of the extermination and not only for those who committed the acts themselves.
Today, the court in the town of Itzehau sentenced Forchner to two years of probation, becoming the first woman in three decades to be convicted of war crimes in Germany.
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