Irmgard Furchner, a secretary at a center of Nazi atrocities, dies in 99

Irmgard Furchner, who played his role as a teenager in the management of the Nazi detention camp in Poland, which Germany occupied in 2022 for being attached to more than 10,000 murders, on January 14. She was 99 years old.

Friedrich Melhoffar, a spokeswoman for the court in Izho, confirmed in northern Germany, where Mrs. Forsner was tried, but she did not provide any other information. The German magazine, Deir Spiegel, and the German newspaper, Shaligij Holsteinchi Zaitongfirlage, reported that Mrs. Forsner died on April 7.

The trial of Mrs. Forsner has reflected a shift over the past decade by the German authorities, who are now following cases against workers from the lowest level such as guards as attachments to murders due to the nature of their jobs in the camps, while they needed specific evidence of murders.

“He is a real teacher in judicial accountability,” Onur Ozata, the lawyer who represented some of the survivors who witnessed the trial of Mrs. FurchnerThe New York Times told 2021, when the indictment was announced. “The fact that a secretary in this system, who is a bureaucratic close, can be presented to justice is new.”

Mrs. Forsner-her name IRMGARD DIRKSEN at that time-was first reported to work in the Stutthof camp, about 20 miles from Danzig (GDANSK now), in June 1943. The leader, Paul-Werner Hoppe served, for approximately two years as a secretary and writing.

She conducted traditional secretarial duties such as taking dictation and formulating messages. But in the unconventional field of the Nazi detention camp, the Die Welt newspaper reported, the deportation lists and execution orders were written.

It was her knowledge of what happened in the camp that led her as an attachment to thousands of murders in Stotthov and an attachment of five crimes in the camp. The indictment was placed in an administrative center for Holocaust, where the Nazis killed six million Jews and about five million non -Jews.

“It comes to the concrete responsibility she was facing in the daily performance of the camp,” said Peter Muller Raku of the Prosecutor’s Office in Itzho in 2021.

On the day that the charges against it were to hear, I escaped: Instead of taking a taxi to the courtShe headed from her home supported from her home outside Hamburg, to a nearby subway station, where police officers were finally arrested.

She was tried as an event because she was minor during her Stutthof. The prosecution had achieved in the case for a period of five years: an independent historian was appointed and an interview was conducted with survivors in the United States and Israel.

During the trial, the court heard a testimony from many survivors. One of them, Joseph Salomeunovich, was a child when he entered Stotthov. While he spoke to the court, he held a picture of his father, Eric, who was killed in the camp, because he believed that Mrs. Forsner needed to look directly at his father’s image.

“It is indirectly guilty,” Mr. Salomonovich The journalists were informed in the court in 2021“Even if I just sat in the office and put her seal on my father’s death certificate.”

One of the prosecutors, Maxi Whantzen, doubts that Mrs. Forsner claims that she was not aware of the atmosphere in the camp.

“If the defendant looks at the window, she can see the new prisoners who have been chosen,” said Mrs. Walit to the court. “Nobody can miss smoke from the Holocaust or not notice the smell of burning bodies.”

After the court convicted it in December 2022, Dominic Gross, the president of the judge, said that Mrs. Forsner was a member of the bureaucratic mechanism in the camp that could have been left at any time without any consequences.

He also said that during her Stutthof, “she remained unaware of what happened there.” And she was “an assistant worker for the exact purpose of helping to implement the goals it follows in the camp.”

Mrs. Forsner arrived at the court that day in a wheelchair, wearing a hat, dark sunglasses and Kovid mask. The court spoke for the first time.

“I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she said. “I regret that I was in Stotthov at the time.”

She received a two -year suspension sentence.

Manfred Goldberg, one of the other survivors who witnessed the trial, BBC said He was disappointed by the circumstances that broke the sentence.

He said: “It is a single conclusion that a 97-year-old child will not be provided for a prison sentence-so it can be just a symbolic penalty.” “But the length should be to reflect the extraordinary barbarism of finding being complicit in the killing of more than 10,000 people.”

IRMGARD MARMGARDALENE DIRKSEN was born on May 29, 1925, in Danzij free cityIt is a Polish city country, where it enrolled in the elementary school. She later obtained a commercial vocational training and worked as a print in a bank before his appointment to Stutthof, according to the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung.

The Stutthof camp was opened in 1939. Originally, a camp for civilian players, it became a “education education” camp in late 1941, According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum of the United States. In January 1942, he was converted into a concentration camp, and was ultimately surrounded by an electric barbed wire.

Later that year, Mr. Hoppe, Colonel Lieutenant who was running the Guard detachment in Auschwitz, the leaders of Stutthof; After I ask the camp to evacuate and send prisoners in the March of Death in early 1945, another camp was ran. He tried in West Germany in 1955 and was sentenced to nine years in prison, with hard work, on charges of helping and paying several hundred hundreds of prisoners.

During the trial of Mr. Hopbi, Mrs. Forsner witnessed that all correspondence in Stuthatov is from the economic arm of SS, a paramilitary organization that controls the focus camp system, passed through her office. It was also a witness in other trials after the war.

You might have met her future husband, Heinz Fortshtam, Special Security Forces officer, in the camp. They got married after the war, and at some point, he is the illusion of the title to Forsner.

She held an administrative position in northern Germany. Information about the survivors was not available.

When Mrs. Forsner resumed her conviction, her lawyer argued that she was only carrying out regular duties.

But in the ruling against it by the Federal Court of Justice in Germany In August 2024, the referees wrote, “The principle that the typical professional activities neutral to the” daily “nature are not a criminal that does not apply here because the defendant knows what the main perpetrators do and supports them to do so.”

Christopher F. Shawitz The reports contributed.