More than 60,000 people were killed there with lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly into the heart.
A German court on Tuesday sentenced a 97-year-old woman as an accessory to murder for her work as secretary to the SS commander at the Nazi Sutthof concentration camp during World War II.
Furchner was accused of being part of the apparatus that kept the camp running.
The Itzehoe state court gave Irmgard Furchner a suspended sentence of two years in prison, according to the German news agency dpa.
The prosecution accused her of having “aided and abetted the people in charge of the camp in the systematic murder of those incarcerated there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her work as a stenographer and typist in the office of the camp commandant.”
The sentence was in line with what the prosecution was seeking, while the defense had sought an acquittal on the grounds that the evidence had not shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Furchner was aware of the systematic killings in the camp, which which implied that there was no evidence of intent, as required by criminal liability.
In his closing statement, Furchner said he was sorry for what had happened and was sorry he was at Stutthof at the time.
The woman was tried in juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.
The defendant tried to escape from the start of her trial in September 2021, but was later located by the police and spent several days in detention.
Originally used to round up Jews and non-Jewish Poles expelled from Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, Stutthof was used from about 1940 as a “labor education camp”, where forced laborers, mainly Polish citizens and Soviets, to serve sentences.
Often the prisoners died.
Beginning in mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from the Baltic ghettos and Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians detained in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Rising.
The compound also held political prisoners, people accused of crimes or homosexual activity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
More than 60,000 people were killed there with lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly into the heart, shot or starved. Others were forced to go outside without clothes in the winter until they died, or were killed in a gas chamber.
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