A former concentration camp secretary charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 11,412 inmates typed up and put her initials on execution orders, a court in Germany has heard.
Irmgard Furchner, 96 came face to face with the prosecution’s damning evidence at the trial in the northern town of Itzehoe three weeks after she had attempted to flee proceedings.
Sat in her wheelchair, she watched on Tuesday as the prosecution detailed claims that she was complicit in the murder of inmates at Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk in occupied Poland.
Furchner worked at the camp from June 1943 to April 1945. The prosecution says that through her work as the typist and stenographer for the camp commandant, Paul Werner Hoppe, she directly and knowingly contributed to the wider Nazi “machine of destruction”.
Prosecution lawyer Christoph Rückel represents five co-plaintiffs from Austria, France and the US. He said Furchner clearly knew about the atrocities being committed, as she "took care of all the camp commandant's correspondence".
"She also typed the execution and deportation orders, and put her initials on them personally.”
According to the National Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, around 65,000 people died at Stutthof and in its various sub-camps.
Some were shot dead, others poisoned with gas, while many perished through forced labour, disease, malnutrition and exposure to the elements on “death marches”.
On July 22, 1944, SS Obersturmbahnführer Paul Maurer authorized the transit of Stutthof detainees to Auschwitz, where they would be killed, according to the prosecution.
Four days later, camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe issued a radio message in which he confirmed that the transport was en route. The prosecution argued that Furchner must have composed this message because it was transcribed at the Stutthof commandant's office.
Furchner failed to appear at a hearing last month, when instead of attending the trial she took a taxi from her nursing home in Quickborn, near Hamburg to a nearby tube station before she was apprehended by police.
Also in court was an expert witness on Nazi concentration camps, historian Dr Stefan Hördler, who presented a 180-page report. He argues that Furchner had the option to leave Stutthof, citing several other employees at the camp who resigned between 1943 and 1945 and took up work elsewhere. He said that there is no evidence she asked to be transferred.
He also argued that through her regular contact with SS staff, Furchner must have gained "deep insights into the daily violence of the Stutthof concentration camp". He said that the work of secretaries such as Furchner was key to keeping concentration camps operating.
"Communication, coordination and decision-making between the instances of the concentration camp system, as well as the organisational execution of killing operations, were essentially made possible and continuously maintained by the daily work of the stenotypists, teleprinters, telecommunicators, radio operators and other office workers.”
Born in 1925 in Kalthof near Danzig (today Gdansk in Poland), Furchner attended a commercial school, then from April 1941 to May 1943 worked as a stenotypist at Dresdner Bank in Marienburg.
A month later she started as a typist at Stutthof concentration camp, where she met SS member Heinz Gerhard Furchner in the command office, later marrying him.
After the war, she lied about her Nazi past. When she applied for a job at a regional hospital in Schleswig, she claimed she had worked for the German Army.
Furchner was questioned several times in post-war investigations, but any incriminating information she might have disclosed cannot now be used against her because she was a witness and not on trial.
In 1954, she told an investigating judge that all correspondence with the SS Economic Administration Main Office had passed through her hands. She also testified that that camp commander Paul Hoppe dictated correspondence to her, and that incoming mail went through the office where she worked.
She claimed she was unaware either of any documents about the gassing of victims or that any prisoners were gassed in the camp. She admitted that Hoppe had requested executions in some cases but said the prisoners had allegedly been guilty of something although she was unable to give exact reasons.
Furchner was a witness in the trial against Hoppe before he was found guilty as an accessory to murder and jailed in 1957.
In 1982 Furchner was interrogated by the North Rhine-Westphalia State Criminal Police Office. She now said she had seen the crematorium of the concentration camp from a distance.
The public prosecutor's office in Itzehoe opened its investigation into Furchner in 2016, and a year later, visited her at her nursing home.
Here Furchner repeatedly said the investigations were “ridiculous”, and that she could not understand the accusation that she was an accessory to murder. She said she had a clear conscience and had not killed anyone.
In 2019 a journalist for the German broadcaster NDR visited Furchner. Here the former concentratin camp secretary confirmed that she had worked at Stutthof, but claimed that her office window faced away from the camp, so she had not been able to see anything.
Furchner said she knew nothing of the murder of thousands of prisoners which took place just metres away from where she sat.
Through her lawyer, Furchner wrote to the court before the first hearing, saying she would not be coming to trial: “I want to spare myself these embarrassments and don’t want to make myself the laughing stock of humanity.”
Furchner is being tried at an adolescent court in northern Germany because she was 18 when the alleged offenses occurred. The court has been specially designed to ensure she is not exposed to the corona virus, given her age. Press and public are separated by a glass wall from the court room.
She is due to appear at several more hearings over the next few months, each limited to around two hours because of her age.
