In what may be the last case of its type, a 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been found guilty for her part in the Holocaust murder of 10,505 individuals.
From 1943 until the fall of the Nazi dictatorship in 1945, Irmgard Furchner worked as a stenographer and typewriter at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland.
A court spokesperson in Itzehoe, northern Germany, confirmed that she received a two-year suspended sentence on Tuesday.
Furchner, 97, was tried in a juvenile court because she was a minor when the offences were committed, and the court told AWN that as part of her sentence, she will be placed on juvenile probation.
Furchner eluded capture for several hours until being apprehended by law enforcement weeks before the start of her trial. Late last year, the proceedings eventually started.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Stutthof camp housed tens of thousands of prisoners in appalling conditions, and more than 60,000 people died there.
According to the museum, Stutthof mostly housed non-Jewish Poles as well as a sizable number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok and from the Nazi-occupied Baltic nations.
In recent years, Germany has hurried to prosecute those responsible for Nazi war crimes before it is too late. But according to experts, very few of those involved ever appeared in court.
