LEIPZIG, Germany, Aug 20, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - A 99-year-old former Nazi camp
secretary on Tuesday lost her appeal against her conviction for complicity in
the murder of more than 10,000 people, in what could be the last judgement of
its kind in Germany.

Irmgard Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022
for her role in what prosecutors called the "cruel and malicious murder" of
prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

Her defence had filed an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice against the
judgement, handed down by a regional court in the northern town of Itzehoe.

But the higher court, whose job was to examine whether certain points of law
had been applied correctly, on Tuesday upheld the judgement.

"The conviction of the defendant... to a two-year suspended sentence is
final," presiding judge Gabriele Cirener said.

Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner took the dictation and handled the
correspondence of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe while her husband was a
fellow SS officer at the camp.

An estimated 65,000 people died at the camp near today's Gdansk, including
Jewish prisoners.

Delivering the verdict in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross said that
"nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her" and that the defendant
was aware of the "extremely bad conditions for the prisoners".

Furchner tried to abscond from her trial as the proceedings were set to begin
in September 2021, fleeing the retirement home where she was living.

She managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the
nearby city of Hamburg.

But she expressed regret as the trial drew to a close, telling the court she
was "sorry about everything that happened".

Furchner was a teenager when she committed her crimes and was therefore tried
in a juvenile court.

Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring
to justice criminals linked to the Holocaust.

In recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or
were physically unable to stand trial.

The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he
served as part of Hitler's killing machine, set a legal precedent and paved
the way for several trials.

Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds
rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual
accused.