A 97-year-old former death camp secretary was given less than a slap on the wrist by a German court on Tuesday, being a handed a two-year suspended sentence over her complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp.
The trial of Irmgard Furchner, who has been called the “secretary of evil,” could be one of the last ever of a former Nazi death camp official, and prosecutors called her integral to the “cruel and malicious murder” of inmates housed there between 1943 and 1945.
Manfred Goldberg, who survived 8 months in the Stutthof camp, noted that Furchner’s sentence is the same that is typically given to a shoplifter.
“My only disappointment is that a two-year suspended sentence appears to me to be a mistake,” Goldberg, who is 92, said. “No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes.”
“If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders be given the same sentence?” he wondered.
Goldberg added that it is “impossible” that Furchner didn’t know what was going on at the camp, as she claimed in court.
“The entry gate of Stutthof was knows as the Gate of Death; entering was more or less equivalent to death,” he said. “Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been collected.”
Prosecutors agreed with Goldberg, arguing that Furchner, who was 18 when she began working at the camp, was informed “down to the last detail” about the murders happening at the camp.
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8 Responses
This is why the חרם on Germany from. 5/8/1945 must continue unabated thru 5/8/2945, and why putin should be focusing his efforts on denazi’ing Germany rather than denazi’ing Ukraine
Okay, so hang her like Israel did to Eichmann in 1961, more than sixty years ago. Would it make any difference?
arizona,
You can’t be Jewish, there are no Holocaust survivors in your family.
I never understood this. She was a typist. She had no power, made no decisions. To make a “mecha” by a secretary is a joke. All it illustrates is all those who were complicit and got away.
Come on, people.
First of all, she didn’t kill anyone, she didn’t hurt anyone, she was just a secretary doing her job. As far as I’m concerned it’s a travesty to drag her out and put her on trial after all this time, when at the time nobody even bothered with her because they were going after the real criminals. Why should she suffer now, just because the real criminals are all dead and today’s prosecutors need to signal their virtue at her expense?
More importantly, she was a juvenile at the time, so she couldn’t be tried in an adult court. She had to be sentenced like any teenager would be, in the juvenile courts, so this was about the maximum sentence she could get anyway.
May they all be erased. 217 years to 6000. This is your concern. This woman is going to float like Hitler and so are the rest Obama Clinton Biden Schumer and on. Keep Shabbos daven and don’t concern abound the fall of Christianity. Smile as they disapy
Rif: What a disgusting thing to say, and yes, the smoke of my antecedents rose from the Nazi ovens.
I agree with Milhouse. She was just a secretary–unless there was testimony to something more serious. She’s 97 and even if they gave her a 10-year sentence, would that make everyone feel better. In addition, we know nothing else of her life. If she has been a lifelong anti-Semite, I could understand the anger but if she was just an ordinary citizen since the Holocaust, exactly what does this accomplish some 75 years later?