The last person convicted in Germany for crimes committed during the Holocaust, Irmgard Furchner, died at the age of 99, a German court announced on Monday.

In 2022, Furchner, who served as a secretary at the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof during World War II, received a two-year suspended sentence for complicity in the murders of more than 10,000 people. Her trial marked the first prosecution of a woman in Germany for Nazi-era crimes in decades.

The Stutthof concentration camp, located near Gdansk in occupied Poland, was established by Nazi Germany in 1939. Around 65,000 people lost their lives at Stutthof, many of them non-Jewish Poles, as well as Jews deported from Warsaw, Bialystok, and forced-labor camps in the occupied Baltic states.

Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner worked directly under the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe. Her husband was also an SS officer at the camp. The court noted during her trial that Furchner was fully aware of the “extremely bad conditions” prisoners endured.

Furchner made headlines when she attempted to evade her trial by fleeing from the retirement home where she lived. Authorities quickly apprehended her in nearby Hamburg. Due to her age at the time of the crimes—she was a teenager—her trial took place in a juvenile court.

In 2024, the Federal Court of Justice upheld Furchner’s conviction, emphasizing her conscious involvement in the atrocities committed at the camp, including the deaths caused by gassing, inhumane conditions, transportation to Auschwitz, and forced death marches as the war ended.

“For Holocaust survivors, it is enormously important for a late form of justice to be attempted. Even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes,” said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Stutthof was the very last Nazi concentration camp to be liberated at the end of World War II.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)