Holocaust survivor, 86, addresses trial of 96-year-old Nazi ‘secretary of evil’

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A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary has made another appearance in German court today accused of the murder of over 11,000 people.

Irmgard Furchner, a typist who has been dubbed the ‘secretary of evil’, heard from the first Holocaust survivor to testify at the trial in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

She is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 11,412 people at Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland between 1943 and 1945, a charge which she denies.

Furchner was photographed in the courtroom wearing a cream-coloured puffer jacket and matching beret, large sunglasses and a face-mask concealing her face.

As concentration camp survivor and witness Josef Salomonovic spoke in the courtroom, Furchner – who had been brought in by guards in a wheelchair – was seen tightly clutching her cane while staring intensely at him through her glasses.

Speaking on Tuesday, 83-year-old Mr Salomonovic – a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust whose family was from Czechosloavkia – gave a harrowing testimony, according to The Telegraph.

He said he was just six years old when his father kissed him goodbye for the last time before he was killed by a lethal injection to the heart at the Stutthof death camp.

‘Maybe she has trouble sleeping at night. I know I do,’ Mr Salomonovic said when asked by a prosecutor whether he had a message for Furchner.

Furchner was just 18 when she started work at the camp on the Baltic coast, and is the first woman to stand trial in decades over crimes connected to the Third Reich.

She worked in an office outside the main Stutthof camp, and claims she had no knowledge of the mass-murder being carried out inside.

Mr Salomonovic dismissed this as a possibility, however, telling reporters after Tuesday’s hearing that even if she was not directly responsible, she was still indirectly guilty – even if all she did was stamp his father’s death certificate.

In court, he held up a picture of his father to Furchner, saying he was testifying for his family. ‘It is not easy to go over all this again. It’s a moral duty. It’s not pleasant.’

He recalled how, as a child, he had to watch as Nazis stripped his mother of he clothes and possessions, and shaved her head. He didn’t recognise her after, he said.

Mr Salomonovic went on to describe how he survived eight concentration camps, including Auschwitz, but said Stutthof was the worst he experienced.

‘I was classified as a parasite. Everyone who couldn’t work was a parasite,’ he told the court. ‘I got into the cattle wagon and of course I didn’t know we were going to Auschwitz or that this was the last time I would see my father. He kissed me.’

Mr Salomonovic was able to survive together with his mother Dora and brother Michael. He said his mother requested that her son be brought from the men’s camp to the women’s camp. To their surprise, his brother was brought too.

The family were brought from Czechosloavkia because they were Jewish.

The 83-year-old told the court: ‘The worst was the hunger and the cold,’ and described how he would crouch between his mother’s legs to stay warm.

Mr Salomonovic said he thought he was going to die at the end of the way after he started working in a munitions factory in Dresden. There, an SS officer reached for his gun, saying: ‘This filth has to go’. 

However, the witness said there was then a bombing in the city. ‘That’s why I’m still alive,’ he told the court.

The trial continues.       

Speaking in October, prosecutor Maxi Wantzen told the court in the northern town of Itzehoe that Furchner had knowledge of all of the horrific events at the camp due to her work for the commandment of the camp and was informed ‘down to the last detail’ about the murder methods practised there.

He added that through her work as the camp secretary, she ensured ‘the smooth functioning of the camp’, the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper reported.  

An arrest warrant was issued after Furchner fled her retirement home on September 30 and headed to a metro station as her trial was set to begin in the northern town of Itzehoe. 

The pensioner managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg and temporarily held in custody by authorities.

Furchner was released five days later ‘under the condition of precautionary measures’, court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer said earlier this year, adding that it was ‘assured that she (Furchner) will appear at the next appointment’.

According to media reports, the accused has been fitted with an electronic tag to monitor her whereabouts.

In October, the court heard how SS men in white medical uniforms would pretend to be doctors who were simply measuring prisoners’ height.

But instead, the prisoner’s height was used as the setting for a specially engineered ‘neck shot’ device.

Around 30 prisoners were then shot in the neck within a two-hour period.

In other cases, prisoners were forced into chambers which were filled with poisonous Zyklon B gas.

Here prisoners screamed in agony, scratched at their skin until it was red raw, and even pulled their own hair out.

Furchner, born Irmgard Dirksen on May 19, 1925, worked as secretary for the concentration camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe.

As she was only 18 at the time, she is being tried in a juvenile court, even though she is almost a hundred years old.

The prosecution has claimed that her work as a secretary assisted the wider ‘killing apparatus’ of the concentration camp.

The prosecutor described in the trial earlier this year how on July 22, 1944, SS Obersturmbahnführer Paul Maurer gave orders that a group of prisoners at Stutthof be transported to Auschwitz for extermination.

Four days later, a list of prisoners to be transferred was written at the commandant’s office at Stutthof.

At 6.05pm, commandant Hoppe, then gave confirmation by radio that the transport was en route.

The prosecution then claimed that this message must have been written by Furchner.

Furchner’s lawyer, Wolfgang Molkentin, has previously told the court in a statement that his client denies that she is ‘personally guilty of a crime’. 

He said: ‘Irmgard Furchner does not deny the crimes of the Shoah [Holocaust].  

‘Neither does she deny the terrible acts that took place as has once again been made clear to us all in the indictment. She simply rejects the charge around which this trial ultimately revolves, that she was personally guilty of a crime.’ 

Prosecutors say that throughout her time at the camp, Furchner took dictation of Hoppe’s orders and handled his correspondence. 

According to Christoph Rueckel, a lawyer representing Holocaust survivors, Furchner ‘handled all the correspondence’ for the commander.

‘She typed out the deportation and execution commands’ at his dictation and initialled each message herself, Rueckel told public broadcaster NDR. 

Stutthof, which was located near the Polish city of Gdansk, was the first death camp to be built outside Germany and was constructed in 1939.

Over the six years it operated – until it was liberated by the Allies in May 1945 – it is thought some 110,000 people were sent there, of which up to 65,000 died.

Originally built to house Polish intelligence officers and intellectuals, the camp later expanded to include significant numbers of Jews – many of whom were transferred there from Auschwitz or camps in the Baltics – and Soviet prisoners.

The camp had gas chambers where many of the inmates were put to death, but tens of thousands also died due to starvation, disease epidemics, overwork and forced ‘death marches’. Of those who died, around 28,000 were Jews. 

Furchner was first questioned by police over her involvement in the camp in February 2017, when officers also searched her apartment. 

It took four years and eight months to bring the case to trial, which included a medical assessment to decide whether Furchner was fit to stand.

In February this year a doctor ruled the 96-year-old was fit enough, and her hearing was scheduled. 

A teenager at the time the alleged crimes were committed, Furchner’s trial is being held in juvenile court.

In a letter sent ahead of her first scheduled hearing, the defendant told the presiding judge of the court that she did not want to appear in person in the dock.

Her ultimate failure to present herself showed ‘contempt for the survivors and also for the rule of law’, the vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee Christoph Heubner told AFP at the time.

‘Healthy enough to flee, healthy enough to go to jail!,’ tweeted Efraim Zuroff, an American-Israeli ‘Nazi hunter’ who has played a key role in bringing former Nazi war criminals to trial. 

Prosecutors argue that she was part of the apparatus that helped the Nazi camp function more than 75 years ago.

In a previous interview with NDR, she claimed she had never actually set foot in the camp itself and insisted she had only learned about the atrocities after the war.

Lawyers say she was ‘shielded’ from the camp’s true purpose by her superiors, while prosecutors say that is impossible given her role as the commander’s secretary.

Furchner said she was aware that executions were taking place at the camp, but believed they were punishments for specific crimes – rather than genocidal mass-murder. 

Her boss, SS officer Hoppe, was convicted for his role at the camp and sentenced to nine years in prison by a West German court in 1957. He died in 1974.

In evidence during that investigation, given nearly 70 years ago, Furchner acknowledged working for Hoppe but said she knew nothing of the gas chambers. 

The state court in Itzehoe in northern Germany said in a statement that the suspect allegedly ‘aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office.’ 

The case against Furchner will rely on German legal precedent established in cases over the past decade that anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function can be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific crime.

A lawyer for the defendant told Der Spiegel magazine that the trial would centre on whether the 96-year-old had knowledge of the atrocities that happened at the camp.

‘My client worked in the midst of SS men who were experienced in violence – however, does that mean she shared their state of knowledge? That is not necessarily obvious,’ Wolf Molkentin said.

According to other media reports, the defendant was questioned as a witness during past Nazi trials and said at the time that the former SS commandant of Stutthof, Paul Werner Hoppe, dictated daily letters and radio messages to her.

Still, Furchner testified she was not aware of the killings that occurred at the camp while she worked there, the German news agency dpa reported. 

Today a group of around fifty anti-Nazi demonstrators gathered outside the court.

They were supposed to mount a counter demonstration to a neo-Nazi gathering which never appeared.

Rumours had circulated on social media that the neo-Nazis were coming to show solidarity with someone they have referred to as the ‘Rebel from Itzehoe.’

Speaking to MailOnline, chief Nazi hunter Dr. Efrain Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, said this trial is of great importance.

‘The demonstration by neo-Nazis to support the ‘Rebel from Itzehoe’ is yet another reminder of how important these trials are.’

‘This is in spite of the advanced age of the defendant, and the many years which have passed since she committed her crimes.’

‘The authorities have to take steps to protect the witnesses and attorneys who represent the families of the victims, as well as the spectators. ‘

The far-right nationalist party, Die Rechte, were unavailable for comment.

When Mail Online contacted them in February this year about Irmgard Furchner, however, spokesperson Sven Skoda wrote:

‘The indictment against Irmgard F. for aiding and abetting murder is part of contemporary hysteria. Charging a former secretary who is spending her remaining days in a nursing home, and this seventy five years after the end of World War 2, amounts to a witch hunt, which is unworthy of a constitutional state.’

‘In a constitutional state, criminal law may never be misused to pursue a purely symbolic policy. But that is exactly the aim of such procedures. We demand the immediate termination of the proceedings against Irmgard F.’ 

Around the same time Furchner fled her trial, a 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard appeared before judges at a court in Neuruppin, northwest of Berlin.

Josef Schuetz, who stands accused of assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945, told the court he was ‘innocent’ and ‘knows nothing’ about what happened at the camp.

Along with Furchner, the two are among the oldest defendants to stand trial for their alleged roles in the Nazi system.

Seventy-six years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring people to justice. 

Prosecutors are investigating another eight cases, according to the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.

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

The last guilty verdict was issued to former SS guard Bruno Dey, who was handed a two-year suspended sentence in July at the age of 93.