War Criminal Convicted

[George K]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/europe/irmgard-furchner-nazi-crimes-trial-verdict-intl/index.html

A 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted for her role in the murder of 10,505 people during the Holocaust, in what could be the final trial of its kind.

Irmgard Furchner worked as a stenographer and typist at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland, from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

She was sentenced Tuesday to a two-year suspended sentence, according to a spokesperson at the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

As Furchner was an adolescent at the time of the crimes, the 97-year-old’s trial took place before a juvenile court and her sentence will see her placed into juvenile probation, the court confirmed to CNN.

Furchner went on the run weeks before her trial was due to begin, but was found by authorities after several hours. Proceedings eventually began late last year.

Tens of thousands of people were held in brutal conditions at the Stutthof camp, and more than 60,000 died there, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Stutthof mainly held non-Jewish Poles, as well as a large number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok and from Nazi-occupied Baltic states, according to the museum.

Germany has raced to bring the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in recent years, before it is too late. But experts say that only a small proportion of those involved ever faced a court.

I would be interested to see what the actual evidence of war crimes perpetrated by this 20 year old secretary were.

[jon-nyc]

This is a pattern, the more remote the event, the lower the bar for war crime. In 1946 we only wanted to prosecute decision makers. By the 60-70s we wanted low-level participants if they were known to have relished in the cruelty of it all. Now any participant will do.

About a decade ago on here I predicted that the last WW-II prosecution will be of someone who’s only known offense was party membership.

[George K]

@jon-nyc said in War Criminal Convicted:

About a decade ago on here I predicted that the last WW-II prosecution will be of someone who’s only known offense was party membership.

Looks like you were close.

[Jolly]

Sad to say, I think you're right.

I believe in Justice, but at this point prosecuting the lowest offenders is Vengeance, not Justice.

[Mik]

At 97 years old, what's the point? I suspect she has paid far more over the years in fear and regret than anything that can be done to her now.

On the other hand, maybe she started the whole thing because she can't afford nursing care.

[Horace]

How shocking that all the white males in this thread are also closet Nazi sympathisers.

[LuFins Dad]

A War Crime trial was conducted in a Juvenile Court. Full Stop…

[Renauda]

@George-K

It would seem that the prosecutor’s office needed to check off a box. Hence the trial and suspended juvenile sentence. More an exercise in bureaucratic procedure than anything resembling justice or jurisprudence.