The 97-year-old "secretary of evil" Irmgard Furchner, who was sentenced to probation, filed an appeal

The court of the city of Itzehoe in northern Germany on December 20 passed a verdict against 97-year-old Irmgard Furchner, who during World War II worked as a secretary to the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof Paul Werner Hoppe. Irmgard Furchner was sentenced to two years of probation for complicity in 10,505 murders. This week, the court announced that the lawyer of the convict filed an appeal to the Federal Court. This is reported by the Daily Mail.

The Furchner case was made possible thanks to a legal precedent that appeared in Germany in the last decade.

It allows anyone who helped the Nazi death camps and concentration camps to function to be held accountable for their participation in the commission of murders, even if there is no evidence of their participation in a particular murder.

Furchner's lawyers sought her acquittal, arguing that she did not know about the systematic murders in Stutthof, which means that there was no intent in her actions, the proof of which is necessary for criminal prosecution. However, Judge Dominic Gross, announcing the verdict, said that the fact that Furchner did not see the murders taking place nearby was "simply beyond any imagination."

The camp near Danzig, now Polish Gdansk, operated from June 1943 to April 1945. Furchner worked there when she was 18 and 19, so she appeared in juvenile court. According to the prosecution, when she started working at the camp, she was informed "to the smallest detail" about the methods of murder practiced there.

By the beginning of the trial, which was scheduled for September 2021, Furchner was living in a nursing home. On the day when she was supposed to be brought to court, she tried to escape by running away from a nursing home. After several hours of searching, she was detained in neighboring Hamburg. In her closing remarks , Furchner said: "I'm sorry for everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at that time".

During the hearing, prosecutors said that Furchner's trial could be the last of its kind. However, the special federal Prosecutor's office in Ludwigsburg, which is tasked with investigating Nazi war crimes, reports that five more cases are pending in different regions of Germany. Charges of murder and complicity in murder in such cases do not fall under the statute of limitations.