A 96-year-old woman who was arrested on Thursday after failing to turn up for the start of her trial in Germany on charges of aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of concentration camp prisoners had warned the judge in advance that she would not show up.
Irmgard Furchner was discovered about 38 miles from the courtroom after escaping her retirement home in a taxi, which dropped her off at an underground station in the early hours of the morning. She had written to the judge that to “avoid embarrassment” and due to her “advanced age and physical impediments” she would not be attending the trial.
Furchner, who worked as a secretary for a Nazi concentration camp commandant in Stutthof, was caught six hours after absconding from the home in Quickborn, when police found her wandering along a residential street in northern Hamburg. She has now been placed in police detention after a doctor ascertained she was medically fit, and is expected to be held there pending the next trial date in just under three weeks’ time.
In a letter handwritten at the start of September to Judge Dominik Gross at the court in Itzehoe, near Hamburg, Furchner wrote: “Due to my advanced age and my physical impediments, I will not be attending the court appointment and would request that I am represented by my defence lawyer.”
After listing her physical ailments, she continued: “I want to spare myself these embarrassments and don’t want to make myself the laughing stock of humanity.”
According to court officials, Gross replied to Furchner warning her of the legal consequences if she failed to attend her trial.
However, it appeared that Furchner’s warning had not been taken seriously when she did indeed fail to turn up. Authorities had wanted to avoid remanding her in custody.
Frederike Milhoffer, a spokesperson for the court said that “all necessary legal measures” would be taken to ensure that Furchner turned up to the next trial date.
Court sessions are to be restricted to a maximum of two hours.
Even if she is convicted, the outcome of similar recent cases indicates there is little chance of Furchner ever going to jail, due to her age.
In the months before the trial, Furchner had argued that her medical condition meant she was unfit to appear. But a doctor who assessed her ruled otherwise. She was widely reported to have avoided receiving the coronavirus vaccine in the expectation it would allow her to avoid the court case.
In order to protect her, a plexiglass casing had been erected around the area in which she is supposed to sit throughout the trial, which is due to be held in an industrial logistics centre. It was moved there from the regular court to cope with the considerable media interest.
Furchner was 18 when she started working at the camp near Danzig. She is charged with aiding and abetting murder in 11,412 cases, as well as complicity in 18 cases of attempted murder. Her trial has been labelled as one of the last connected to the Nazi regime, due to the advanced age of those defendants still alive. She is the first woman in decades to stand trial over such crimes.
Prosecutors will argue that in her administrative role she was part of the running of the camp and therefore helped facilitate the murders that took place there.
The prosecution case against Furchner is being brought as a result of the trial of a former camp guard at Sobibór death camp, who was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders of 28,000 people, setting a new legal precedent. The judge at the time said regardless of how small a person’s role had been, as long as it could be proven they had been “cogs” in the “machinery of destruction”, they could be held responsible for the crimes committed.
After her failure to attend court, Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, which represents concentration camp survivors and their relatives, said Furchner had “shown unbelievable contempt towards the state of law as well as to Holocaust survivors”.
Efraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Holocaust research institute with a history of hunting Nazi criminals and bringing them to justice, told German media: “The trial against Irmgard Furchner is an important reminder that the crimes of the Nazis were not only carried out by men but also by women who served in concentration camps and even death squads.”
Onur Özata, a lawyer who is representing two co-plaintiffs, both survivors of Stutthof, in the trial, said: “The defendant is leading the judiciary a merry dance with her behaviour. She clearly does not feel she is bound by the law.”
Stutthof, 23 miles (37km) east of Danzig, was established by the Nazis in 1939 as a prison camp for civilians. It was later transformed into a concentration camp. More than 100,000 Jews and political prisoners from 28 countries were held there, 65,000 of whom were murdered.
