On Tuesday, a German court upheld the conviction of 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner, who had been found guilty of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders during her time as a secretary to the SS commander at the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.
The Federal Court of Justice affirmed the previous ruling by a state court in Itzehoe, which in December 2022 sentenced Furchner to a two-year suspended sentence. She was convicted of aiding the operation of the camp, located near Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), and was found complicit in 10,505 cases of murder and five cases of attempted murder.
During a federal court hearing in Leipzig last month, Furchner's defense team questioned whether she was truly aware of the crimes committed by the camp’s leadership and whether she was an accessory to the atrocities.
However, the Itzehoe court had previously determined that Furchner was fully aware of, and actively supported, the brutal killing of prisoners through gassings, harsh camp conditions, deportations to Auschwitz, and death marches towards the end of the war, as a stenographer in the camp's commandant's office from June 1, 1943, to April 1, 1945.
* ABC News contributed to this article.
