A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary was remanded in custody on Thursday after spending several hours on the run in a bid to flee her trial in Germany to face charges of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.
One of the first women to be prosecuted for Nazi-era crimes in decades, Furchner is charged for her role at the Stutthof concentration camp in occupied Poland where she was secretary to the camp commandant while still a teenager.
Lawyer Christoph Rueckel, acting on behalf of Holocaust survivors, said Furchner had written to the court around three weeks ago to say she planned to boycott the proceedings because they would be “degrading” for her.
“If someone remains silent in such a trial, or does not show up, it is rather shocking for these survivors, because after so many years they actually think that one could be more reasonable about it,” he said.
For Efraim Zuroff, an American-Israeli “Nazi hunter” who has played a key role in bringing former Nazi war criminals to trial, the conclusion that can be drawn was clear.
“Healthy enough to flee, healthy enough to go to jail!,” he tweeted.
The suspect had been declared fit to face trial but only for two hours a day, according to Der Spiegel.
Prosecutors accuse Furchner of having assisted in the systematic murder of detainees at Stutthof, where she worked in the office of the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945.
The trial is taking place in a youth court as she was aged between 18 and 19 at the time.
Around 65,000 people died at the camp, not far from the city of Gdansk, among them “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war”, according to the indictment.
According to Rueckel, Furchner “handled all the correspondence” for camp commander Hoppe.
“She typed out the deportation and execution commands” at his dictation and initialled each message herself, Rueckel told public broadcaster NDR.
However, Furchner’s lawyer told Der Spiegel ahead of the trial that it was possible the secretary had been “screened off” from what was going on at Stutthof.
Source: (digital journal)
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