Irmgard Furchner, Secretary at a Hub of Nazi Atrocities, Dies at 99

Irmgard Furchner, whose role as a teenage secretary in the administration of a Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland led to her conviction in 2022 for being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders, died on Jan. 14. She was 99.

Frederike Milhoffer, the spokeswoman for the court in Itzehoe, in northern Germany, where Ms. Furchner was tried, confirmed the death but did not provide any other information. The German magazine Der Spiegel and the German newspaper Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitungsverlag reported Ms. Furchner’s death on April 7.

The prosecution of Ms. Furchner reflected a shift over the past decade by German authorities, who now pursue cases against lower-level workers like guards as accessories to murders because of the nature of their jobs in the camps, whereas they used to need specific evidence of murders.

“It’s a real milestone in judicial accountability,” Onur Ozata, a lawyer who represented some of the survivors who testified at Ms. Furchner’s trial, told The New York Times in 2021, when the indictment was announced. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic cog, can be brought to justice is something new.”

Ms. Furchner — her name was Irmgard Dirksen at the time — first reported for work at the Stutthof camp, about 20 miles from Danzig (now Gdansk), in June 1943. She served the commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe, for nearly two years as a secretary and typist.

She performed traditional secretarial duties like taking dictation and drafting letters. But in the nontraditional sphere of a Nazi concentration camp, the newspaper Die Welt reported, she typed deportation lists and execution orders.

It was her knowledge of what transpired at the camp that led to her indictment as an accessory to thousands of murders at Stutthof and an accessory to five attempted murders at the camp. The indictment put her at an administrative hub of the Holocaust, during which the Nazis murdered six million Jews and about five million non-Jews.

“It’s about the concrete responsibility she had in the daily functioning of the camp,” Peter Müller-Rakow of the public prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe said in 2021.

On the day she was scheduled to hear the charges against her, she fled: Instead of taking a taxi to the court from her assisted living home outside Hamburg, she headed to a nearby subway station, where police officers eventually apprehended her.

She was tried as a juvenile because she had been a minor during her time at Stutthof. The prosecution had investigated the case for five years: an independent historian was hired and survivors in the United States and Israel were interviewed.

During the trial, the court heard testimony from several survivors. One of them, Josef Salomonovic, was a child when he entered Stutthof. As he spoke to the court, he held up a photograph of his father, Erich, who was killed at the camp, because he believed that Ms. Furchner needed to look directly at his father’s image.

“She’s indirectly guilty,” Mr. Salomonovic told reporters at the court in 2021, “even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate.”

One of the prosecutors, Maxi Wantzen, disputed Ms. Furchner’s claim that she was unaware of the atrocities at the camp.

“If the defendant looked out of the window, she could see the new prisoners who were being selected,” Ms. Wantzen told the court. “Nobody could miss the smoke from the crematorium or not notice the smell of burned corpses.”

After the court convicted her in December 2022, Dominik Gross, the presiding judge, said that Ms. Furchner had been a willing member of the camp’s bureaucratic machinery who could have left at any time without any consequences.

He also said that during her time at Stutthof, she “did not remain unaware of what happened there,” and that “she was an auxiliary worker for the precise purpose of assisting in the implementation of the goals pursued in the camp.”

Ms. Furchner arrived in court that day in a wheelchair, wearing a hat, dark sunglasses and a Covid mask. And she addressed the court for the first time.

“I am sorry for everything that happened,” she said. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at that time.”

She received a two-year suspended sentence.

Manfred Goldberg, another survivor who testified at the trial, told the BBC that he was disappointed by the circumstances that led to the brevity of the sentence.

“It’s a foregone conclusion that a 97-year-old would not be made to serve a sentence in prison — so it could only be a symbolic sentence,” he said. “But the length should be made to reflect the extraordinary barbarity of being found to be complicit in the murder of more than 10,000 people.”

Irmgard Magdalene Dirksen was born on May 29, 1925, in the Free City of Danzig, a Polish city-state, where she attended elementary school. She later earned a commercial apprenticeship and worked as a typist at a bank before being hired at Stutthof, according to the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung.

The Stutthof camp opened in 1939. Originally a civilian internment camp, it became a “labor education” camp in late 1941, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In January 1942, it was turned into a concentration camp, and it was eventually surrounded by electrified barbed wire.

Later that year, Mr. Hoppe, a lieutenant colonel who had run a guard detachment at Auschwitz, became Stutthof’s commandant; after ordering the camp evacuated and sending inmates on a death march in early 1945, he ran another camp. He stood trial in West Germany in 1955 and was sentenced to nine years in prison, with hard labor, for aiding and abetting the murders of several hundred inmates.

During Mr. Hoppe’s trial, Ms. Furchner testified that all correspondence at Stutthof from the economic arm of the SS, the paramilitary organization that controlled the concentration camp system, passed through her desk. She was also a witness at other postwar trials.

She may have met her future husband, Heinz Furchstam, an SS officer, at the camp. They married after the war and at some point, he or they, changed the surname to Furchner.

She held an administrative job in northern Germany. Information on survivors was not available.

When Ms. Furchner appealed her conviction, her lawyer argued that she was only carrying out ordinary duties.

But in the ruling against her by Germany’s federal court of justice in August 2024, the judges wrote, “The principle that typical, neutral professional activities of an ‘everyday’ nature are not criminal does not apply here since the defendant knew what the main perpetrators were doing and supported them doing it.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.