96-year-old German woman accused of Nazi crimes flees before trial opens

Irmgard Furchner had joined the Stutthof concentration camp at the age of 18 as a typist between 1943 and 1945 to transcribe execution orders dictated by the camp commander, and thus took part in the assassination of 11,412 people. “The accused is on the run. She left her home early this morning and took a taxi to a metro station,” said Frederike Milhoffer, spokesperson for the Itzehoe district court before announcing that an arrest warrant had just been issued against her. Irmgard Furchner is currently unobtainable by the authorities in Itzehoe, a town in the far north of Germany, about 100 km from the Danish border.

A case tried in youth court

According to Der Spiegel magazine, she wrote to the judge asking for her case to be examined in absentia, a legal impossibility in Germany. The case is being tried in youth court because of Irmgard Furchner’s young age at the time of the facts. Irmgard Furchner is the latest in a long line of nonagenarians to be charged with Holocaust crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime. According to her lawyer Wolf Molkentin, the accused was unaware of the mass massacre orchestrated in the concentration camp where she worked. “My client would have worked in the middle of SS experienced in violence. But should she share their level of knowledge? (…) In my opinion, it is not necessarily obvious”, he declared during the meeting. ‘an interview with Spiegel.
About 65,000 people, including Jews and prisoners of war, died of hunger, disease or asphyxiation in the gas chambers of the Stutthof concentration camp, near Gdansk in present-day Poland, between 1939 and 1945.