Europeans who committed genocidal crimes during the Holocaust cannot be forgiven, regardless of their age. There is no statute of limitations on murder, either legally or morally. Perpetrators like Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old German woman who was given a lenient two-year sentence in 2022 as an accessory to murder in a Nazi concentration camp, richly deserve to be locked up.
She appealed the verdict, but fortunately, it was upheld by the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe recently.
The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, applauded the decision, saying that a perpetrator like Furchner should “answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”
He is right.
Furchner, who should spend the rest of her life in a prison cell, was employed as a secretary by Paul-Werner Hoppe, the SS commandant of Stutthoff, a German concentration camp in what was eastern Germany from June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945.
At her trial two years ago, the judges agreed that, in performing her duties, she knowingly supported the murder of 10,505 prisoners by gassing, by inhumane conditions in the camp, by transfers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, and by forced death marches at the end of World War II. Before the Red Army liberated Stutthoff on May 9, 1945, 60,000 inmates, mainly ethnic Poles, perished there.
Furchner is behind bars today thanks to a bold change in Germany’s prosecution policy with respect to Nazi criminals. Until 2008, accomplices like her could not be charged unless it could be proved that they committed murder personally. Since then, this clause has been eliminated, giving prosecutors far more latitude to prosecute war criminals.
The new law was tested in 2011 when John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian concentration guard, was found guilty as an accessory in the murders of almost 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Since then, a number of individuals have been convicted under its terms.
Furchner, due to her advanced age, probably assumed she could get away with murder. Fortunately, in her case, justice has been served.
As Schuster said recently, “The legal system has sent a clear message. Even almost 80 years after the Shoah, there is no forgiveness for Nazi crimes.”
Exactly.