Irmgard Furchner, the former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp who was detained since Thursday after having escaped before the trial in which her complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people will be analyzed, was released this Tuesday pending a new hearing, set for October 19.
Furchner of 96 years, is accused of typing orders of execution and deportation in a camp in Poland when she was between 18 and 19 years old and will be the first woman involved in Nazism for decades to be tried in the country.
This Thursday, 20 minutes after the scheduled time for her trial in northern Germany, the president of the court announced that the defendant had fled and that an arrest warrant had been issued. That same day, she was found by the police and was arrested.
This Tuesday, however, “the court suspended the arrest warrant and released the accused on the condition of precautionary measures”said the spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer of the court of Itzehoe (north), without specifying the nature of those measures.
What Irmgard Furchner did
Furchner’s face was relatively known for being one of the oldest people tried for crimes against humanity of Nazism, now it occupies the front pages of international newspapers for circumventing justice.
Fuechner worked in Stutthof between June 1943 and April 1945 as a typist and secretary to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, the Nazi criminal responsible for the murder of “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war,” according to the prosecution.
The defendant had already testified twice as a witness, in 1954 and 1962, about her role in that killing center. The first time he said that all correspondence with the SS headquarters had passed through his hands and that Werner Hoppe dictated daily writings and radio messages to him. However, he swore that he had never been aware of the murderous machinery of which tens of thousands of people were the victim.
Attorney Christoph Rückel, who has represented Shoah survivors for years, says that “she handled all correspondence from the camp commander.” “He also typed the execution and deportation orders and put his initials,” he told the local press.
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