A court in the town of Itchau in Germany yesterday (Tuesday) sentenced Irmgard Forchner, 97, who was a secretary at the Stutthof concentration and extermination camp and was accused of aiding the murder of more than 11,000 Jewish prisoners in the camp, to two years of probation. Forchner will likely be the last Nazi war criminal to be convicted of crimes committed during the Holocaust.
Forchner, known as the “Secretary of Evil”, was recruited into the SS during World War II. When she was 18 years old, she was sent to serve as secretary to the commander of the Stotthof camp, which is now in Poland, near Gdansk. The prosecution claimed that Forchner “aided and helped those who ran the camp during the systematic killing that was carried out there in 1945-1943. She served as a typist and recorder in the office of the camp commander and was behind the logistics of the killing.”
More than 100,000 prisoners, most of them Jews from Poland and Germany, passed through Stutthof and about 60,000 of them were murdered there. Others were transferred from it to other extermination camps in Poland. The camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Forchner refused to answer the prosecution’s questions. She only agreed to say that she was sorry for what happened during World War II and that she regretted having taken part in it.
“It was impossible not to know what happened,” Stutthoff survivor Manfred Goldberg told the British Sky News network, “there were bodies that were openly transported through the camp.”
Another survivor of the camp, Josef Solomonovich who testified at the trial, was only six years old when his father was shot to death in Stutthof in September 1944. “She is indirectly guilty,” he told reporters in court. “Even if she just sat in the office and stuck the stamp on my father’s death certificate.”
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Forchner’s prosecution was made possible thanks to a change in the German Penal Code. Following the change, even those who assisted in the support system of the extermination can be accused of cooperation and responsibility for the killings – and not only the perpetrators of the atrocities themselves. Forchner is the first woman to be convicted of war crimes in Germany in three decades.