"They have assisted in horrific murders"

The plea in criminal proceedings is considered the climax of a process. The public prosecutor and the defense present their view of the completed taking of evidence, summarize the status and demand what they consider to be the correct verdict. In the final speech to the court, the lawyers, who are fundamentally not free from vanity, put all their rhetorical and professional weight; it is also always public proof of their skill - or their mediocrity.

Seen in this way, prosecutor Maxi Wantzen from Itzehoe had a good day on Tuesday.

In the Stutthof trial against the 97-year-old former camp secretary, Irmgard Furchner, in her plea she called for a two-year youth sentence that should be suspended on probation. She spoke for about 90 minutes about the trial at Itzehoe District Court, the personal guilt of the accused and the decades-long disinterest of the German judiciary in holding the perpetrators and helpers of the Holocaust accountable.

Wantzen reported on the "hell" that the prisoners had to experience there, she reported on the types of killing and the relationship of the SS and his followers to it. After so many decades, a verdict in this "historical process" is "only of a symbolic nature", but is "essential".

With Irmgard Furchner, one of the last links in the long chain of perpetrators and accomplices in the mass murder of European Jews is on trial. From April 1943 to April 1945 she was the chief shorthand typist for Paul Werner Hoppe, who was then head of the Stutthof camp near Danzig, and typed all of his correspondence – be it letters or orders. At least that's what Wantzen considers proven according to the opinion of the historical expert, Stefan Hördler.

For Wantzen, Furchner also made a small but indispensable contribution to the smooth functioning of the killing in the "highly structured and organized camp". "It is impossible that she did not also write letters with a direct connection to the concentration camp," says Wantzen - meaning that killing did not also play a role in the pedantic, bureaucratic office work.

The public prosecutor quoted the expert Hördler as saying that it had been released for all levels of secrecy, even if she had no authority to sign or write letters independently.

Furchner himself testified in 1954 in a preliminary investigation against Hoppe as a witness. At the time, she said she "went all correspondence across my desk." But because the investigators did not properly instruct her at the time and did not explain her right to refuse to testify, this statement could not be used in the current proceedings. During a house search in 2017, she then confirmed to the public prosecutor that she had worked in the concentration camp and worked there for Hoppe - because she was allegedly conscripted.

Wantzen thought that was wrong. It was not possible to clarify in the taking of evidence how exactly Furchner came to Stutthof. But according to Hördler, the hiring procedure stipulated that you had to apply. There can be no question of compulsory obligations, especially since the SS only wanted to employ hand-picked employees in this sensitive area.

Furchner did not say what happened back then, what life and death in the camp looked like, and how the SS and their followers behaved. She chose to remain silent. Once again, in this third newer Stutthof trial after Münster (2017) and Hamburg (2020), it was up to the survivors to report from the concentration camp.

Her descriptions have been known for decades. As early as 1945, the first trial in Danzig against former members of the guards began, in which survivors testified. Historians have been working on and analyzing the structure and functioning of the German concentration and extermination camps since the 1960s. None of the harrowing accounts heard in the Itzehoe courtroom were new.

The joint plaintiffs and witnesses "brought out their pain once more" and reported on the system for shooting in the neck, the gas chamber and the horrific killings in Stutthof.

They described the hostile conditions and the systematic killings that began in October 1944, when a typhus epidemic killed so many prisoners that the corpses were collected on the premises with handcarts and burned on pyres.

Furchner claimed in earlier interrogations that he knew nothing about it or had seen it. Wantzen also considered that a protective claim. "If the defendant looked out the window, she could see the new prisoners who were being selected. And no one could miss the smoke from the crematorium or the stench of the burned corpses,” the prosecutor said.

In the past few decades, hardly anyone wanted to hear the stories of the people who were able to resist the German assassination attempt - and certainly not the German judiciary.

Wantzen also went into that. The breakthrough in changing the case law came in 2011 when the Munich II Regional Court convicted former SS helper John Demjanjuk, who had been used as a guard at the Sobibor death camp, as an accessory to murder. At this point in time, the view of the former Hessian Attorney General and initiator of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, Fritz Bauer, prevailed: Anyone who supported the murders in a camp on the part of the SS, no matter how small and inconspicuous way, made himself complicit in the mass murder. The division of labor in extermination, the distribution of the burden on innumerable shoulders, was supposed to conceal the responsibility of each individual in the logic of the SS. Bauer demanded that they be named and proved.

It was clear to Wantzen that Furchner was one of the small cogs in the machine that the murder machine needed to murder the tens of thousands of people who died in Stutthof. The accused was aware that she worked for the camp commander, did clerical work for him and thus contributed to the functioning of the camp. "During her service she helped with gruesome murders," said Wantzen. And even if I didn't put any of my own thoughts on paper, but only copied them, this should still be seen as an aid. During an interrogation, Hoppe himself admitted that there had been written communication about gassings.

A colleague of Furchner's, Ellen Steußloff, who died only a few years ago, said the following in an interrogation from the 1950s: It was common knowledge in Stutthof that Jewish prisoners were gassed. Anyone who claimed not to have known that should not be telling the truth, Wantzen quoted from the statement.

Irmgard Furchner gave no indication of whether or not she followed the prosecutor's statements. She sat motionless in her wheelchair and didn't move.

The joint plaintiffs' pleadings will begin next Tuesday.