A German court convicts a 90-year-old woman of complicity in thousands of murders during the Nazi era

Some 65,000 people are believed to have died in appalling conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, Gentile Poles, and captured Soviet soldiers. As Forchner was only 18 or 19 at the time, she was tried in a special juvenile court.

In Stutthof, near the present-day Polish city of Gdańsk, a variety of methods were used to kill detainees, and thousands died in the gas chambers there starting in June 1944.

The court in Itzehoe, in northern Germany, heard testimonies from camp survivors, some of whom died during the trial.

When the trial began in September last year 2021, Irmgard Forschner fled her retirement home and was eventually found by police on a Hamburg street.

The commandant of the Stutthof camp, Paul Werner Hoppe, was imprisoned in 1955 for being an accessory to murder and released five years later.

A series of trials have been launched in Germany since 2011, following the conviction of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, which set a precedent that the fact that a suspect was a guard could be considered sufficient evidence to prove complicity.

This ruling also opened the door to the prosecution of the civilian worker Forschner, because she was working directly with the camp commandant and dealing with the correspondence surrounding the Stutthof detainees.

It took 40 days for the woman to break her silence at the trial, when she told the court, “I am sorry for everything that happened.” “I regret that I was in Stutthof at that time, that’s all I can say,” she said.

Her defense lawyers argued that she should be acquitted because of doubts about what she knew, as she was one of several clerks in Commander Hobby’s office.

Historian Stefan Hordler played a key role in the trial, accompanying two judges on a visit to the camp site. It became clear from the visit that Forchner was able to see some of the worst conditions in the camp from the commandant’s office.

The historian told the court that 27 transports carrying 48,000 people arrived at Stutthof between June and October 1944, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp and accelerate mass killings using Zyklon B gas.

Hordler described Commandant Hoppe’s office as the “nerve center” for everything that happened in Stutthof.

Camp survivor Josef Salomonović, who had traveled to court to testify at the trial, was only six years old when his father was shot dead in Stutthof, in September 1944.

“She is indirectly guilty, even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate,” he told reporters in court last December.

Another survivor, Manfred Goldberg, said his only disappointment was that the two-year suspended sentence “seems like a mistake”.

“No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the verdict must reflect the seriousness of the crimes,” he said.

“If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years in prison, how can someone who has been convicted of complicity in 10,000 murders receive the same sentence?”

Forschner’s trial may be the last to take place in Germany for Nazi-era crimes, although some other cases are still under investigation.

Two more cases have been brought to court in recent years, alleging Nazi crimes at Stutthof.

Last year, a former camp guard was declared unfit to stand trial, although the court said there was a “high degree of probability” of complicity.

In 2020, another SS camp guard, Bruno Day, was given a suspended two-year prison sentence for complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners.