Can a former concentration camp secretary be considered an accomplice to mass murder? The Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig, Germany's highest civil and criminal court, answered "yes" in handing down a landmark decision on Tuesday, August 20. The judges upheld a 2022 ruling by the regional court of Itzehoe (Schleswig-Holstein), which had convicted Irmgard Furchner of being an accessory in the murder of 10,500 inmates at Stutthof concentration and extermination camp near Danzig, Poland. Furchner, now 99, worked in camp administration as a stenographer. She has always denied responsibility for the crimes committed at Stutthof and had appealed her conviction. The two-year suspended sentence handed down to her in 2022 was thereby confirmed by the federal judge on Tuesday.

The trial, which has been widely followed and commented on in Germany, is likely to represent the last conviction in a case linked to the mass murders of the Nazi period. It has raised questions about the legal and ethical implications of convicting, 80 years after the fact, the regime's "little hands" for their responsibility in Nazi crimes even though many of the main perpetrators have escaped justice.

Furchner was just 18 when she was employed as a secretary for Stutthof's administration. She worked there between June 1943 and April 1945, under the orders of camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe. The federal judges ruled that, even in this menial position, she could be held complicit in the systematic murders of camp inmates. Even workers in lowly positions may be legally considered accomplices to the crimes committed there, the judges rules – his was the crux of the appeal. Now, the ruling has brought years of proceedings to a close.

The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, welcomed the verdict while expressing dismay that the defendant had not admitted her guilt. "This is not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life," said Schuster. "The issue is for a guilty person to answer for her actions and find words to talk about what happened and what she was associated with. As a secretary, she was a conscious accomplice of the Nazi killing machine." Abraham Koryski, a 96-year-old Stutthof survivor now living in Israel, testified to this fact at one of the last hearings at the end of July. "Those who worked in the camp administration, in particular, can't say they didn't know. They even knew before anyone else what was going to happen, who would be executed and who would be deported," he said in a statement read to the court by his lawyer.

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