Irmgard Furchner, 97, was convicted by a German court of being an accessory to murder for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis' Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.Christian Charisius/The Associated Press
Back in June, the oldest person ever tried for his role in the operations of the Nazi death camps was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Josef Schuetz, who was found guilty in a German court of being an accessory to the murder of about 3,500 individuals at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, might as well have been sentenced to five minutes in prison, given his advanced age at the time of the verdict (101 years old) and ill health.
But in the decades since the end of the Second World War, the Germans have remained steadfast in their commitment to bringing those who participated in the Holocaust to justice, regardless of the accused’s age, health or, more recently, degree of involvement. In 2011, the conviction of John Demjanjuk, who was alleged to have worked as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, set a new precedent for who could be charged under German law. Mr. Demjanjuk was found complicit in the murder of nearly 28,000 people by virtue of his role in the death camp machinery, though the court obviously could not prove that 28,000 people died by his hand. Prior to that ruling, German courts focused primarily on those who had specific, direct blood on their hands. After it, the state began prosecuting in earnest those who logged, guarded and mopped up the blood, too.
That’s the context behind Germany’s latest conviction of one of its more aged Nazi collaborators: a 97-year-old woman named Irmgard Furchner. On Tuesday, a German judge found that Ms. Furchner was complicit in the deaths of 10,500 people during the time she worked as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Ms. Furchner, whose case was handled in juvenile court since she was under 21 years old at the time in question, was handed a two-year suspended sentence, meaning she will not spend time in jail. (Ms. Furchner did spend five days in jail last year, however, when she fled from her retirement home when her trial was set to begin; she was apprehended by police a few hours later.)
It might seem silly to expend time and money to prosecute a 97-year-old woman (even one who went on the lam at 96) who was just 18 when she started working as a stenographer for the concentration camp’s commander. After all, conscientious objectors weren’t exactly rewarded for their free thinking under Nazi rule, and the combination of social indoctrination and state coercive control meant that all sorts of “normal” people were complicit in some of the worst atrocities committed in the 20th century.
But those atrocities could never have been carried out without the complicity of hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of people who gave up their Jewish neighbours, operated trains to Auschwitz, stood guard at concentration camps or meticulously maintained records. The passage of time does not absolve one of culpability in mass murder – even if he or she was living in a time and place of enormous coercive state control – nor does one’s advanced age at the time of conviction (though that is typically taken into account at sentencing).
There is no expiry date on justice, and if the victims of the Holocaust are condemned to live with the trauma of their persecution for a lifetime, so too should those complicit in its perpetration.
Yet there is another reason to keep pursuing and prosecuting those who participated in the death camp machinery, and it concerns the worrying resurgence of antisemitism, both in Germany and abroad – including in Canada. The recently thwarted Reichsburger plot, which aimed to overthrow the German government, is rooted in far-right conspiracy theories about foreign state control, the illegitimacy of the current German state and global Jewish supremacy (though many of its adherents strive to return the country to pre-Nazi times).
Holocaust denial or minimization appears to be increasingly moving mainstream, touted by celebrities such as Ye (the rapper formerly known as Kanye West), by dining companions of former U.S. president Donald Trump such as Nick Fuentes, and in a Canadian newspaper whose publisher attended a Parliament Hill event.
Germany’s prosecution of even the oldest Nazis, as well as their enablers, serves as a countermeasure against the misinformation circulating among contemporary antisemites. It is a reminder of the facts of the Holocaust – the horrors that existed in the not-so-distant-past – and it should force us to reflect on the horrors of the present, including the persecution of minority populations in places such as China, Myanmar and elsewhere.
Most of all, it is confirmation that the pursuit of justice ought to be never-ending – that even 18-year-old Nazi secretaries can be held accountable 80 years on. Some might see it as a frivolous use of time, but there is always utility in trying to right the wrongs of history.