97-year-old former Nazi secretary sentenced for involvement in more than 10,000 murders

By Rob Picheta and Inke Kappeler, CNN

A 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted for her role in the murder of 10,505 people during the Holocaust, in what could be the final trial of its kind.

Irmgard Furchner worked as a stenographer and typist at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland, from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

She was sentenced Tuesday to a two-year suspended sentence, according to a spokesperson at the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

As Furchner was an adolescent at the time of the crimes, the 97-year-old’s trial took place before a juvenile court and her sentence will see her placed into juvenile probation, the court confirmed to CNN.

Furchner went on the run weeks before her trial was due to begin, but was found by authorities after several hours. Proceedings eventually began late last year.

Tens of thousands of people were held in brutal conditions at the Stutthof camp, and more than 60,000 died there, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Stutthof mainly held non-Jewish Poles, as well as a large number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok and from Nazi-occupied Baltic states, according to the museum.

Germany has raced to bring the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in recent years, before it is too late. But experts say that only a small proportion of those involved ever faced a court.

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