The last trial of the Nazis: German court rejects the appeal of…

German court 99-year-old man’s appeal rejected who was convicted as an accomplice to more than 10,500 murders while working as secretary to the SS commander at the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany. Nazi During World War II.

Irmgard Forschner was only 18 years old. When she began working at the Stutthof camp, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. In 2021, Forschner, 96, became the first woman in decades to be tried for crimes related to the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

The Federal Court today upheld her conviction. In December 2022, a court in the northern German city of Itzehoe sentenced Irmgard Forschner to a two-year suspended prison sentence.

He was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped run the camp. Near Gdańsk, now the Polish city of Gdańsk. He was convicted as an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.

At the Federal Court in Leipzig last month, her appeal was heard in which her lawyers presented arguments to overturn her conviction and drop the charge that she was an accomplice to crimes committed by the commandant and other senior camp officials as well as whether he really knew what was happening at Stutthof.

In the first trial, the Itzehoe City Court recognized that Forschner She also became known through her work as a stenographer in the camp commandant’s office. From June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945, the Stutthof concentration camp deliberately contributed to the sending of 10,505 prisoners “to a cruel death in the gas chambers” by transporting them to the death camp at Auschwitz and sending them on death marches to the Stutthof concentration camp. End of the war.

This may be the last trial for Nazi crimes.

Prosecutors said during preliminary proceedings that Forschner’s trial could be the last of its kind.However, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Ludwigsburg, which is responsible for investigating Nazi-era war crimes, said that Three other cases are still pending before prosecutors or courts in different parts of Germany.As any suspect ages, more and more questions arise about his or her fitness to stand trial.

The Forschner case is one of many in recent years. It built on a 2011 court precedent that convicted former Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk of being an accessory to murder for his work as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. Demjanjuk, who denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.

German courts required prosecutors to prove charges by presenting evidence of a former guard’s involvement in a specific murder, which was often nearly impossible.

However, prosecutors argued that Helping to run the camp was enough to convict someone of complicity in the murders committed there..

Forschner was tried in juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 years old at the time of her alleged crimes. The court was unable to find beyond reasonable doubt that she was of “mental maturity” at that time.

Stutthof was originally a concentration point for Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, and was later used as a “labor training camp” where forced laborers, mostly Poles and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

Since mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews have been expelled from the Baltic ghettos and from Auschwitz. They were transferred to the camp.along with thousands of Polish citizens who were arrested after the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.

Other prisoners at Stutthof were political prisoners, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In total, it is estimated that more than 60,000 people died in the camp.

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