Earlier this month, Germany moved to prosecute what may very well be its last major Nazi war crime trial:
And this week, the defendant was found guilty:
A former Nazi concentration camp typist known as the "Secretary of Evil" has been convicted by a German court for her role in more than 10,000 murders during the Holocaust.
Irmgard Furchner, 97, was found guilty on Tuesday of complicity in the deaths of 10,505 people at Stutthof, the internment camp near Gdansk, Poland, where she served as a typist and stenographer from 1943 through 1945, BBC reported.
Furchner, who was tried as a juvenile because she was under 21 when she worked at the camp, was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison term.
A two-year suspended sentence for a Nazi war criminal feels a bit light, though she is nearly 100 years old. In any event, clearly something had to be handed down:
During her time as a secretary, Furchner worked closely with Stutthof's commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe, who served a prison stint as an accessory to murder in the late 1950s. Historian Stefan Hördler previously testified that Hoppe's office was the "nerve center" for the camp's evils.
Hördler and two judges visited Stutthof twice during the proceedings, during which it became clear that Furchner would have seen the deplorable conditions from the commandant's office.
The official findings were bolstered by testimonies from Stutthof survivors, now also in their 80s and 90s.
