Irmgard Furchner, a 96-year-old former secretary to the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, is pictured at the beginning of her trial in a courtroom, in Itzehoe, Germany, Oct. 19, 2021. Photo: Christian Charisius/Pool via REUTERS

A German court on Tuesday announced the death of 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner, a former Nazi concentration camp secretary.

Furchner is believed to likely be the final person convicted of war crimes committed during the Holocaust. She died on Jan. 14, a fact that came to light this week as the result of an investigation by Der Spiegel.

During World War II, Furchner joined the infamous Nazi SS. At 18, she went to work as a secretary for Lieutenant Colonel Paul Werner Hoppe, the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, where between June 1943 and April 1945 she performed conventional clerical tasks like stenography and transmitting reports to SS headquarters.

In 2022, Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence following her conviction for war crimes — specifically complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp.

Historians estimate between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners, including 28,000 Jews, died at the camp. Her conviction came as a result of a change in German law which enabled prosecutions of those who assisted in supporting work at concentration camps.

Jurors did not accept Furchner’s defense of ignorance of the atrocities at the camp. “She is guilty even if she just sat in an office and stuck the stamp on my father’s death certificate,” survivor Josef Salomonovic said.

Furchner would ultimately apologize for her role in mass murder. “I am sorry for what happened. I regret having been in Stutthof in those days. I cannot say more,” she said at her trial. A court shot down Furchner’s appeal that she filed in August 2024.

“Furchner’s carefully couched expression of regret minus an admission of guilt is noteworthy mainly for its timing shortly before sentencing. That’s an opportune time to try and gain the sympathy of the judges, and it’s only natural,” Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff, then serving as director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote for the Times of Israel before her sentencing. “Yet Furchner’s refusal to accept any criminal responsibility throughout all the previous proceedings and her feigned ignorance regarding the mass murders tell a different story: no shame, no acceptance of guilt.”

At the time of her conviction, Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that the prosecution was “not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life” but instead seeking to hold Furchner responsible to “answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”

Schuster said that “the legal system sent an important message today: Even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes.”

One survivor of Stutthof who worked as an enslaved laborer in the camp questioned the potency of the message.

“My only disappointment is that a two-year suspended sentence appears to me to be a mistake,” Manfred Goldberg said. “No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes. If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?”

Zuroff explained in 2022 that Furchner’s age at the time of her crimes and subsequent conviction in a juvenile court had impacted the seeming lightness of her sentencing.

“Today’s verdict is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court since she was under the age of 21 during her service in the camp,” Zuroff said. “In view of Furchner’s recent statement to the court that she ‘regretted everything,’ we were concerned that the court might accept her defense attorney’s plea for an acquittal. Yet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing.”

Goldberg also insisted that Furchner must have known of the slaughter she aided from her seat at the typewriter. “Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office,” he said.

In response to Furchner’s 2024 appeal, judges wrote that “the principle that typical, neutral professional activities of an ‘everyday nature’ are not criminal does not apply here, since the defendant knew what the main perpetrators were doing and supported them in doing it.”

Lawyer Onur Oezata represented three people who survived Stutthof.

“The secretary was rightly convicted of aiding and abetting murder in several thousand cases,” Oezata said. “The now legally binding guilty verdict is particularly gratifying for my clients. They never wanted revenge or retribution.”