99 year old Nazi Irma Furchner died in January. Why was it only revealed now?

Irmgard Furchner, one of Germany’s final living links to the Holocaust’s atrocities, died on January 14, 2025, at 99. Her death, kept quiet until this week, closes a chapter on a life that skirted justice for decades.

Irmgard Dirksen was born in 1925. When she was 18, she took a job as a secretary at Stutthof, a Nazi camp near Gdansk, Poland, from 1943 to 1945. Under commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, tens of thousands of Jews perished: gassed, shot, or starved. Furchner typed orders and logged their deaths, a clerical cog in a machine of mass murder. For years, she lived quietly in northern Germany, marrying an ex-SS officer and working as an administrator, her past buried.

In 2021, everything changed. Prosecutors charged her with 11,412 counts of accessory to murder. She tried to flee from her retirement home for a subway station hours before her trial in Itzehoe’s juvenile court.

But her attempt failed. She was arrested, then released under conditions. She faced justice seated in a wheelchair. “I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she said at the trial’s end, words that rang hollow to many. In December 2022, she was found guilty, handed a two-year suspended sentence due to her age. Germany’s Federal Court of Justice upheld the verdict in August 2024.

Furchner, unrepentant until cornered, embodied a generation’s fading footprint. “One of the last Nazis in Germany is gone,” a German official noted, per local reports.