A German court rejected an appeal against the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary, on Tuesday.

Furchner was employed as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp located near the Polish city of Gdansk (formerly Nazi-occupied Danzig), where over 60,000 people were killed. Run by the SS from 1943 to 1945, Furchner, being 18 to 19 years old at the time the crime was committed, was convicted in a juvenile court. The Itzhoe Regional Court convicted Furchner for “aiding and abetting murder in 10,505 cases and attempted murder in five cases” in 2022, where she received a suspended youth sentence of two years. She appealed against this conviction in early 2024.

The 5th Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice delivered the judgment upholding the conviction asserting Furchner’s work was vital to the operation of the camp. The court ruled that she assisted the camp commander and his adjutants through her work as a stenographer and maintained a relationship of trust. The regional court verdict noted, that throughout her work at the camp, she stayed obedient subordinate and worked reliably, by helping with the continued operation of the concentration to carry out the murder of prisoners.

In upholding the regional court’s decision, the federal court stated Furchner, had provided support to the camp’s authorities in perpetrating the killing of prisoners, affirming she was complicit in the systematic killings of prisoners through gassing, the creation of hostile camp conditions, sending prisoners on death marches and transporting them to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Furchner’s case was decided following the critical legal precedent established in the case of former Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk. This precedent, solidified in the case of Oskar Gröning allowed for the conviction for being an accessory to murder. The precedent has subsequently been upheld in the cases of Bruno Dey and Josef Schuetz.