German court finds 97-year-old guilty of Nazi war crimes in one of last Holocaust trials

(CNN NEWSOURCE) — A former Nazi concentration camp secretary who was found guilty on Tuesday by a German court of aiding in the murder of more than 10,000 people told the court that “she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been in Stutthof at that time,” according to a press statement released by the district court in the northern town of Itzehoe.

Irmgard Furchner, a stenographer and typist in the commandant’s office at the Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, was convicted of assisting those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of prisoners between June 1943 and April 1945, according to the court.

Public prosecutors had said before that Furchner could be the last person in Germany to be tried for crimes committed during the Holocaust.

Furchner faced trial before a Juvenile Court Chamber because she was an adolescent at the time of the offenses. She was one of the first women to go on trial in decades for crimes during the Nazi era.

According to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, which is responsible for investigating Nazi crimes, around 65,000 people died in the Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps, as well as on the so-called death marches at the end of the war.