97-year-old former Nazi secretary sentenced for involvement in more than 10,000 murders

A 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted for her role in the murder of 10,505 people during the Holocaust, in what could be the final trial of its kind.

Irmgard Furchner worked as a stenographer and typist at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1943-1945.

She was sentenced Tuesday to a two-year suspended sentence, according to a spokesperson at the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

As Furchner was an adolescent at the time of the crimes; the 97-year-old woman’s trial took place before a juvenile court and her sentence will see her placed into juvenile probation.

Furchner went on the run weeks before her trial was due to begin, but authorities found her after several hours. Proceedings eventually began late last year.

Tens of thousands of people were held in brutal conditions at the Stutthof camp. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum more than 60,000 died there.

Stutthof mainly held non-Jewish Poles, as well as a large number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok and from Nazi-occupied Baltic states, according to the museum.

Germany has raced to bring the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in recent year. But experts say that only a small proportion of those involved ever faced a court.