A former Nazi death camp worker dubbed the "Secretary of Evil" has spoken out for the first time during the trial for her role in 10,000 deaths in the camp during World War II.
Irmgard Furchner, 97, is the first woman in decades to be tried within Germany for crimes related to the Nazi era, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Prosecutors have stated this could be one of the last trials related to crimes committed during the holocaust, due to the aging population of those who were around during the atrocities of the Holocaust, between 1941 and 1945.
Furchner was a teenager when the alleged crimes took place, and has therefore been tried at a juvenile court.
Speaking about the events for the first time in 14 months, the 97-year-old said: "I'm sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time."
Stutthof was a concentration camp established in Gdansk, Poland, by the Nazis in 1939. Over 100,000 people were transported there. The camp was swept by a typhus outbreak in 1942 and again in 1944, as conditions were brutal, per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The prisoners - largely consisting of both non-Jewish and Jewish Poles - who were deemed too weak to work would be killed in the gas chambers, or by lethal injection. More than 60,000 people lost their lives in the camp.
Furchner's role within the camp was as a secretary, working within the command block. During her trial, she alleged that due to the nature of her work, she was unaware of the murderous regime, per the Daily Mail.
It was later revealed that her husband was an SS officer during the second world war, and in 1954 he testified he was aware of what took place during the Holocaust.
Her role was to take dictation of the orders from the commander of the camp - Paul Werner Hoppe - and handle his correspondence.
Survivors from Stutthof testified during the trial and gave harrowing accounts of the horrors that took place there.
Speaking via video link, Risa Silbert, 93, explained: "We had cannibalism in the camp. People were hungry and they cut up the corpses and they wanted to take out the liver." She added that her father and brother were murdered by the Nazis in 1941, while she and her mother were placed in a ghetto before being transported to the camp.
She also stated that the prisoners would be forced out of bed at 4:00 or 5:00 AM each morning, and those unable to stand still were whipped by the SS guards.
Furchner's prosecutors claim she was complicit in 10,000 deaths during her time at Stutthof, and want the judge to hand down a two-year suspended sentence. Her lawyers claim the evidence presented "had not shown beyond doubt" that she had full knowledge of the atrocities.
The 97-year-old attempted to flee from her retirement home as the trial was due to start in September 2021, but law enforcement caught her several hours later in Hamburg.
The verdict as to whether she is deemed to be complicit with the killings will be announced on December 20.
