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Germany’s Supreme Court (TS) upheld the conviction on Tuesday of a woman identified as Irmgard Furchner, a former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp in what is now northern Poland, for complicity in 10,505 murders as part of the Nazi regime’s plan to exterminate the Jews.

Furshner, who He is currently 99 years old.From June 1943 to April 1945 she worked as a camp secretary.

The Itzehoe Provincial Court found it proven that the woman’s work had contributed to a plan to systematically murder prisoners and sentenced her to two years’ imprisonment with the possibility of parole.

His defence appealed, which has now been rejected by the Supreme Court because it was neither clear nor proven that he knew what was happening on the ground, nor that his work contributed to the process of systematic killings.

At Stutthof, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, 110,000 people were interned from 1939 to 1945. About 65,000 people were killed.

This process has attracted attention for several reasons, such as advanced age of the accused and also because it will probably be one of the last ones connected with the crimes of National Socialism.

There are currently three cases pending, but in two cases the courts found that the defendants were unable to follow the proceedings.

The Furchner case has revived the question of why it took so long for German justice to bring those involved in Nazi crimes to justice.

A 1969 Supreme Court ruling (which followed several previous Holocaust-related convictions) made it difficult to prosecute perpetrators by requiring that their complicity in specific cases must be proven. show the cause and effect relationship between their actions and crimes.

This led to several cases being brought, including against guards involved in the selection on the Auschwitz ramp.

A new twist in legal doctrine occurred in 2011, when John Demjanjuk, a former Sobibor guard, was found guilty of complicity in 28,000 murder cases without proving a causal link between their actions and the deaths.

Later, in reviewing another sentence handed down to Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, the Supreme Court ruled that it was sufficient that the accused would be part of the death machine and that with his work he would help to commit a large number of murders in a short time.

Since then, there have been more than a dozen trials of elderly people in which former victims have testified about the crimes of National Socialism.