Why did it take so long for Germany to prosecute Nazis?

Wearing a puffy beige jacket and stray white hair poking from beneath her cream beret, 97-year-old Irmgard Furchner looked dazed as she was wheeled out of a German court on Tuesday.

Her two-year suspended sentence, for complicity in the murder of 10,500 people, made the ex-concentration camp secretary the sixth elderly German to be convicted in the last decade for Nazi-era crimes.

As an 18-year-old she served as secretary for nearly two years in Stutthof, a concentration camp operated by the Nazis near the German-annexed Free City of Danzig, today Gdansk in Poland.

About 65,000 people died in the Nazi camp - Jews, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war - from starvation and disease, extreme labour and, from 1943, in gas chambers.

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While Furchner insisted she saw nothing and knew nothing of daily life and death in the camp, 95-year-old survivor Halina Strnad called her out, telling the court: “I can’t imagine how it was possible not to know what was happening when there was this constant stench of charred corpses.”

Modern Germany is held up as a model in how it has come to terms with its terrible 20th century past, and in many ways it is a model.

Yet it took 62 years before Germany’s legal system accepted with the trial of former death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011, that even “ordinary” people - as small cogs in a much larger Nazi machine - served the system of industrial murder.

From Demjanjuk, who died before he was convicted, to Furchner, who may yet appeal, the belated change of heart by German courts has so far allowed six cases and six defendants with a combined age of 572.

Those who criticise the cases, given the defendants’ advance age, are reminded by others that German law has no statute of limitation on murder. The verdicts also offer important emotional closure for survivors and families of the dead.

With at least five similar cases looming in the coming years, though, the growing question is: “why now?”

One answer can be found in Germany’s southeastern city of Karlsruhe and the Grand Duke’s Palace, since 1950 the main home of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), Germany’s supreme court.

On a first floor corridor a marble wall plaque hangs “in memory of 34 members of the Reichs court and prosecutors’ office”, then in Leipzig, who were arrested by the Soviet secret service, imprisoned without trial and died in 1945 and 1946 in repurposed Nazi camps, including Buchenwald.

The ceremony to unveil the plaque in 1957 was a low point of post-war West German hypocrisy: BGH judges, four out of five themselves former Nazi judges, honoured their dead colleagues as “martyrs of injustice” and “passionate opponents of the National Socialist regime”.

Of the 34 judges and prosecutors memorialised, 23 were Nazi party members, and were involved in staggering rulings, including death sentences for a bicycle thief and for a mother who urged her conscripted son to desert.

The driving force behind the plaque was then BGH court president Hermann Weinkauff. A leading light in Nazi-era “racial defilement” cases, his court ruled in 1956 that Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma was not based on racist ideology but their “anti-social characteristics”.

So what to do now with the problematic Karlsruhe plaque? Leave it, supplement it, remove it? Plaster over the gap, replace it with something else, leave a hole in the wall? After five years of prevaricating, a recent seminar with lawyers and historians heard arguments for and against removing the plaque and BGH president Bettina Limpberg has promised a decision soon.

“For me this isn’t a memorial for individual people but has become a historical document of the very uncritical approach at that time towards National Socialist crimes - including the judicial system,” she told SWR radio.

The plaque dilemma and this week’s Furchner ruling are part of a growing debate in Germany about decades of post-war historical denial among judges, prosecutors and lawyers.

In a remarkable 2020 ruling, ending another belated Nazi case, Hamburg judge Anne Meier-Göring said the postwar legal profession ensured that post-war German “once again made itself culpable vis-a-vis the victims of the Holocaust”.

This dogged denial means it was only last year that Germany introduced an obligatory component in law degrees on the profession’s own legal and ethical failures in the fascist and post-war eras.

Tomorrow’s judges in Germany will now, finally, learn about how their post-war predecessors found legal tricks to keep countless Nazis from trial and, in the process, kept themselves out of the dock.

For historian Christoph Safferling the post-war period is best summed up by the German expression, “a crow doesn’t pick out the eyes of another”.

“Post-war jurists not only didn’t pick out the eyes of colleagues,” said Prof Safferling of the University of Erlangen, “they tried to protect them, excuse them or even frame them as victims.”