Irmgard Furchner, a 96-year-old former secretary to the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, is pictured at the beginning of her trial in a courtroom, in Itzehoe, Germany, Oct. 19, 2021. Photo: Christian Charisius/Pool via REUTERS

A German court on Tuesday announced the death of 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner, a former Nazi concentration camp secretary.

Furchner is believed to likely be the final person convicted of war crimes committed during the Holocaust. She died on Jan. 14, a fact that came to light this week as the result of an investigation by Der Spiegel.

During World War II, Furchner joined the infamous Nazi SS. At 18, she went to work as a secretary for Lieutenant Colonel Paul Werner Hoppe, the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, where between June 1943 and April 1945 she performed conventional clerical tasks like stenography and transmitting reports to SS headquarters.

In 2022, Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence following her conviction for war crimes — specifically complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp.

Historians estimate between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners, including 28,000 Jews, died at the camp. Her conviction came as a result of a change in German law which enabled prosecutions of those who assisted in supporting work at concentration camps.

Jurors did not accept Furchner’s defense of ignorance of the atrocities at the camp. “She is guilty even if she just sat in an office and stuck the stamp on my father’s death certificate,” survivor Josef Salomonovic said.

Furchner would ultimately apologize for her role in mass murder. “I am sorry for what happened. I regret having been in Stutthof in those days. I cannot say more,” she said at her trial. A court shot down Furchner’s appeal that she filed in August 2024.

“Furchner’s carefully couched expression of regret minus an admission of guilt is noteworthy mainly for its timing shortly before sentencing. That’s an opportune time to try and gain the sympathy of the judges, and it’s only natural,” Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff, then serving as director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote for the Times of Israel before her sentencing. “Yet Furchner’s refusal to accept any criminal responsibility throughout all the previous proceedings and her feigned ignorance regarding the mass murders tell a different story: no shame, no acceptance of guilt.”

At the time of her conviction, Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that the prosecution was “not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life” but instead seeking to hold Furchner responsible to “answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”

Schuster said that “the legal system sent an important message today: Even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes.”

One survivor of Stutthof who worked as an enslaved laborer in the camp questioned the potency of the message.

“My only disappointment is that a two-year suspended sentence appears to me to be a mistake,” Manfred Goldberg said. “No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes. If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?”

Zuroff explained in 2022 that Furchner’s age at the time of her crimes and subsequent conviction in a juvenile court had impacted the seeming lightness of her sentencing.

“Today’s verdict is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court since she was under the age of 21 during her service in the camp,” Zuroff said. “In view of Furchner’s recent statement to the court that she ‘regretted everything,’ we were concerned that the court might accept her defense attorney’s plea for an acquittal. Yet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing.”

Goldberg also insisted that Furchner must have known of the slaughter she aided from her seat at the typewriter. “Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office,” he said.

In response to Furchner’s 2024 appeal, judges wrote that “the principle that typical, neutral professional activities of an ‘everyday nature’ are not criminal does not apply here, since the defendant knew what the main perpetrators were doing and supported them in doing it.”

Lawyer Onur Oezata represented three people who survived Stutthof.

“The secretary was rightly convicted of aiding and abetting murder in several thousand cases,” Oezata said. “The now legally binding guilty verdict is particularly gratifying for my clients. They never wanted revenge or retribution.”

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US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright speaks to the media, outside of the West Wing of the White House, in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kent Nishimura

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Tuesday that Iran can expect tighter sanctions if it does not come to an agreement with President Donald Trump on its nuclear program.

“So absolutely, I would expect very tight sanctions on Iran, and hopefully drive them to abandon their nuclear program,” Wright said in an interview with CNBC.

Wright on Wednesday will launch a nearly two-week tour of three Middle East countries, including Saudi Arabia, marking his first visit as a US official to the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Wright also defended Trump’s executive order, expected later on Tuesday, to boost the coal industry as essential for artificial intelligence data centers, as well as steel production and other industrial activities.

“We need a growing supply of electricity to hit the AI boom and also for this re-industrializing of the United States. If we want to grow America’s electricity production meaningfully over the next five or 10 years, we’ve got to stop closing coal plants,” Wright said in the interview.

Asked about Trump’s comment that the European Union should buy more energy from the United States, Wright said he has had countries in Asia, in Europe and elsewhere reach out to express interest in buying more American energy.”

Wright said he does not think European countries will want to return to Russia for their energy supplies when the war in Ukraine ends.

“As I talk to European leaders, one thing they all share is a regret that they bet their energy future on Russia,” he said. “So, I don’t think there’s a huge desire right now that, when the war is over, we’re going to we’re going to re-count on Russia for a dominant share of our energy supply. I think that’s very unlikely to unfold.”

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Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Harvard University plans to borrow $750 million from Wall Street as part of contingency preparations, it said on Monday, days after President Donald Trump’s administration announced a review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to the Ivy League school in a crackdown on antisemitism on campuses.

In a letter to Harvard last week, the government listed conditions that Harvard must meet to receive federal money, including a ban on protesters wearing masks to hide their identities and other restrictions.

Harvard acknowledged receiving the letter but did not comment further.

“As part of ongoing contingency planning for a range of financial circumstances, Harvard is evaluating resources needed to advance its academic and research priorities,” Harvard University said in Monday’s statement.

Harvard‘s plans come less than a week after Princeton University said in a notice dated April 1 that it was also considering the sale of about $320 million of taxable bonds later this month. Princeton said last week the US government froze several dozen research grants to the school.

Harvard intends to issue up to $750 million of taxable bonds for “general corporate purposes,” a spokesperson said. The university had $7.1 billion of debt outstanding at the end of fiscal year 2024 and anticipated about $8.2 billion after the proposed bond issuance.

The university most recently issued $434 million in tax-exempt bonds in March 2025 and $735 million in tax-exempt bonds in spring 2024, its spokesperson said, adding it also issued bonds in 2022.

Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, the largest of any US university. Advocates, students, and several faculty members have called on university leadership to resist the demands from the Trump administration.

Trump has threatened to slash federal funding for US universities that his administration says have tolerated antisemitism on their campuses.

Such allegations have grown out of a wave of raucous, unsanctioned, and sometimes violent anti-Israel protests at Harvard and other schools against Israel’s military campaign targeting the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

The Israeli campaign followed an October 2023 attack inside Israel by Hamas, which took over 250 hostages. The attack killed 1,200 people.

Protesters say the Trump administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for Hamas.

But many Jewish students on campuses have said they have felt threatened by protesters, and that some academic courses are biased against Israel.

Rights advocates have also raised concerns about Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias during the Israel-Gaza war. The Trump administration has not announced steps in response.

Last month, the government warned 60 universities that it could bring enforcement actions if a review determined the schools had failed to stop antisemitism.

Harvard‘s student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, recently reported that two leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Director Cemal Kafadar and Associate Director Rosie Bsheer, were dismissed from their positions.

TRUMP CRACKDOWN

The Trump administration also planned to freeze grants to Brown University.

Last month, it canceled $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, the epicenter of last year’s campus protests.

Columbia agreed to some significant changes that Trump’s administration demanded as a precondition for talks about restoring the funding.

Federal agents have detained some foreign student protesters in recent weeks from different campuses and are working to deport them. The government has revoked the visas of many foreign students.

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