How Nazi war criminals lived ‘mundane and untroubled lives’ here in the UK
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At a courtroom near Hamburg on Thursday, a 96-year-old woman fails to appear at her trial after going on the run. As she is declared a fugitive and an arrest warrant issued, it is almost the stuff of comedy, especially as all she seems to have done was get on a metro train from her retirement home and travel a couple of stops. She is quickly apprehended.
What Irmgard Furchner stands accused of, however, is rather less amusing. She worked as a typist in a concentration camp where more than 65,000 people were murdered, around 28,000 of them Jewish. Thousands died in the camp’s gas chambers. Others were clubbed to death, drowned in mud, killed by lethal injection, shot or worked to death. The allegation, which she denies, is that she knew what was going on.
At almost the same time, in a west London coffee shop, a softly spoken man is talking about the very subject of Nazis escaping justice – or in Furchner’s case, if she is convicted, justice catching up with them.
‘Did you know,’ he s...
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