Imgard Furchner, a 96-year-old resident of a special care facility in Germany, is being investigated as a war criminal. She will appear in court in a wheelchair, which is now her customary way of moving about, the Swiss magazine DieWeltwoche reports. She did try to escape from her accusers in a taxi but was apprehended and has been spending time in jail pending the outcome of the court proceedings.
Furchner is a mind-boggling example of the German word Sündenstolz, which means being proud of confessing one’s sins. This word was invented to describe the weird combination of self-debasement and righteousness that has characterized the German reputation in recent years for ostentatiously parading their forefathers’ iniquities before the world, particularly before the leftist media in other Western countries.
Although Furchner had been asked to testify in 1954 and 1962 about a concentration camp near Gdansk (then Danzig) to which she had been assigned as a stenographer, no charges were brought against her at the time. It was properly assumed that she had done nothing to kill the 65,000 inmates who died in the prison camp. She belonged to the clerical help whom the German government had assigned to that location. She neither set nor carried out the practices of the SS-Totenkopfverbände units that ran the facility. The Weltwoche commented mockingly that the German justice system is now treating a very old lady “who never held a gun” as a war criminal.
Weltwoche explains that while in the 1950s and 1960s the German government went after murderous Nazis who committed true atrocities, it now seems motivated by a “changed disposition” affecting the entire system of justice. Once that system is finished with the lady in the wheelchair, it will go on to investigate a 100-year-old invalid, who is suspected of having collaborated, however remotely, with some Nazi malefactor.
