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Irmgard Furchner, 97, appears in court for the verdict in her trial on Dec. 20 in Itzehoe, Germany. (Christian Charisius/AP)

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This month, a German court convicted Irmgard Furchner as an accessory to the murder of 10,505 people. From 1943 to 1945, Furchner served as the secretary to the commandant of Stutthof, an SS concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Bizarrely, because the 97-year-old defendant had begun her secretarial duties at 18, she was tried in juvenile court. Partly for this reason, the court gave a lenient sentence of two years, suspended. Furchner might be the last person convicted of taking part in the Nazis’ annihilation of 6 million European Jews.

The legal reckoning with the Holocaust began early, even before the war ended, with the Soviet trials of perpetrators of mass murder in Krasnodar and Kharkov in 1943.…  Seguir leyendo »

Brandenburg Gate in Berlin last year on the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. Credit Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

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Victory in Europe Day, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s military capitulation to the Allies on May 8, 1945, is an occasion of unreserved celebration across much of the continent, observed with colorful parades and national holidays. For Germans, it is understandably fraught.

For a long time, the anniversary was largely defined in Germany by ambivalence. How, after all, could the vanquished celebrate their surrender? Now Germans are increasingly grappling with a thornier question: How could they not?

Over recent decades, it has become an ever more common convention in Germany to commemorate May 8 as a day of “liberation.” Germany, the thinking goes, was saved from the evils of Nazism, and therefore Germans, too, ought to rejoice.…  Seguir leyendo »