The Nazi prison camp where inmates were forced to EAT each other to survive trends now
Starving prisoners forced to eat each other to survive, sadistic 'torture shows', and inmates murdered by lethal injections and gas chambers.
These are just some of the horrific details of life at the Nazi's Stutthof camp that have emerged during the trial of Irmgard Furchner.
Furchner, 97, dubbed the 'Secretary of Evil', was today handed a two-year suspended sentence for her complicity in the murder of 10,000 people during her time as a stenographer at the Stuffhof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland between 1943 and 1945.
During her trial, countless survivors of the Stuffhof camp recounted how Nazi guards brutalised the tens of thousands of inmates there.
One Holocaust survivor detailed how starving prisoners turned to cannibalism to survive while another described how guards killed inmates by throwing them against electric fences or setting dogs on them.
Starving prisoners forced to eat each other to survive, sadistic 'torture shows', and inmates murdered by lethal injections and gas chambers. These are just some of the horrific details of life at the Nazi's Stutthof camp (pictured) that have emerged during the trial of Irmgard Furchner
Human remains seen in a crematorium furnace at Stutthof concentration camp
Furchner, 97, dubbed the 'Secretary of Evil', was today (pictured) handed a two-year suspended sentence for her complicity in the murder of 10,000 people during her time as a stenographer at the Stuffhof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland between 1943 and 1945
Prisoners were shot in the neck by SS men in white medical uniforms at the camp, while others were forced into chambers which were filled with poisonous Zyklon B gas. Their screams from the pain of the gas ripping into their skin resounded through Stutthof.
SS guards would also put on sadistic 'torture shows' at the camp, including one in which a son was forced to beat his father to death in front of other inmates.
Conditions in the camp were horrifically brutal - and many prisoners died in typhus epidemics that swept through the camp in the winter of 1942 and again in 1944. Those who were deemed too sick to work were gassed to death.
During her trial, Irmgard had claimed that she didn't know the systematic murder of inmates was being carried about by SS officers. The presiding Judge Dominik Gross said it was "simply beyond all imagination" that Furchner didn't notice the killings.
He said Furchner could see from her office the collection point where new prisoners had to wait after arrival, and the crematorium was in constant use in the fall of 1944, with smoke spreading across the camp.
The Stutthof camp was established in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, and enlarged in 1943 with a new camp surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences.
It was here that more than 60,000 people were killed by SS guards. They were either murdered via lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved.
Other prisoners were forced to go outside during winter without clothes where they died of exposure, or they were sent to their deaths in gas chambers.
German Nazi party official and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, center, visits the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof in Sztutowo, Poland, on November 23, 1941
The Stutthof camp was established in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, and enlarged in 1943 with a new camp surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences
Furchner was a teenager when her alleged crimes were committed and has therefore been tried in a juvenile court
The Nazis began evacuating the prisoners at the Stutthof camp once Soviet troops began advancing towards the area in January 1945. The SS guards marched thousands of prisoners from Stutthof to the Baltic Sea coast, forced them into the water and machine gunned them down.
During the trial, survivor Risa Silbert, 93, detailed how cannibalism was commonplace among starving prisoners at Stutthof.
The inmates would butcher the corpses of their inmates and eat their livers in order to survive, Silbert
