In August 2024, the German judiciary confirmed a two-years suspended jail time for a 99-year-old woman named Irmgard Furchner. She was prosecuted for being an accessory to over 10,000 murders when she was 18, working as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp. She was likely the last person to be tried for Holocaust crimes.

In Argentina, elderly former military personnel and ex police officers are still undergoing trials for crimes against humanity they committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

The judicial paths to bring perpetrators to court in both countries have several differences, but they are both considered to be turning points in terms of prosecution of crimes against humanity. 

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials that took Nazi officials to the dock. December 9 also marked 40 years since the verdict against the Argentine military Juntas that led the dictatorship was announced.

Nuremberg was a key precedent that served as a baseline to the Juntas trial. Before 1945, the concept of “crimes against humanity” did not exist. But the legal process Argentina undertook in 1985, and the trials against those who committed crimes during the dictatorship which continued over the span of the last two decades, would also leave important lessons.

“There had never been a trial like that in Argentina. The only precedent was Nuremberg,” said Ricardo Gil Lavedra, a former judge who was part of the jury that tried the Argentine dictators, during a conference on the Nuremberg and military Juntas trials at the University of Buenos Aires’ Law School.

“The Juntas trial was an example for the world.”

The Nuremberg trials carried out by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States in occupied Germany judged the crimes of the Holocaust and other violations........

© Buenos Aires Herald