Executions Of Horrific Female Guards Of World War 2 JJ

They were some of the worst female guards who worked inside of the concentration camps during World War II. Many of them at the end of the conflict were taken to trials, and they were then condemned to death for their evil actions. Female concentration camp guards were known for being violent, ruthless, and more than happy to take the life of a prisoner within milliseconds of the thought entering their minds.

Many of them would turn in their mood, and they would then bring death to one poor suffering soul who wasn’t fortunate enough to be in their way. Women such as Emma Grese, Maria Mandel, Johanna Bormann, and Elisabeth Volkenrath paid the ultimate price for this sort of behavior, and they were then sent crashing through the gallows for their crimes during World War II.

In this video, we look at the executions of the most brutal female guards. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was, as a young woman, a member of the League of German Maidens, the teenage girls youth group, which the Nazis later made compulsory. In this, millions of young women were brainwashed into the Nazi politics and beliefs, and they were told that they were to have as many children with SS men and Aryans for the Reich as possible.

Hitler wanted as big a population as possible, but within the youth groups, many young women were indoctrinated. Jenny Barkmann was one of them. She dreamed after school of being a fashion model, and she was considered by some, and also by the standards of the time, rather good-looking. She did complete a number of photo shoots, but then in 1944, she decided to get involved in a different career that would define her life, and would ultimately send her to the gallows.

In 1944, the 21-year-old young woman signed up to become a member of the SS retinue, and she then became an Aufseherin. She trained to become a female guard within the concentration camps, and she may have been lured into this by the enticing thought of better and consistent pay and promotion within the SS’s organizational hierarchy.

Jenny was sent to the nearby camp as she was from the Gdansk region, and where she trained was known as Stutthof. Stutthof was immensely brutal and there was a lot of suffering. And around 65,000 people would never make it out of the camp alive. This number equates to around 60% of all of those who were sent to the camp altogether.

Stutthof became known for its rough treatment of inmates, and the conditions were rough and immensely harsh. Tens of thousands succumbed to disease which spread around the camp and also starvation. Typhus epidemics rampaged throughout the site most years, and even the SS guards caught this. But the prisoners were given no medical treatment at all.

Those who became ill or who were deemed unfit to work were sent into the small gas chamber within the camp. Women guards who worked at the site, such as Jenny Wanda Barkmann, became known for their evil. And despite presiding over mostly female prisoners, they also condemned many men. Jenny Barkmann specifically became known as Mad Jenny as she was ruthless and immensely violent with her batons and weapons.

She struck prisoners wherever she went and she battered them, sometimes to death. Prisoners witnessed her taking lives and then laughing. And she also took part in the selections. As previously mentioned, if an inmate was too sick or weak to work, then they were sent to the small gas chamber. And the SS guards were those who selected these people for this fate.

Barkmann got involved in this and she was the reason why many hundreds of people were gassed as she drove them and ordered them into the chamber. She gained the infamous nickname of the beautiful specter as inmates remarked about her beauty, but also her immense temper and very violent nature. Jenny Wanda Barkmann was at Stutthof for around a year and she wasn’t a concentration camp guard who worked at many different sites all across Germany like Irma Grese or Maria Mandel.

She also wasn’t involved in the training of other guards, too. Because 1945 came around, it was very clear that the war was lost for the Germans and because of this, many SS guards inside of the camps began to desert their posts in an attempt to evade any form of capture. Jenny left Stutthof in 1945 and she hid in the region of Gdansk and this was a rather foolish thing for her to have done.

In the months before, Stutthof had been evacuated and thousands of people had been killed, many being marched into the nearby sea by SS guards and then machine-gunned. But Jenny Wanda Barkmann was known about and local authorities tried to track her down. She was arrested at a train station attempting to flee and she had managed to hide out for 4 months.

She may have been traveling out of the region to continue to hide out elsewhere, but the former prisoners of the camp quickly identified her, too. And with this, she was arrested and was later brought to the Stutthof trials. This was one of the first post-war trials and alongside her were a number of other female guards, her colleagues who had too been arrested.

At trial, Jenny Wanda Barkmann brazenly ignored many of the questions and she also lied through her teeth. She tried to claim that she’d saved a number of prisoners from death and that she’d treated them well, but she showed her true colors and she was more bothered about her hair and also with flirting with the court guards than she was her victims.

Her lawyers tried to make out that she was mentally ill, and her lawyer claimed that no sane person would have committed the crimes that she was accused of. She continued to laugh in the face of witnesses and did not ask for forgiveness. With all of the evidence that was very much stacked up against her, Jenny Wanda Barkmann was sentenced to death, and she was specifically to be hanged.

She replied to the death sentence with the chilling words, I quote, “Life is a great pleasure, and pleasure, as a rule, does not last long.” But she would never have imagined the spectacle that her execution would become. On the 4th of July, 1946, a crowd of around 20,000 people at least gathered to witness the executions of the Stutthof guards.

This took place on Biskupia Gorka, a huge hill and open space, where a number of large gallows, five in total, had been built. These weren’t little structures either. They were absolutely huge, possibly 4 m high at least. The aim of these was so that everyone could have a good view of the executions, and they could see that justice was going to be carried out upon the former guards of the local concentration camp.

It became a huge public event. Local people sold food and drink, and it was very much like a medieval carnival. Because for centuries, people flocked to see executions. Jenny Wanda Barkmann was executed first out of the 11 condemned former guards. She was brought out in front of the crowd, who jeered and taunted her, and she was helped onto the back of a truck.

This truck would be the execution scaffold, and whilst on the truck, an official loudly read the death sentence and reminded the crowd of her crimes. The executioner, who was a former prisoner of Stutthof, dressed in their striped pajamas, secured the noose around her neck. Barkmann was then stood on a stool, and slowly the truck drive off, and the noose then snapped taut around her neck.

It took many minutes for her to die as she slowly strangled to death as she struggled in front of the crowd. But why was her execution so public? Well, the people of Gdansk and Poland in particular had suffered significantly during the Second World War. Many of those in the crowd had been prisoners inside the camp where Jenny Barkmann worked, and this for them was revenge.

They wanted to see a woman who’d condemned their friends and family members suffer. It was also undeniable that justice had been carried out upon her, and she would not escape her fate either. So, Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was one of the most ruthless and evil female concentration camp guards of World War II.

And for her crimes, she paid the ultimate price in front of around 20,000 people. >> Maria Mandl was born in January 1912, and she was the daughter of a shoemaker. The family owned a farm, and there was little to suggest what she would later do in her life. Her father actually spoke out against the Nazis, but Maria left school at the age of 12.

She at one point moved to Switzerland and held different jobs, but she returned back home to Austria and worked as a maid in a villa. However, at the time, she was slowly inside of the country becoming exposed to the Nazi Party, who were beginning to impose upon Austrian politics. Eventually, the nation would become aligned with the Nazis in the Anschluss as Austria was annexed into the German Reich.

However, Maria Mandl, who worked as a nanny at one point, was fired as she was not of the opinion of a Nazi. She sort of fell into working inside the concentration camps, and she moved in with her uncle, and she thought he could help her get a job in the police force. Maria was then encouraged to take a job as a female overseer and officer in inside the concentration camps, which were being opened.

She would later admit that she knew nothing about what the concentration camps were when she signed up. And she took the job initially because of the increase in pay, and she knew she could earn more money in this role than she would working as a nurse. She was trained and indoctrinated in the Nazi racial policies and was interrogated about her attitude towards Hitler and his empire.

She was then sent to Lichtenburg, an all-female camp to work, and she passed her 3-month trial. She was influenced by the commandant Max Kergal, who influenced her behavior, and she got involved in the horrific punishments at this camp. Maria Mandel was seen whipping women and beating them who’d been stripped naked and tied to a post.

She also once beat a prisoner so badly with a key that they were knocked out, and they were then dragged throughout the camp and thrown into a solitary confinement cell. With further expansion of the concentration camp systems, Maria Mandel was, at the age of 27, transferred to the newly opened camp of Ravensbruck, an all-female site close to Berlin.

One female prisoner of Ravensbruck summed up the conditions of the site saying, “They didn’t shoot the women. We were to die of misery, hunger, and exhaustion. When we arrived at Ravensbruck, it was the worst. The first thing I saw was a cart with all the dead piled on it, their arms and legs hanging out, and mouths and eyes wide open.

They reduced us to nothing. We didn’t even feel like we had the value of cattle. You worked and you died.” Mandel became known inside of the camp for targeting women who had different hair, and she even shaved this off following beatings. She was witnessed kicking a woman to death during roll call, and whilst at Ravensbruck, she became a teacher, schooling other prospective female guards in how to instigate a reign of terror over others.

She had a relationship inside of the camp with a male guard, SS Obersturmführer Edmund Brossmann. However, when he broke this off, Maria Mandl took out her anger on the inmates, and she shot a number of them to, in a sense, cure her broken heart. After a few years at Ravensbruck, she was then sent to Auschwitz II Birkenau, the main extermination element of the deadliest concentration camp.

Mandl worked under the commandant Rudolf Höss, and she was the Lagerführerin of the female camp, practically the commandant of the female camp. She ruled with an iron fist, and she was given bonuses in pay for the way she ran the female prisoners. She promoted other female guards, such as Irma Grese, the beautiful beast, and she often stood at the gates of Auschwitz Birkenau, and she wanted a prisoner to look at her.

If one did, they were quickly removed and were never seen again, presumably dragged away and shot by Mandl and other guards. Whilst at Auschwitz Birkenau, she also got involved in the selections of prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers, and then she would patrol the train yards, where thousands of men, women, and children disembarked.

Those who were not fit enough to work, or those who Maria Mandl deemed as needing to be killed, were immediately sent to their deaths, and her signature was found on the extermination lists of thousands of men, women, and children who were then driven into the gas chambers. One former prisoner said of her strange behavior that, “I had a friend who had a job cleaning in the guards’ hostels.

One of the senior guards had a piano in her room. One day my friend went in and heard the most beautiful music. The woman who was playing was lost in a world of her own, in ecstasy. It was the same guard who had murdered the Jewish woman a few days earlier. This woman being Maria Mandel. She was decorated by the Nazis for her behavior and actions.

But as the Second World War was coming to an end, and as the Soviet Red Army were approaching the region of Poland, Maria Mandel was moved across to the Mühldorf subcamp of Dachau. This site was away from enemy lines, and she was seen as an asset by Heinrich Himmler. In May 1945, Maria Mandel fled the subcamp, and she moved to the mountains of Bavaria.

She probably thought that she would be safe living in the mountains, and she did travel to different countries, evading capture. But on the 8th of October 1945, Maria Mandel was arrested by the Americans. Her image and likeness had been circulated, and she was someone who’s being hunted for her crimes.

And she now found herself locked up inside the former camp of Dachau, along with many other guards. During her interrogation, it was found that she was rather clever, but she was a devoted Nazi, and she told the interrogators what happened inside the camps. Mandel was in November 1946 deported to Poland, where she was locked up inside of Montelupich prison inside the city of Krakow.

And she was later brought to trial in December 1947 in the Auschwitz trial. Mandel and many other female and male guards, including former commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, were tried with the crimes of Auschwitz. One witness in the courtroom stated that Maria Mandel behaves differently. She does her best to be in control of herself, but her efforts are futile.

The woman who condemned female prisoners to death with a single gesture now cannot control her accelerated breathing, unnatural blush, and nervous twitching of her entire face. She was tried and found guilty of being involved and complicit in the murder and slaughter of 500,000 people. Half a million men, women, and children who were all driven into the gas chambers of Auschwitz, all signed off by the female overseer.

There was no denying her crimes, and a lot of former prisoners had testified against her, and to those inside the courtroom, it was clear that she was a monster. Following the death sentence being passed against her, Maria Mandel was locked up again inside of Montelupich prison awaiting her execution date. She would not be executed on the gallows or a structure with a long drop aimed to snap her neck.

Inside of the prison, they used slow strangulation. At half past 7:00 in the morning on the 24th of January, 1948, Maria Mandel was led into the execution chamber of the prison alongside a number of other condemned Auschwitz guards. In the chamber were some hooks in the ceiling, and from these, nooses dangled which had already been tied.

Under the nooses were boxes for the condemned to stand on. Maria Mandel was helped onto one of the boxes, and an executioner then quickly secured the noose around her neck, and he kicked the box from underneath her. It’s not known if she was given a cap placed over her head, but within a few minutes, she was dead.

She kicked and struggled as her life was choked out of her until her body went limp, and she was left for some time before she was then cut down. Her final words were Poland lives. Her body was then donated to medical science and anatomists after her death. Maria Mandel was a harrowing and brutal female concentration camp guard, possibly the worst one inside of the SS or the Third Reich.

She was a woman who was sentenced to death for being complicit in the deaths of half a million people, and she was someone who tortured and brutalized female prisoners on a daily basis. She was more than comfortable and happy to take someone’s life inside of the camps where she worked, and she also drove prisoners into the gas chambers.

She entered work inside the concentration camps to begin with just for money, but it wasn’t long before Mandel got her hands dirty, learning off of her sadist how to become a beast and a murderer. Inside of a Polish execution chamber, she met her maker at the end of the noose. Irma Grese was one of the most harrowing women of of the concentration camps of World War II, and her name still, 80 years on, carries a sense of dread and fear.

But why was witnessing her execution much worse than you would probably have imagined? Irma Grese fell into the lure of the Nazi Party. Her father was allegedly anti-Nazi, but she decided to join the youth groups for teenage girls, such as the League of German Maidens. This upset her father, but her later work inside the concentration camps would push their relationship to breaking point.

She did not have the greatest early life. Her mother died after discovering her father’s affair, and Irma left school at 14 to work at a dairy factory. She held other jobs, including a shop assistant, but she then wanted a career as a nurse. But this choice was skewed by her Nazi mentality. She didn’t apply to work in any hospital, but she became an apprentice aid to an assistant nurse at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium, a place where SS officers received treatment after being injured on the front lines of World War

But she was let go from this in 1941, and the SS doctor in charge, Karl Gebhardt, the personal doctor of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, gave Irma Grese a reference to use to possibly work inside the concentration camps. When she was 18, she applied to work as a concentration camp guard inside of Ravensbruck, an all-female camp near to Berlin.

She completed her 3-week training, and she demonstrated brutality, which was completely shocking. She was at the time not even 20 years old, and she would then go on to work inside of Auschwitz after the camp was expanded to include a specific women’s camp. Irma Grese became known for her brutality and overseeing the punishment detail.

She patrolled with a pistol, and she would shoot inmates at random. She was also a deviant and abused many prisoners sexually. Prisoners referred to her as the beautiful beast or the blonde angel, and she wore expensive perfumes to torment the prisoners who were living in complete filth and who were suffering physically. Former inmates claimed that she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

Her face was an angelic clarity, and her blue eyes were the liveliest and most innocent eyes imaginable. Another said, “It defied belief that such a pretty girl could be so cruel.” When she walked through the camp with a whip in her hand, she was surrounded by a cloud of choice perfume. Irma Grese would take things further and batter and beat prisoners to death with her truncheon.

She also walked around on patrol with dogs that had been trained to maul and attack prisoners on command, and at times these beasts killed some of the inmates while others watched. She enjoyed shooting prisoners in the cold blood, and one of her favorite things to do was to order the women inside of her barracks to strip, and she then whipped them.

One of her biggest offenses was in taking part in the selections at Auschwitz. She patrolled the arrival yards when the trains came in and selected women to be sent to their deaths for any reason. Jealousy played a big part, and if she thought an arrival was more beautiful than her, she would have them gassed instantly.

Grese also had many affairs with other guards at Auschwitz and abused prisoners who were kept like slaves until she became bored. One of her favorite things to do though was to watch doctors perform medical experiments and operations. One doctor claimed that Grese kicked the women who were being operated on and she even became transfixed by what she was seeing, almost in a trance.

She was evacuated from Auschwitz in January 1945 and she eventually arrived at Bergen-Belsen, an overcrowded sorry state of a camp in which thousands of corpses lay everywhere. Even in the final days of Belsen as the site was close to liberation, Grese demonstrated unbelievable cruelty. But as the site was liberated, the British came across this young woman in her 20s dressed in a uniform and whom the prisoners described as a complete sadist and brute.

They could not believe what they were hearing but Grese was in no mood to apologize for her crimes. She was cold and arrogant and when she was brought to trial, she passed the blame to the head of the SS, Himmler, saying that “Heinrich Himmler is responsible for everything that has happened but I suppose I am as much to blame as the others above me.

” At the Belsen trial, Grese showed no emotion except when her sister gave a character witness testimony. Alongside many of her fellow guards, Irma Grese was sentenced to death on day 54 of the Belsen trials. When she was informed that she was to be executed by hanging, she showed no emotion at all but when she was taken back to her cell, it was claimed that she was found crying in fear in private.

She applied for clemency but there was no chance for mercy despite the fact she was just 21 years old at the time. On the 8th of December 1945, months after the end of World War II, Grese and the other condemned guards were moved to Hamelin prison, where there was an execution chamber created for the Belsen executions.

Days before the executions were due to take place, Greaser had a knock on her cell door, and she was led towards a room where she first met with British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Pierrepoint, who was a master of using the long drop gallows method, recorded her height and weight, and then worked out the drop required to snap her neck instantly.

Pierrepoint said of this moment that, “She walked out of her cell and came towards us laughing. She seemed as bonnier girl as one could ever wish to meet. She answered O’Neil’s questions, but when he asked her age, she paused and smiled. I found that we were both smiling with her, as if we realized the conventional embarrassment of a woman revealing her age.

Eventually, she said 21, which we knew to be correct. O’Neil asked her to step on the scales. “Schnell,” she said, “quick, get it over.” On the morning of the 13th of December 1945, the Belsen executions began. The first to go through the gallows was Elisabeth Volkenrath, a senior female guard of Auschwitz and Belsen, and friend of Greaser.

Greaser had actually spent the night before singing Nazi songs with the women, and after Volkenrath’s execution, Greaser was next, and she was fetched from her cell. Now, there were not a huge amount of witnesses inside of the execution chamber where the gallows stood. There were British judges and military officials who were there to oversee the proceedings.

Albert Pierrepoint personally went to each of the cells to collect the condemned. It was claimed that, “Irma Greaser stepped out. The cell was far too small for me to go inside, and I had to pinion her in the corridor. “Follow me,” I said in English, and O’Neil repeated the order in Those being the words of Pierpoint.

Her arms had been secured behind her back, and as she was led into the execution chamber, Greiser looked at the gallows, and she also looked at the witnesses and officials stood all around. She was probably terrified by what was going to come. One account says that she went to the gallows kicking and screaming, but another claims that she walked very quickly, almost running to the chalk mark on the trapdoor.

Pierpoint then checked her arms behind her back, and he placed a white cap over her head, a hood so she could not see her final moments. After this, the witnesses gasped as they saw the noose Pierpoint had prepared, and he then secured this around Greiser’s neck, and made sure it was tight enough. She then uttered her final words of “Schnell.

” begging Pierpoint to be quick. It was then claimed that the drop crashed down, and the doctor followed me into the pit, and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes, the body was taken down and placed in a coffin ready for burial. The execution of Irma Greiser was incredibly quick, and despite her brutality, what shocked many inside of the execution chamber was the age of her and the innocence of her in that final moment.

Despite the notoriety, they saw in many of their eyes a beautiful young woman in her early 20s take her final breaths. This for some was distressing, and it summed up the evils of the Nazi Party, how everyone, no matter their age, could be caught up in the terror of the regime. Pierpoint never forgot Irma Greiser.

As he placed the noose around her neck and pulled the hood down over her face, she allegedly gave him an enigmatic smile, and this haunted Pierpoint. She was just 22 years old when she was executed. Pierpoint had performed his job successfully, and he had snapped her neck instantly, but she was also left for 20 minutes before she was cut down.

And the noose would have been swinging from the crossbeam for a few minutes before it then came to rest. Irma Grese was one of the most evil concentration camp guards of the Second World War. She had a victim list in her thousands and either by her own hand or by sending victims to the gas chambers, many suffered and took their final breaths because of her.

But inside of Hameln prison’s execution chamber at the hands of a British executioner, Grese herself took her final breaths. Interestingly, her body still remains on earth and her remains are buried in a cemetery close by to the prison. They were known for being barbaric in the way they treated prisoners and the crowd that day knew exactly what monsters these women were.

Among them was a 25-year-old woman who became infamous for beating female prisoners horrifically with her truncheon and weapon. And her actions led to the deaths of many prisoners. As she was held onto the truck awaiting the noose to be placed around her neck, she screamed and cried as she knew exactly what was coming for her.

Eva Paradies succumbed that day to her fate in front of the crowd and she was left swinging wildly in front of the crowd who jeered when the noose tightened. But specifically, what had she done that led to her execution and was it justified? Eva Paradies was born in December 1920 and she had a normal early life.

There was very little to suggest that one day she would become a horrific and brutal woman. She was most probably a member of the League of German Maidens, the compulsory youth group for young girls and teenagers set up after the Nazis came into power. Like many young women, they were led into the group through a mix of brainwashing and also the fact the Nazis made it compulsory for them to join.

Many were encouraged by their parents to delve into what the Nazis were offering, too. However, as World War II continued on, there was a rather distinct and visible gap in manpower and the Germans needed to send further men to the front lines to fight. The male concentration camp guards, even if they had been injured previously, were pressed into the war effort to defend Hitler’s Reich from the Soviet Red Army.

And then the SS retinue searched for women to then go and work inside the camps as replacements. Young women were offered the chance of a promotion, regular and decent pay for a wartime salary, and they left jobs such as hairdressers, shop workers, and nurses to become what was known as Aufseherinnen, female overseers or guards.

Many then began to train inside of Ravensbrück and other camps around Germany. And then quickly they were sent to go and work within the camps. During the training period, they were taught how to brutally beat and batter inmates to keep them in submission. Irma Grese in August 1944 was sent to go and work inside of Stutthof’s SK3 camp and she trained there.

But within a matter of weeks, she was sent to the Bromberg Ost subcamp to work as a Wärterin. In this role, she was responsible for a barracks and she oversaw many female prisoners who were within the camp. Prisoners were usually told to load cargo onto trains at a nearby railyard and they were also tasked with repairing tracks and digging trenches, which was all very hard work.

Irma Grese worked alongside other brutal guards, Hertha Bothe, who was tried at the Belsen trials, and also Gerda Steinhoff, who would also be executed alongside her. Specifically at the camp, Grese was known for being a monster. One witness later testified against her and claimed that, I quote, “She ordered a group of female prisoners to undress in the freezing cold of winter and then doused them with ice-cold water.

When the women moved, Paradies beat them. This sort of behavior was very typical of her and she was very dangerous and her behavior was very dangerous and particularly throwing cold water on people in winter could have led prisoners to succumb to hypothermia in the middle of the cold nights. She was also known for inflicting the deaths of some prisoners herself, beating many of them to death.

Inside of Stutthof, there was a small gas chamber and Paradies may have even selected female prisoners to be sent to the main camp to be then killed. She was moved back to Stutthof’s main camp, too, but in April 1945, she accompanied one of the final transports of women prisoners who were being sent from Stutthof to the Lauenburg subcamp.

After this, she ran away and tried to escape, but she was then captured shortly after the war had come to an end. Paradies was brought to the Stutthof trials alongside a number of other female guards and she was with other women such as Jenny Wanda Barkmann sentenced to death. The courtroom specifically had witnesses that testified against her and Paradies did not seem to take the court proceedings very seriously until she was actually condemned to death.

Then the tears came. On the 4th of July 1946, there was a huge crowd of around 20,000 people gathered on the hill inside of Gdansk known as Biskupia Gorka. Traders sold food and drinks ready for the crowd to watch the grizzly proceedings of the executions of the condemned Stutthof guards. Eva Paradies was not the first female guard executed that day on the massive gallows that had been created.

Following the death of Jenny Wanda Barkmann, Eva Paradies was led out towards a truck which was parked under the gallows next to Barkmann. On the other side of the two-pronged gallows from where Jenny Wanda Barkmann had been hanged. Parodies was sat on the back of a truck and an official loudly read out the crimes she had committed.

The crowd were relatively quiet and could hear Parodies cries as she knew her life was going to be brought to an end soon. The executioner, who was actually a former prisoner of Stutthof, whilst Parodies was stood on top of the stool, then secured the noose around her neck. After a few final checks were performed, the truck was driven slowly forward and the noose snapped taut around her neck.

Eva Parodies was then left slowly strangling to death and the rope was swinging wildly. Afterwards, it’s presumed that her body was donated to medical science being given to local institutions after she’d been declared dead. So, there were a number of reasons why Eva Parodies was executed. She was condemned for the fact she caused the deaths of prisoners inside of Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps.

Her actions deliberately led to the deaths of a number of inmates. Also, there was a huge amount of anger inside of Poland at the time. During World War II, the country had suffered a great deal under German occupation and scores of the population were killed in horrific mass executions, gassings, and other indiscriminate killings.

By condemning to death and publicly executing a number of female guards of Stutthof, it showed the Polish crowd that some small form of justice was being had for them and they could see this with their own eyes from the large gallows. Eva Parodies was just 25 years old when she was executed and for a young woman, this was of course a horrific fate.

But, she herself during World War II became a monster and at the time the people in Poland saw her punishment as completely fair and proportionate for the crimes that she had committed during World War II. Dorothea Binz was born into a lower class German family in Brandenburg. Her early life was relatively normal and it’s assumed that she attended the normal youth groups that girls did during Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.

When Hitler seized control of the country, Dorothea was just a teenager, so she most probably would have joined the League of German Girls or Maidens. The youth groups had different roles for boys and girls. The boys joined the Hitler Youth and were taught how to become soldiers and do various different activities to prepare them for being involved in the military.

But the girls groups were to prepare them for being mothers and they were taught how to complete domestic jobs such as looking after a home and cooking. Inside the girls groups, they’re indoctrinated in the Nazi way of life and were convinced to have as many children as possible for Hitler’s Third Reich. Dorothea Binz stayed in education until she was 15 and she then decided to volunteer for work inside of a concentration camp.

She volunteered to work inside the kitchens at Ravensbruck in August 1939 around the age of 19. Ravensbruck was a concentration camp found north of Berlin where mostly female prisoners were kept. Throughout the camp’s time inside the Third Reich, 132,000 women passed through the camp, almost 50,000 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union and around 25,000 from Germany and Austria.

More than 80% of the prisoners were held for political reasons and inside the walls there was a significant amount of slave labor utilized by the group Siemens. It’s estimated that around 50,000 prisoners perished inside of Ravensbruck from either disease, ill health, starvation or were murdered in various different ways.

Now at Ravensbruck, the camp staff included around 150 female SS guards who were assigned to oversee the prisoners. The camp also became a training base for female overseers and 4,000 SS female guards learned at Ravensbruck. Many went on to senior positions at other camps, and here they were taught how to horrifically brutalize and treat prisoners.

Dorothea Bins rose to the position as a female overseer within a month that she was at the camp. And the women guards inside the camp were known to be particularly savage. There were many examples of other guards, such as Irma Grese and Ruth Neudeck, who after the Second World War were sentenced to death for their crimes committed at Ravensbruck and various other different camps.

Now, whilst working there, Bins was known as a true star of the camp, and as a chief guard who overshadowed her superiors. In different parts of Ravensbruck she worked, including the kitchens and the laundrette. And she was also a supervisor of a bunker at times. Inside one of these bunkers she was alleged to have tortured many of the prisoners, and also killed many using various savage beatings.

Remember, she was only just around the edge of 19 when she first arrived at the camp. Dorothea rose to the position as a deputy director of her penal block around September 1940, within a year that she arrived at the camp, and eventually became the director 2 years later. She became known as a deputy chief warden, too, in July 1943, before this was made official later on.

Bins was known for being brutal with her whip, and was known in particular for beating prisoners savagely. She developed a reputation for picking on the weakest prisoners, and she watched for the weakest in the most scared women, who she would then shower with lashes or blows from her whip. She was said to have displayed an unwielding appetite of violence inside of the camp, and was noted to have kicked, shot, whipped, stomped, abused, beaten, and punched many of the young women continuously.

Every day the prisoners had to go through roll call. And allegedly when she appeared, the whole plaza where roll call took place fell silent, such was the fear that Bins was She was noted for walking around with her German Shepherd and often she would intimidate prisoners with this large dog.

She would then go around selecting women to be killed. Dorothea Binz also was noted for having a boyfriend, an SS officer named Edmund Browning. And together the couple were known for going on romantic dates, walking around the camp hand in hand, watching women being flogged and whipped. They would watch these incidents together almost like a movie before walking away laughing.

And together they did live in a house outside of the camp’s walls. Another aspect of Binz’s role at Ravensbrück was to instruct and teach other women to become brutal guards inside of the system. The camp, as mentioned before, was a training center for guards and Binz taught a number of different classes intent on instilling the necessity for evil treatment for the future guards of the camp.

The conditions inside Ravensbrück were despicable and a former camp prisoner stated of them, “They didn’t shoot the women. We were to die of misery, hunger, and exhaustion. When we arrived at Ravensbrück, it was the worst. The first thing I saw was a cart with all of the dead piled on it, their arms and legs hanging out, their mouths and eyes wide open.

They reduced us to nothing. We didn’t even feel like we had the value of cattle. You worked and you simply died.” It was guards such as Dorothea Binz who made the prisoners feel exactly like this, breaking them to make them feel like they were worthless and useless. All of the inmates were forced to complete hard labor and those who were not able to work were killed and treated horrifically.

As the Second World War came to an end, there was a need for prisoners to be moved from concentration camps to other camps closer to Germany and the heart of the Third Reich. At Ravensbrück, death marches did occur and during one of them Dorothea Binz attempted to escape on her bicycle. And she fled knowing that after the war she would be tried as a war criminal and was likely to be sentenced to death.

She was quickly captured on the 3rd of May, 1945 by the British in Hamburg after being recognized during a stop. And she was then taken to Recklinghausen camp for interrogation and incarceration. She was then taken to the Hamburg Ravensbruck trials to face justice. These were heard before a military tribunal and the defendants included SS officers, doctors, and many of the female guards.

Dorothea Binz was defendant number 10 in the first trial which began on the 5th of December, 1946 and this lasted until February the 3rd, 1947. On the scaffold, Pierrepoint straightened Binz and then placed a black hood over her head followed by the noose. She was then shuffled over the trapdoor on which a chalk X had been drawn on and immediately Pierrepoint pulled the lever and Binz was executed in seconds since she entered the execution chamber.

Dorothea Binz was a despicable SS guard who seemed to revel in the concentration camp system. However, at the end of the day, she was a very young woman of 27 when she was executed for committing horrific war crimes inside of the camps. She was noted for the immense brutality she showed and the suffering she inflicted.

But what is very sick is that she encouraged and taught many of the female guards in her ways and for this she had a greater impact on the Holocaust with many guards who learned from her taking her methods all across the Reich territory and spreading horrific treatment. Bergen-Belsen was a camp that began as a camp for Allied prisoners of war.

It was established in 1940 and was found within Germany and until 1943 was used exclusively for prisoners of war. However, the SS then took over a part of the camp and turned it eventually into a concentration camp. It was made up of a number of different centers and it had three main sections. The prisoner of war one, the resident camp, and also the prison camp.

Over the course of the Second World War, the complex held Jews, political prisoners, and other groups who were targeted for persecution by the Nazis. The SS divided Belsen into subsections for different groups. For example, the Hungarian camp, the special camp for Polish Jews, and the star camp for Dutch Jews.

Between 1943 and 1944, thousands of prisoners were transported to Belsen. Whilst inmates were forced to do work inside of the shoe commando, in which they recovered pieces of leather from shoes for recycling. Bergen-Belsen also transitioned to become a recovery camp as well, where sick prisoners would arrive from different places, and they were then taken in.

The idea was that they were supposed to recover at Belsen. However, the majority of them were put to work and ended up dying of disease, starvation, and poor medical care. In August 1944, a new element of Belsen was established, a women’s camp. This caused a large number of women to be brought over, but most only stayed for a short amount of time before they were then moved to other places for slave labor.

It’s famously known as a place where Margot and Anne Frank were transported to, and where both of them died inside the barbed wire fences of Belsen. However, much of the issues inside of the camp were caused by the huge overcrowding element that occurred as the Germans lost territory during World War II. By late 1944, Josef Kramer, the beast of Belsen, was in charge, and his leadership saw Belsen swell hugely in its size.

Around 85,000 people were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and within a year, the number of prisoners had risen tenfold, and this caused catastrophic effects. The overcrowding led to a number of issues, in particular with a lack of food and malnutrition, as there was nowhere near enough food to go around, which caused thousands to starve.

Also, disease ran riot around Belsen with huge outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery causing more deaths. Belsen itself was only meant to house 10,000 prisoners, but a huge number of transported prisoners caused severe problems and because of this scores of people were killed. It has been estimated that during the time it operated over 120,000 prisoners passed through Belsen.

The treatment of those inside varied on individual sections of the camp that they found themselves inside of. Exchange prisoners, for example, were often treated better than others. There were no gas chambers at Belsen, but the vast majority of prisoners died from the conditions inside caused by the huge overcrowding.

When the British and Canadians liberated Belsen, the huge scale of the problem was brought to the world’s knowledge. On the 11th of April, 1945, Himmler had agreed to hand over the camp without a fight and the SS guards ordered prisoners to bury some of the dead to attempt to hide some of the crimes. A few days later, the British set up a neutral zone that was established surrounding Belsen.

What surprised the British was that so many of the guards and staff, including Josef Kramer, were still inside of Belsen and Kramer claimed that they were there to uphold order inside. When the British and Canadians arrived and entered Bergen-Belsen, what they saw was truly horrific. They found over 13,000 unburied bodies and 60,000 prisoners who were in a terrible state, many who were in fact dying of starvation and disease.

The majority of the prisoners had simply been abandoned and left and had been given no food and water for days and 500 were dying a day from disease. The scenes were reported on the BBC. It was said, “Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which. The living lay with their heads across the corpses and around them moved the awful ghostly procession of emaciated aimless people with nothing to do and no hope of life unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights

around them. Babies have been born here. Tiny things that could not live. A mother driven mad screamed at the British sentry to give her milk for her child and thrust a tiny mite into its arms, then ran off crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby that had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.

The British began to provide care and support for the prisoners. But after the liberation, revenge killings did take place and even the SS guards shot and killed some prisoners who were trying to get food from the storehouses. Prisoners over the next few days were deloused and survivors were moved to a different camp.

The British forced many of the SS staff based at the camp to bury the bodies in mass graves for those who had died. The camp was then burned to the ground by flame-throwing tanks due to the epidemic of typhus and huge efforts were made to help the survivors. But one thing remained on the minds of those with regards to Belsen. Who on earth could carry out the atrocities committed at the camp and who on earth could inflict such suffering onto other people? Over the time it was operating, almost 500 people worked at Belsen.

However, from September the 17th, 1945 to November the 17th, 45 SS guards and former workers were brought to justice in the Belsen trials. And what shocked many people around the world was the fact that many of these were young women. Young women whose names have gone down in history with the immense cruelty and sadism of the Holocaust.

The trial took 54 court days and comprised of much of the British Army footage taken as Belsen was liberated. On trial were those who were found at the camp and those such as Josef Kramer who were involved in the leadership of the camp. Other staff such as doctors and cooks also found themselves on trial. Some of the women who were brought to trial have gone down in infamy for their notoriously sadistic treatment of prisoners throughout their time at Belsen and also other concentration camps such as Ravensbruck and Auschwitz.

Those women who were on trial in the Belsen trial were Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Johanna Bormann, Herta Bothe, Hertha Ehlert, Ilse Forster, Irene Haschke, Gertrude Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrude Feist, Frieda Walter, Hildegard Lieseiewicz, and other women who were acquitted. However, some of these women were notoriously evil.

Irma Grese became known as a beautiful beast or the hyena of Auschwitz. She was only 22 when she faced the court and was the youngest person to die under British law in the 20th century. She was a strange character as her father even threw her out of his home. Such was his disgust that she became a concentration camp guard.

She became a guard at different camps and was known for taking part in selections at Auschwitz, picking those women and children to be sent to their deaths in the gas chambers, virtually playing God with other people’s lives. She was also known for murdering prisoners, too, with her own hands and weapons and was even noted for setting dogs onto prisoners, encouraging them to rip the prisoners to bits.

Elisabeth Volkenrath, too, was just a young girl when she faced the judges. She too worked as an overseer inside of Auschwitz and she was noted for selecting prisoners to go to the gas chambers. Volkenrath was well thought of inside of the Auschwitz command and she oversaw all of the camp sections for female prisoners, virtually being the head of the women’s prison there.

She was also known for being a prolific murderer, often beating prisoners unconscious with a truncheon. She even once pushed an elderly prisoner down some stairs to her death, and she was known for shooting prisoners at will. Johanna Bormann was also known as a woman with the dogs. She was older than Grese and Volkenrath, and worked in a number of different camps.

She was selected to work inside of Auschwitz, and she abused prisoners terribly. She was known for also setting her dogs onto prisoners, for murdering them as well, and she also took part in selections. These three women in particular were sentenced to death alongside a number of men following the Belsen trials, found guilty of crimes against humanity, inflicting such suffering onto prisoners of Bergen-Belsen, and also Auschwitz and other camps they worked inside of.

Herta Bothe, Ilse Förster, Hermine Boettcher, Irene Haschke, Gertrud Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrud Feist, Frieda Walter, and Hildegard Lichy were all sentenced to various different prison sentences, having been found guilty of only one offense, with the condemned being found guilty of more than one. The executions of the Belsen trials were to be carried out on the 13th of December, 1945, and they were performed by hanging, with the executioner being Albert Pierrepoint.

Pierrepoint was an experienced executioner who used a long drop method in which he would meet prior to the execution with the condemned to work out their height, weight, and also the drop needed to snap their necks. Pierrepoint was brought to Hameln prison to carry out the executions, and he was seen as reliable and trusted, and he was expected to complete the job effectively and efficiently.

When he met Irma Grese, he wrote in his biography that at last we finished noting the details of the men, and O’Neil ordered bring out Irma Grese. She walked out of her cell and came towards us laughing. She seemed as bonny a girl as anyone could ever meet. Just O’Neil questioned, but when we asked her her age, she paused and smiled.

I found that we were both smiling with her as if we realized the convention and embarrassment of a woman revealing her age. Eventually, she said 21, which we knew to be correct. O’Neil asked her to step on the scales. Schnall, she said, the German for quick. In Britain, prison warders and medical staff would have been responsible for weighing and measuring the condemned prior to the execution, but on this occasion, Albert Pierrepoint and O’Neil did it.

Irma was 5 ft 5 and 1/4 in tall and weighed 150 lb, and she was given a drop of 7 ft 4 in. Grese’s execution was also described by Pierrepoint. It was chosen that she would be the first of the condemned to die due to her age, but there is some debate as to whether her and Volkenrath were executed first. The executions of the women took place at 9:34 a.m., 10:04 a.m., and 10:38 a.m.

Pierrepoint wrote of Grese’s execution, The following morning, we climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were waiting. A German officer at the door leading to the corridor flung the door open, and we filed past the row of faces and into the execution chamber. The officers stood at attention. Brigadier Paton Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised.

He gave me the signal, and a sigh of released breath was audible in the chamber. I walked into the corridor. Irma Grese, I called. The German guards quickly closed all of the grills on all 12 of the inspection holes and opened one door. Irma Grese stepped out. The cell was far too small for me to go inside of, and I had to pinion her in the corridor.

Follow me, I said in English, and O’Neil repeated the order in German. At 9:34 a.m., she walked into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing round it, then walked on in the center of the trap where I’d made a chalk mark. She stood on the mark very firmly, and as I placed the white cap over her head, she said in her voice, “Schnell.

” The drop crashed down, and the doctor followed me into the pit and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes, her body was taken down and placed in a coffin ready for burial. Elisabeth Falkenrath, following her death sentence, continued to deny her involvement in the Holocaust, and she stated that she did not know where the prisoners were going that she selected to be sent to their deaths.

She claimed to have never heard of the gas chambers, but it was Pierrepoint who would hear her final words. At around 10:04 a.m., in the same manner as Gräzer, she was brought from her cell, her identity confirmed, and then she was handed over to Pierrepoint for her execution. With ruthless efficiency and success, he performed her execution with the drop snapping her neck.

She was only 26 when she was executed, and when she first conducted her horrific crimes, she was even younger. Johanna Bormann is the outlier of the free women executed following the Belsen trials. She was much older than Gräzer and Falkenrath, but two displayed sadistic tendencies shown by the staff that worked inside of the concentration camps.

When he met her, Pierrepoint stated that she limped down the corridor looking old and haggard. She was 52, standing only a little over 5 ft. She was trembling as she was put on the scale. In German, she said, “I have my feelings.” Like the two women who went before her, Bormann was executed with efficiency by Pierrepoint as he had already meticulously calculated her drop needed to have been 8 ft 8 in.

Her execution was performed at 10:38, with her execution being performed very swiftly, and she was the final female executed following the Belsen trials. The men were then fetched from their cells to face their sentence and Pierrepoint, and he performed 11 executions on the 13th of December, 1943, inside Hameln prison on the gallows.

The execution of the female guards of Belsen showed the world how evil in particular these three women were. The Belsen trials brought to the world’s attention how terrible humans can be to each other with the suffering of those inside the camp being shown in front of the world’s media. The suffering of those who were responsible for the horrific conditions at Belsen was short-lived and was no match for what they inflicted onto innocent people.

Belsen was a place where Anne Frank and dozens of thousands of other people died because of the regime that sought to exterminate so many people off the face of the earth. The executions of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Johanna Bormann were justified, but for so much suffering there was only a few executed.

Much interest fell on those who were simply sentenced to time in prison and there was much debate as to whether more people could have been sentenced to death for the crimes of Bergen-Belsen. Once again, thanks for watching. To support our channel, please make sure to subscribe and once again, thank you so much for watching.