Painful Death of Elisabeth Volkenrath *WARNING REAL FOOTAGE JJ

December 13th, 1945, 9:33 a.m. Hameln Prison, Germany. The corridor is dead silent except for the sound of footsteps. A 26-year-old woman is escorted through a narrow stone hallway toward a wooden door. Behind that door, a rope. Behind that rope, the end of a story soaked in blood, screaming, and deliberate cruelty.

Her name is Elisabeth Volkenrath. She does not cry. She does not beg. And that tells you something about who she was. Because for years, she was the one who decided whether other people lived or died. She beat unconscious women in the mud. She selected mothers for gas chambers. She knocked a dying girl to the ground the day after Allied forces liberated the camp she was stationed at, and then simply walked away.

This is not a story about a soldier following orders. This is the story of a woman who chose this, who rose through the ranks of Nazi brutality not because she had to, but because she was extraordinarily good at it. And on the morning of December 13th, 1945, at exactly 9:34 a.m., the British executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, made sure she never hurt anyone again.

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And you do not want to stop halfway through. Let’s go back to the beginning. April 15th, 1945. The British 11th Armoured Division pushes southwest of Bergen, Germany. When the soldiers pass through the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, they stop moving. Hardened combat veterans, men who have fought through North Africa, Normandy, and the frozen Ardennes stand frozen in place.

Some vomit. Some weep. 13,000 unburied bodies are lying in the open air. 60,000 prisoners, breathing, technically alive, are barely recognizable as human beings. Skeletal, covered in open wounds, staring at the British soldiers with eyes that had long stopped expecting rescue. Journalist Richard Dimbleby, one of the first correspondents inside Bergen-Belsen, made a live radio broadcast from the camp.

He said, and I’m quoting from the historical record here, “I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold, furious anger.” The BBC initially refused to air his report because producers didn’t believe it was real. He threatened to never broadcast for them again if they censored it. They aired it. What the British soldiers found was the direct result of years of deliberate, calculated murder.

And Elisabeth Volkenrath had been standing in the middle of it since February 5th of that very year. Born September 5th, 1919 in Schönau in Dürkatzbock, a small, unremarkable town in what was then the Weimar Republic, Elisabeth Mühlau was the daughter of a forest worker named Josef Mühlau, one of six children. A completely average childhood by every measure.

She was 13 years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. That detail matters because what happened next wasn’t accidental. The Nazi regime had a very specific plan for girls like Elisabeth, and it began immediately. She joined the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Hitler Youth. These were not after-school clubs.

They were state-run ideological conditioning programs. Children were systematically taught that Jews, Roma, and other groups were biological threats to Germany. They were taught that blind obedience to the state was a moral virtue. They marched. They rallied. They were praised for their racial purity. The Hitler Youth had 100,000 members in January 1933.

By December of that same year, 11 months later, that number had surpassed 2 million. By 1936, membership was legally mandatory for every German child between 10 and 17. In classrooms, portraits of Hitler hung next to the blackboard on day one of school. Textbooks were rewritten to teach love for the Führer, nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism as foundational truths.

Elisabeth Volkenrath was shaped by all of it, every lesson, every rally, every march. After completing elementary school, she worked as a nanny, then a cook’s assistant, then spent several years working in a hairdressing salon. Just the theme an ordinary life, right up until the machinery of Nazi Germany reached out and consumed her entirely.

Here is the detail that most documentaries skip over, and it is deeply important. In 1941, Elisabeth was conscripted into the SS and sent for training at Ravensbrück, the only major women’s concentration camp in the Nazi system. It was there that she began her career as a guard. But it was at Auschwitz, when she was transferred in March 1942, that her personal story took an unexpected turn. She fell in love.

His name was Heinz Volkenrath, an SS block leader who had been stationed at Auschwitz since 1941. By all historical accounts, theirs was a genuine romantic relationship that developed inside the camp. In 1943, they married. Elisabeth Mühlau became Elisabeth Volkenrath. Think about what that means.

Two people living and working inside the largest extermination complex in human history, building a life together while thousands of people were gassed, starved, and beaten to death around them, including by Elisabeth herself. Their love story unfolded against a backdrop of industrial genocide. This is not mentioned to humanize her crimes.

It is mentioned because it destroys one of the most common defenses offered for perpetrators like her, that they were numb automatons simply executing orders in a mechanical fog. Elisabeth Volkenrath was fully conscious. She felt love. She experienced happiness. She chose with complete emotional awareness to also beat women unconscious with a rubber truncheon.

Before Auschwitz, there was Ravensbrück. Opened in May 1939, Ravensbrück was a camp that processed over 132,000 women from across occupied Europe. Poles, Russians, Jews, Roma, political prisoners. More than 92,000 of them were killed there. Volkenrath trained under Dorothea Binz, one of the most sadistic figures in the entire SS hierarchy.

Binz ran what survivors later called a school of violence, a training program for female guards that produced approximately 3,500 women who were then deployed across the camp system like a disease spreading from one host to another. The medical experiments conducted at Ravensbrück are among the most disturbing documented crimes of the war.

SS doctors, coordinated by Karl Gebhardt, assisted by Hertha Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer, selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for surgical experiments. They deliberately fractured legs with hammers. They packed open wounds with aggressive bacteria and glass fragments, then monitored healing with and without early antibiotics like sulfanilamide.

Some experiments involved bone transplants and amputations performed without anesthesia. Women were also forcibly sterilized. Pregnant women were beaten to force miscarriages. Newborns were killed. When asked after the war whether she had known about these experiments, Volkenrath replied, “I have never heard anything about it.” She would have been the only person there who hadn’t.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was not just a concentration camp. It was the largest, most systematically lethal killing operation ever constructed by a government in human history. Over 1.1 million people were murdered there, the vast majority Jewish. When Volkenrath arrived in March 1942, she began in a tailoring workshop supervising mostly elderly female prisoners who mended uniforms.

She beat them regularly with her fists, sometimes hard enough that they collapsed. Her justification, they had tried to steal bread that didn’t belong to them. She was promoted rapidly. By November 1944, she held the rank of Oberaufseherin, chief senior overseer, commanding multiple layers of female guards and prisoner supervisors called Kapos.

She was the highest-ranking female SS officer at Auschwitz at the time of the camp’s evacuation. Her primary duty included participating in selections, the process by which SS officers chose which arriving prisoners would be sent to forced labor and which would go directly to the gas chambers. Volkenrath later insisted she only maintained order during selections and never chose victims herself.

Survivor testimony demolished that claim entirely. Two Holocaust survivors, Kaufman and Siwadowa, testified under oath that on approximately 80 documented occasions, Volkenrath beat female prisoners with a rubber truncheon until they were unconscious. Multiple women were carried away dead. Survivor Vera Fischer testified that one beating by Volkenrath put her in the camp hospital for 3 weeks.

On one recorded selection, out of 1,400 women brought before Volkenrath’s review, only 300 were left standing when it was over. The remaining 1,900 were loaded on the trucks headed for the gas chambers, with Volkenrath helping to force them on. Morning roll calls at Auschwitz ran from 3:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

Standing in rows of 10 motionless in winter darkness, Volkenrath forced prisoners to hold their arms above their heads for hours. Those who lowered their arms were beaten. She confiscated food from starving women, explaining that they had too much. Her version of punishment was what the SS cynically called “making sport,” forcing malnourished, sick women to crawl across gravel on their elbows, goose step, run with their arms raised, or roll in the dirt. Age and health were irrelevant.

The woman was systematic in her sadism. On January 18th, 1945, Soviet forces closed in on Auschwitz from the east. The SS began evacuating the complex through what became known as the death marches, forcing tens of thousands of prisoners to walk hundreds of miles in freezing winter conditions with almost no food and no shelter.

Thousands died on the roads. Volkenrath arrived at Bergen-Belsen on February 5th, 1945. The camp was already catastrophically overcrowded. Death marches from other camps had flooded Bergen-Belsen with desperate dying people. Of each arriving transport, up to 1/3 were already dead upon arrival.

Nearly 80% of survivors were too weak to walk from the train station and had to be carried by truck. In winter, prisoners slept sitting upright on the floor, tens of thousands of people sharing just 200 blankets. Between 250 and 300 people died every single day and Volkenrath still found people to beat. She caught a seriously ill girl taking vegetables from a pile.

She forced the girl to kneel in the dirt and hold the vegetables above her head. After 4 hours, 4 hours, the girl’s arms gave out. Volkenrath beat her across the head, back, and legs with her truncheon until the girl was knocked unconscious. No prisoner was permitted to help her. She lay there until nightfall.

A prisoner named Helene Herkovitz was accused of possessing a stolen ring and locket. After being beaten at the scene, she was forced to run behind a bicycle to SS headquarters where Volkenrath joined in beating her again. She was then thrown into a cellar. She survived only because her sister secretly smuggled her food and water through 3 weeks of brutal interrogation.

And on April 16th, 1945, the day after British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, Elisabeth Volkenrath was witnessed by Allied soldiers beating a young girl with her bare fists until the girl collapsed and stopped moving. Volkenrath turned around and walked away. She was arrested 1 day later on April 17th, 1945 alongside Josef Kramer, the Bergen-Belsen commandant, and Irma Grese, the woman history would call the Hyena of Auschwitz.

The Belsen trial opened September 17th, 1945, one of the first and most significant Nazi war crimes prosecutions conducted by the British. 44 defendants, survivor after survivor took the stand and described in clinical and unsparing detail what each of them had done. Volkenrath pleaded not guilty on all charges. She denied everything until the documented evidence made denial impossible.

When confronted with her history of beating prisoners, she said, “It is true that I slapped the faces of women. If they did not obey orders and were slapped, it was only their own fault. If they were more intelligent, they would have obeyed and everything would have been fine.” On November 17th, 1945, the British military tribunal sentenced Elisabeth Volkenrath to death by hanging.

December 13th, 1945, 9:34 6 1945, 9:34 a.m., Hameln Prison. Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s chief executioner, who carried out more Nazi executions than any other individual, placed the rope around her neck. She was the first of 11 convicted Nazis executed that morning. Irma Grese followed at 10:03 a.m. Elisabeth Volkenrath was 26 years old.

No one wept. No flowers were placed because the women she beat into the ground at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen never received that either. Justice for once came exactly on time. That was the documented, verified, historically complete story of Elisabeth Volkenrath, one of the most brutal and systematically cruel women in the entire history of Nazi Germany.

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