The Most Brutal Female Nazi Executions Ever Recorded (*ACTUAL FOOTAGE*) JJ

Many people assume the story  of Nazi justice ended with the   famous trials at Nuremberg. But for a  small group of women who ran the camps,   judgment came somewhere else entirely.  What happened to them over the next three   years turned into one of the most brutal  chapters of post-war justice ever recorded.

It began in the quiet German town of Hamelin  during the early morning of December 13, 1945,   just a few months after World War Two  had ended in Europe. Inside the prison,   British hangman Albert Pierrepoint was  preparing for one of the busiest days   of his entire career. Thirteen convicted Nazi war  criminals were scheduled to be executed that day.

Two of them were women who had just  spent nine weeks on trial for crimes   so horrific that many people found  them almost impossible to believe. The first woman brought to the gallows that  morning was Elisabeth Volkenrath. She was born   in 1919 in a small village in Prussia, which was  part of Germany at the time.

As a young woman,   she worked different jobs, including cutting hair,  looking after children, and helping with kitchen   work. But in 1941, at the age of 22, she joined  the SS, the powerful Nazi organization that ran   the concentration camps, and was sent to Ravensbr  ck, the main concentration camp built specifically   for women prisoners. There, she was trained  to supervise, control, and punish prisoners.

By 1942, Volkenrath had been  transferred to Auschwitz,   the largest and deadliest Nazi concentration and  extermination camp. At first, she supervised a   sewing workshop where prisoners repaired  military uniforms. While working there,   she met another SS guard named Heinz Volkenrath,  and the two were married in 1943 inside the camp   itself.

An SS honor guard stood beside them  during the ceremony while smoke from the camp’s   crematorium rose into the sky behind them.  They celebrated their wedding only a short   distance from the place where thousands  of murdered victims were being burned.   It showed just how normal mass killing had become  for many people inside the Nazi camp system. Volkenrath continued moving up through the ranks.

By November 1944, she had become Oberaufseherin,   the highest-ranking female supervisor  responsible for all the women’s sections   of Auschwitz. Survivors later  testified that she personally   selected prisoners to be sent to the gas  chambers, where they would be murdered. She also supervised public hangings  inside the camp. In January 1945,   as the Soviet Army advanced toward Auschwitz,  the Nazis evacuated many guards and prisoners,   and Volkenrath was transferred to Bergen-Belsen  in northern Germany.

Conditions there were   collapsing. Disease, starvation, and overcrowding  killed thousands of prisoners. Survivors later   said she did nothing to improve the situation and  remained one of the camp’s most feared guards. British soldiers arrested her in April  1945 after they liberated Bergen-Belsen.   When they entered the camp, they found thousands  of unburied bodies lying across the grounds,   exposing the full scale of the disaster inside.

During her trial, Volkenrath admitted that she   regularly slapped prisoners because, in her  words, it was necessary to keep order. However,   she denied ever selecting prisoners for  the gas chambers. The judges did not   believe her. She was found guilty of war  crimes and sentenced to death by hanging. At exactly 9:34 a.m. On the morning of December  13, Albert Pierrepoint carried out the execution.

As he always did, he carefully calculated the  length of the rope based on her body weight   so the fall would break her neck as quickly as  possible. Elisabeth Volkenrath was 26 years old. About half an hour later, shortly after 10 a.m.,  another woman walked to the same gallows. Her   name was Irma Grese, and by then she had already  become one of the most infamous female Nazi guards   in Europe. Newspapers gave her names like “The  Beautiful Beast” and “The Hyena of Auschwitz.

”   She was only 22 years old, but her reputation  for cruelty would survive long after her death. Irma Grese was born in October 1923 in  a small farming village in Germany. Her   childhood was mostly ordinary. When  she was a teenager, her mother died,   a tragedy that deeply affected the family.

By  the age of 19, Grese had joined the Nazi camp   system and began training at Ravensbr ck. In  March 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz,   and this is where her story took an  especially dark turn. She rose through   the ranks very quickly and eventually became  responsible for around 18,000 female prisoners,   most of them Polish women and Hungarian  Jewish women.

By the autumn of 1943, she   had reached the rank of Senior Supervisor, making  her the second-highest-ranking woman at the camp. Survivors who later testified against Grese  described brutal beatings, random shootings,   and cruelty that seemed to go far beyond  simply following orders. Some witnesses   even claimed she appeared to enjoy the  power she had over prisoners, something   that disturbed even some of the other guards.

In  March 1945, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen,   where British troops arrested her after  liberating the camp the following month. During her trial, Grese pleaded not guilty to  all the charges. But survivor after survivor   came into court and described what they  had personally witnessed. Even her own   sister later said that Grese rarely spoke  about her work at home.

Whenever she did,   she claimed her job was simply to  make sure prisoners worked properly   and did not escape. The judges were not  convinced by that explanation either. On the night before her execution, witnesses said  Grese spent part of the evening singing songs.   Whether that was an act of defiance, denial, or  simply a way of dealing with what was coming,   nobody knows for certain. Shortly  after 10 a.m.

on December 13,   she walked to the same gallows that  Elisabeth Volkenrath had used less   than an hour earlier. Albert Pierrepoint carried  out the execution. Grese was just 22 years old,   making her the youngest woman executed under  British law during the entire twentieth century. A third woman, Juana Bormann, was executed  shortly afterward, followed by ten men,   including Bergen-Belsen commandant Josef  Kramer, who had become known as the “Beast   of Belsen” because of his role in running several  concentration camps. By 4 p.m. that afternoon,

all thirteen death sentences had  been carried out. It was one of   the largest single-day executions of  convicted Nazi war criminals in history. But the story does not end in  Germany. Just seven months later,   on the other side of Europe, a hillside  in Poland would become the site of an   execution unlike anything the  continent had ever seen before.

It happened at Stutthof, which was one  of the first concentration camps built   by Nazi Germany. It opened just outside the  city of Danzig, now called Gdansk in Poland,   only a few days after Germany invaded Poland  in September 1939 and started World War Two.   During the final years of the war, the camp  became a place of mass murder.

Tens of thousands   of prisoners died there from starvation,  disease, executions, and the gas chambers.   Some of the camp’s most feared guards were young  German women who were barely in their twenties. One of them was Jenny-Wanda Barkmann,  who was born in Hamburg, Germany,   in 1922. She volunteered to become a concentration  camp guard in 1944.

Prisoners soon gave her a   nickname that reflected both fear and bitter  irony: “The Beautiful Spectre.” They described   her as attractive on the outside but terrifying  because of her cruelty. Survivors later said   she beat prisoners without hesitation and took  part in selecting women and children who would   be sent to the gas chambers to be killed.

When  Soviet forces liberated Stutthof in May 1945,   Barkmann tried to disappear by hiding in Gdansk  and pretending to be an ordinary local resident.   It did not work. Someone recognized her,  and she was arrested later that same month. Working at Stutthof alongside Barkmann was  Elisabeth Becker, who was born in 1923 in a   town near Danzig. Unlike Barkmann, Becker had  never planned to join the SS.

Before the war,   she worked as an agricultural assistant.  Her path into the Nazi camp system began   through the League of German Girls, the  Nazi youth organization for young women,   where she was exposed to Nazi ideology along  with thousands of other girls her age. She   later joined the staff at Stutthof and worked in  the women’s section of the camp for only about   four months.

Even during that short time,  she later admitted that she had personally   selected at least 30 female prisoners to be  sent to the gas chambers. In January 1945,   as the Soviet Army advanced, she fled the  camp several months before the war ended.   But in April 1945, Polish police found  and arrested her at her family’s home. Both women went on trial in Danzig in May 1946.

They were tried alongside three other female   guards, the camp commandant, and several  former prisoners who had worked as kapos,   prisoners chosen by the Nazis to  supervise other inmates inside the camp.   This became the first of four separate  Stutthof war crimes trials held after the war. All eleven defendants pleaded not  guilty.

Throughout most of the trial,   Barkmann appeared calm and showed little emotion,  almost as if she did not take the proceedings   seriously. That changed only when the verdict  was announced. Becker and three other female   guards reportedly broke down in tears and begged  for their lives after the prosecutor asked for   the death penalty. Barkmann was the only one who  remained calm.

After hearing her death sentence,   she reportedly remarked that life was  short and pleasure never lasted long. The executions took place on July 4, 1946, on a  hill overlooking Gdansk called Biskupia G rka.   The size of the crowd was almost unbelievable.  As many as 200,000 people gathered to watch,   making it one of the largest public  executions in modern history.

The   method used there was different from  the executions carried out in Germany.   Instead of the carefully planned long-drop  hanging used by Albert Pierrepoint,   the prisoners faced short-drop hanging. Each  condemned person stood on the back of a military   truck with a noose around their neck.

The  truck then drove away, leaving the person   hanging. Instead of breaking the neck quickly,  death usually came slowly through strangulation. Former prisoners from Stutthof had volunteered  to carry out the executions themselves,   showing just how much hatred and anger  had built up after years of suffering   inside the camp.

According to reports, when  Barkmann’s truck failed to start after the   noose had already been placed around her  neck, the crowd became restless as they   watched her still standing there alive.  A former prisoner finally ran forward and   pushed her off the back of the truck himself.  She died moments later. Becker and the other   condemned prisoners were executed in the same  way on the same row of gallows that afternoon.

After the executions, something happened that  showed just how deep the public’s anger toward   these guards really was. People rushed  toward the hanging bodies and tore off   pieces of clothing, buttons, and other  small items to keep as grim souvenirs.   Barkmann’s body was later taken to  an anatomical theater in Gdansk,   where it was used to teach medical students  before it was eventually disposed of.

Not every Nazi collaborator wore an SS  uniform or worked inside a concentration   camp. Some of the most dangerous people worked  quietly behind desks, translating documents,   helping with interrogations, and deciding who  would be arrested. Herta Ka parov was one of   those people.

Her story is different from the  others because many of the people she helped   send to their deaths were not strangers. They were  people she had grown up with in her own hometown. Herta Ka parov was born in June 1923 in  Tre t, a small market town in what is   now the Czech Republic. Her family  belonged to the Sudeten Germans,   an ethnic German community that had lived in  the region for generations.

Her father worked   as the stationmaster for the local railway. She  was born with a deformity in one of her legs,   which caused her to walk with a noticeable limp.  As a child, she was often teased and bullied   because of it. According to later accounts,  those painful childhood experiences stayed   with her for years and may have influenced  many of the choices she made later in life.

After Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in  1939, many ethnic Germans, including Ka parov ‘s   family, received special advantages under German  rule. Because she spoke both Czech and German   fluently, she used family connections to get a  job at the German criminal police headquarters   in a nearby city. At first, she mostly handled  filing, paperwork, and records.

In September 1942,   she was transferred to the regional office  of the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police.   She continued doing office work, but she also  became a translator during the interrogations   of people suspected of being part of the  resistance against German occupation. Her position gave her much more  influence than it appeared.

Witnesses   later testified that she did far more  than simply translate conversations.   They said she actively helped identify suspects,  reported local people to the authorities,   and used her position to settle personal grudges.  Then came the event that would decide her fate. In   May 1945, only two days before Germany officially  surrendered and World War Two ended in Europe,   Ka parov helped identify several local men,  including some of her former classmates.

Those   men were later executed. According to later  accounts, some of them had bullied her when   she was a child because of her limp. Others  were reportedly accused of breaking into her   family’s home shortly before the end of the  war. Investigators later concluded that she   blamed them out of personal hatred rather than  because she had any real evidence against them.

After Germany surrendered, Ka parov fled with  retreating German forces and eventually hid near   the Austrian border. She managed to avoid capture  for almost a year. But in February 1946, Austrian   police arrested her and handed her over to the  authorities in Czechoslovakia to stand trial. Her case was heard by a special  people’s court in September 1946.

Family members of the victims appeared in  court and described what had happened. The   judges concluded that Ka parov had acted  willingly and out of personal revenge,   not because anyone had forced her to do  it. Under Czechoslovakia’s post-war laws   created to punish Nazi collaborators,  that made her crime even more serious.

On September 13, 1946, Herta Ka parov was executed  in Tre t, the same town where she had been born   and raised. She was executed by pole hanging, a  method that was still used in parts of Eastern   Europe for people convicted of treason. Witnesses  later said Ka parov became terrified when she saw   the execution pole and collapsed, forcing guards  to drag her toward it. She was 23 years old.

Her   execution became the last public execution  of a woman in the history of Czechoslovakia. The most infamous woman in this entire  story was different. Her crimes were not   driven by personal hatred against a few people. Her name was Maria Mandel. She was born in  January 1912 in a small town in Austria.

She   was the daughter of a shoemaker and grew  up in a Catholic farming family. In 1938,   after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, she moved  to Munich and joined the Nazi concentration camp   system as a guard at Lichtenburg, one of the first  concentration camps created for female prisoners. She was later transferred to Ravensbr ck.

Then,  in October 1942, she was sent to Auschwitz   II-Birkenau, where she became Lagerf hrerin,  the highest-ranking female officer responsible   for the entire women’s section of the camp.  In that position, she worked directly under   Auschwitz commandant Rudolf H ss and held enormous  power over the lives of thousands of prisoners. Inside Auschwitz, prisoners simply called  her “The Beast.

” For nearly two years,   she supervised the selection process  that decided who would be forced into   labor and who would be sent directly  to the gas chambers to be murdered.   Historians who later studied the official death  lists that she personally signed estimated that   she was involved in the deaths of around  half a million people.

That makes her one   of the deadliest individual perpetrators  of the Holocaust, whether male or female. Survivors described her as someone who  could appear calm and controlled one moment,   then suddenly become extremely violent the next.  She was also responsible for creating the Women’s   Orchestra of Auschwitz, forcing female prisoners  to play music during roll calls, prisoner   selections, and even as groups of prisoners  were marched toward the gas chambers.

It was   a chilling example of how she tried to create an  appearance of order around unimaginable cruelty. As Nazi Germany collapsed in early 1945,  Mandel fled the camp with her lover,   Walter Langleist, who was also  a concentration camp commandant.   They were accompanied by a Jewish prisoner  they had brought with them.

The group managed   to avoid capture for about three months.  But in August 1945, American military   police finally found and arrested them  at Langleist’s home in Bavaria, Germany. In November 1946, Mandel was handed over to  the Polish authorities to stand trial in the   city of Krak w as part of what is now known  as the Auschwitz Trial, one of the largest   post-war trials of former Auschwitz staff.

In  March 1947, she pleaded guilty and admitted   that she had personally signed most of the death  lists that came from Birkenau. By December 1947,   the court found her guilty of crimes  against humanity and sentenced her to death. On the morning of January 24, 1948, twenty-one  people who had been convicted during the Auschwitz   Trial were executed at Montelupich Prison.

Maria Mandel was the first prisoner led to   the gallows that morning. At exactly 7:32  a.m., she was hanged. According to reports,   her final words were a short sentence spoken  in Polish, meaning “Long live Poland.” She was   36 years old. After the execution, her body  was given to a university medical faculty for   teaching and research before it was later  buried in an unmarked grave.

Records from   the time also show that her family in Austria  never asked for her body to be returned home,   and when the family gravestone was  later made, her name was not included. Four separate courts, three different countries,  and four different execution methods all reached   the same conclusion. Cruelty on this  scale doesn’t go unanswered forever.