When the noose snapped taut around Jenny Wanda Barkmann’s neck, the crowd on Biskupia Gorka hill roared with satisfaction. The truck beneath her feet had rolled slowly forward, leaving her to strangle in the open air, her body twisting and struggling for many long minutes before death finally took her. The former SS guard had just heard her death sentence read aloud, had just felt the rope tightened by a man who had once worn the striped pajamas of a Stutthof prisoner, and now she dangled before roughly twenty thousand spectators who had come to watch her die. The people of Gdańsk jeered and taunted her as the life drained slowly out of her.
She was the first of eleven condemned former guards to be executed that day, and she had no idea, when she was led out, that she would be granted the dubious honor of dying first simply because she was young and female. Jenny Wanda Barkmann was twenty-one years old when she joined the SS retinue in 1944. She had grown up in the Gdańsk region, and before the war had swallowed her entirely, she had dreamed of becoming a fashion model. By the standards of the time she was considered rather good-looking, and she had completed a number of photo shoots.
But modeling was not the career that would define her life. That distinction belonged to the concentration camp system, and the path that led her there began in the League of German Maidens, the Nazi youth organization for teenage girls. The regime had made membership compulsory, and through it millions of young women were subjected to relentless indoctrination: they were told to embrace Nazi ideology without question, to produce as many children as possible with SS men and other so-called Aryans, and to serve the Reich with unquestioning loyalty. Jenny Barkmann absorbed these teachings like so many others did.
She had no surviving record of hesitation or doubt. In 1944, she traded her modeling aspirations for a different kind of career, one that offered regular pay, steady promotion, and a place within the organizational hierarchy of the SS. She signed up to become an Aufseherin, a female guard, and was sent for training to Stutthof, the camp that stood near her own home. Stutthof was a place of immense brutality.
It was not one of the sprawling extermination complexes in the east, but it was lethal in its own right. Of all the people sent to the camp, roughly sixty percent never left it alive, a figure that placed the death toll at around sixty-five thousand souls. Typhus epidemics swept through the barracks almost every year, and even SS guards caught the disease, but the prisoners received no medical treatment whatsoever. Disease and starvation did much of the killing on their own, and those who became ill or too weak to work were sent to the small gas chamber that operated within the camp.
This was the world in which Jenny Wanda Barkmann learned her trade, and it was a world that shaped her into one of the most hated figures among the female guards who served there. She presided mostly over female prisoners, but she also condemned many men. Her violence was not an occasional lapse; it was a constant, defining feature of her service. She became known among the inmates as Mad Jenny because she was ruthless and immensely violent with her batons and weapons.
She struck prisoners wherever she went, battering them sometimes to death. Prisoners who survived her assaults later testified that she took lives and then laughed, as if the act of killing were a source of entertainment rather than horror. She also took part in the selections, the grim process by which SS guards decided who was too sick or too weak to work and therefore deserved to be sent to the gas chamber. Barkmann did not merely observe these selections; she participated actively.
She drove prisoners toward the chamber and ordered them inside, and in doing so she became the direct reason why many hundreds of people were gassed. It was around this time that the prisoners gave her the nickname that would follow her into history: the Beautiful Specter. The name captured the chilling contrast between her appearance and her character. Inmates remarked on her beauty, but they feared her immense temper and her violent nature.
To look into her eyes, survivors later said, was to feel one’s heart go cold with terror. Unlike some of the more infamous female guards of the Nazi camp system, who moved between many different camps or trained new recruits, Jenny Wanda Barkmann served at Stutthof for roughly a year and nowhere else. Her entire career in the SS was concentrated in that single location, yet within that year she left a mark of cruelty that the prisoners would neither forget nor forgive. But by early 1945, the war was clearly lost for Germany.
The Red Army was advancing from the east, and the camp system was beginning to collapse under the weight of its own atrocities. Many SS guards, realizing that they would be held accountable for their actions, deserted their posts in a desperate attempt to evade capture. Jenny Barkmann was among them. She left Stutthof in 1945 and went into hiding in the Gdańsk region, the very area where she was known by sight to countless former prisoners.
In the months before Stutthof was finally evacuated, the retreating SS had committed some of its worst crimes. Thousands of prisoners were marched into the nearby sea and machine-gunned, their bodies left to wash ashore or sink beneath the waves. The local authorities knew who Jenny Wanda Barkmann was, and they set out to find her. She managed to evade capture for four months, moving through the region and apparently trying to leave it altogether.
But her luck ran out at a train station. She was arrested while attempting to flee, and former prisoners of the camp quickly identified her. With that identification, the case against her was sealed, and she was brought before the Stutthof trial, one of the first post-war war crimes trials to be held in Poland. She stood alongside several of her former female colleagues, guards who had also been arrested and who now faced the same accusations.
But Jenny Wanda Barkmann did not behave like a woman who feared for her life. At trial she brazenly ignored many of the questions put to her, and she lied through her teeth. She claimed that she had saved a number of prisoners from death, that she had treated them with kindness and humanity. Yet her conduct in the courtroom told a different story.
She appeared more concerned with her hair than with the testimony being given against her, and she flirted with the court guards instead of confronting the evidence. Her defense lawyers tried a desperate gambit: they argued that she was mentally ill, claiming that no sane person could have committed the crimes she was accused of. But the argument did not hold. Witnesses took the stand and described her laughter, her violence, her role in driving people to the gas chamber, and she laughed in their faces as they spoke.
She did not ask for forgiveness. She never once expressed remorse. The evidence stacked against her was overwhelming, and the court sentenced her to death by hanging. When the verdict was delivered, she replied with words that would be remembered long after her death: Life is a great pleasure, and pleasure as a rule does not last long.
With that chilling dismissal, she accepted her fate, but she could not have imagined the manner in which that fate would be carried out. She was not destined for a private execution behind prison walls. She was destined for a spectacle. On the fourth of July, 1946, a crowd of at least twenty thousand people gathered on Biskupia Gorka, a large hill and open space outside Gdańsk.
Five enormous gallows had been built there, each at least four meters high, and the scale of the structures was deliberate: they were designed so that every single person in the crowd could have a clear view of the executions. The authorities wanted the public to see that justice had been carried out upon the former guards of the local concentration camp. The event took on the atmosphere of a medieval carnival. Local people sold food and drink to the spectators, who had gathered in the thousands, many of them carrying the memory of loved ones who had perished inside Stutthof.
For centuries, crowds had flocked to executions, and this day was no different, except that the condemned were not common criminals but the men and women who had terrorized the local population. Jenny Wanda Barkmann was executed first out of the eleven condemned former guards. She was brought out in front of the crowd, who jeered and taunted her as she was helped onto the back of a truck. The truck would serve as the execution scaffold.
While she stood upon it, an official read the death sentence aloud, reminding the crowd of her crimes. Then the executioner stepped forward. He was a former prisoner of Stutthof, and he wore the striped pajamas of a camp inmate as he secured the noose around her neck. It was a deliberate choice, a final act of justice carried out by a man who had once been at the mercy of the guards who wore the SS uniform.
Barkmann was then stood on a stool, and slowly the truck drove off beneath her. The noose snapped taut around her neck, and she was left to strangle in full view of the thousands who had come to watch. It took many minutes for her to die. She struggled against the rope in front of the crowd, her body twisting, the life draining out of her slowly, and the people of Gdańsk watched every second of it.
Why was her execution so public? The answer lies in the suffering that the people of Poland had endured during the war. Many of those who stood in the crowd on Biskupia Gorka had been prisoners inside the very camp where Jenny Wanda Barkmann had served. They had seen her strike prisoners, had watched her laugh as people died, had witnessed her drive human beings into the gas chamber.
For them, this execution was revenge. They wanted to see the woman who had condemned their friends and their family members suffer, and they wanted to see it with their own eyes. The public spectacle was also a statement: justice had been carried out, and she could not escape her fate. The law had caught up with her, and the people had been allowed to witness it.
Jenny Wanda Barkmann died on that gallows, strangled slowly before a crowd of twenty thousand people, and with her death one of the most ruthless female concentration camp guards of the Second World War paid the ultimate price for her crimes. Her last recorded words about the brevity of pleasure proved truer than she could have known. The violence she had inflicted on prisoners, the hundreds of lives she had helped end, and the suffering she had caused were answered not in private, but in the open air of the hill where she had once walked free. She was twenty-one years old when she joined the SS, and she was still a young woman when she was hanged.
But the Prisoners of Stutthof did not remember her as young. They remembered her as the Beautiful Specter, the woman whose beauty masked a cruelty so profound that even the sight of her face struck terror into the hearts of those who had survived her. And on the fourth of July, 1946, they watched her die.
