The hangman’s rope that morning was meant for a woman the world had come to call the Beautiful Beast. She stood on the chalk mark at the center of the trapdoor, the white hood already over her head, and when she spoke at last it was not a prayer and not a plea. It was a single impatient word in German, telling the executioner to hurry. The trap fell, the doctor followed her down into the pit, and within minutes the second woman condemned that day at Hamelin was dead.
Irma Grese had answered for what she had done inside the wire of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She had not always seemed destined for the gallows. Born on October 7, 1923, in the small village of Fretzen, some fifty miles north of Berlin, she grew up on a farm, the daughter of Alfred Grese, a dairyman who attended church regularly but ruled his children with a harsh and often violent hand. Her mother took her own life in 1932, when Irma was nine, and the marriage troubles that preceded the suicide left the five children to be raised by a father who despised the Nazis and Hitler’s rise.
He forbade his daughters from joining the League of German Girls, the Nazi youth organization that trained young women to become housewives and mothers. Irma simply had her sister Helene join against their father’s wishes, and Helene came home steeped in Nazi ideology. Irma herself absorbed the party’s teachings from the age of ten, when Hitler took power and Nazi education entered every elementary school. At fourteen she left school and left home, working six months as a farmhand and then as a shop girl in a retail store at Luchten.
The growing rift with her father, who was disgusted by her devotion to the party and her reverence for Hitler, likely drove her out. As a child she had been known as someone who fled fights and avoided violence. That would change entirely. In 1939 she went to study nursing at the Hohenlychen hospital, a facility twenty miles from her home where SS members convalesced and senior Nazis received treatment.
There she trained under Karl Gebhardt, a physician who would later be executed for conducting appalling medical experiments during the war. Irma absorbed the SS worldview during those months, but she proved unsuited to nursing, and it was suggested that other work would suit her better. At seventeen she spoke to an associate of Gebhardt’s at Ravensbrück, the concentration camp reserved for women. She went there in April 1941, was sent back after six months until she turned eighteen, and then returned and joined the SS as a camp guard.
Some 2,500 women served in this capacity during the war. Irma passed a series of tests probing her loyalty to Nazism and her knowledge of party law and racial rules, then endured three weeks of brutal training. In one of her first days on the job she apologized to a prisoner who passed by, and was told in no uncertain terms how a guard must treat inmates: with brutality and without courtesy. She began relationships with SS officers around that time, was said to have suitors and lovers among them, and joined their evening drinking parties.
She learned to beat prisoners at Ravensbrück on a wage of 54 Reichsmarks a month. At nineteen she received orders transferring her to Auschwitz-Birkenau near Kraków. Before leaving, she went home in full SS uniform. Father and daughter argued violently; she claimed he struck her and told her never to return.
At Birkenau, the main extermination center of the Auschwitz complex where thousands were killed in the gas chambers, she was assigned to the women’s camp. She led a gardening squad, worked the telephones, and controlled the mail. In May 1944 she was promoted to Oberaufseherin, senior female supervisor, placed in command of more than 30,000 women prisoners in the BIIc sector of Birkenau. She became notorious in that role.
She wore heavy boots and carried a pistol and a whip at all times. Prisoners called her the Beautiful Beast and the Blonde Angel of Hell. She wore expensive perfume, and former Auschwitz doctor after the war described her in terms that seemed impossible to reconcile with what she did: “The most beautiful woman I ever saw. Her face had an angelic purity, and her blue eyes were the most vivid and innocent imaginable.
” Another said, “It was impossible to believe that such a beautiful girl could be so cruel. ” She stole valuables and clothing from prisoners, and she used her weapons to kill. Her whip attacks sometimes caused infections, forcing doctors to operate on the women with dirty instruments and no anesthetic. She attended those operations, watching closely, and if a victim’s screams disturbed her pleasure she would kick her, sending the woman into convulsions with saliva running from her mouth.
She shot prisoners at will and set her dogs on them to spread terror. One witness described an incident when she arrived on a bicycle accompanied by her two dogs, unleashed. Prisoners were hauling carts of stones over a hill. The next team faltered, lost control, and their cart rolled down the slope and tipped over, scattering stones.
Irma set both dogs on them. One dog seized a Polish woman who stumbled on a rock; the other attacked a Russian girl. Capos under Irma’s orders beat and kicked the girls the dogs had not yet reached, and recorded the numbers of the failing team. The dogs tore at the girls’ bodies while Irma watched, her eyes bloodshot, panting as if the sight of blood intoxicated her.
She also took part in selections, deciding alongside doctors like Josef Mengele who would live and who would die. She was believed to have had relationships with Mengele and with others, including prisoners, and when she tired of them she sent them to their deaths. At some point she became pregnant and forced a doctor to perform an abortion, even supplying the instruments. Her great love, however, was SS officer Franz Wolfgang Hoeller, chief construction engineer at Auschwitz I, whom she met in the evenings.
As the war turned against Germany, the camp was evacuated as the Red Army approached, and in January 1945 she was transferred briefly to Ravensbrück. In March 1945 she arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Belsen was in complete collapse, swollen with prisoners evacuated from camps further east. She met many former Auschwitz colleagues there, including Josef Kramer.
She continued her cruelty: forcing prisoners to stand or kneel for long periods, to hold rocks over their heads during roll call, to stand in the cold, and beating anyone who resisted with her club. Even as Allied forces prepared to liberate the camp, she kept on. When the British arrived, she remained inside, claiming she was there to maintain law and order. She had the chance to escape and chose not to.
She was not arrested immediately; she was forced to help bury more than 10,000 corpses strewn about the camp. Then, on April 17, 1945, she was taken into custody. Held temporarily in a nearby training academy, she told interrogators, “It was our duty to eliminate asocial elements, so that the future of Germany might be ensured. ”
Months later she was charged, along with others, with murder, killing, ill-treatment, and brutality at Belsen and Auschwitz.
During the Belsen trials she seemed more concerned with her appearance than with the charges. She remained calm and showed no emotion as evidence was presented. Witnesses described her shooting prisoners at close range; one said she had been beaten by Grese and that some were beaten to death. The court sentenced her to death, along with two fellow guards, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann.
Led from her cell, Grese was said to be crying. At Hamelin prison, Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s chief executioner, was to end her life. On December 13, 1945, she was second to die, after Elisabeth Volkenrath. Pierrepoint later recorded the scene: they climbed to the cells where the condemned waited, passed the red faces of the guards, and stood ready while the brigadier gave the signal.
He called her name. She came out, and the cell was too small for him to enter, so he had to pinion her hands in the corridor. At 9:34 in the morning she entered the execution chamber, glanced briefly at the officials standing around, and walked to the chalk mark. As he placed the white hood over her head, she said, “Schnell,” faster.
The trap fell, the doctor followed into the pit and pronounced her dead. Twenty minutes later her body was lowered and placed in a coffin for burial. Irma Grese was twenty-two years old. She had killed with her pistol, beaten prisoners with her whip, and driven her dogs into crowds of starving women, and she went to the gallows for it.
Amon Göth never faced Pierrepoint. He was born in Vienna in December 1908 to a reasonably wealthy family that owned a publishing house, and he was expected to join the family business. Instead he studied agriculture, then abandoned it for the lure of Nazism and right-wing politics. In the early days the Nazi party operated illegally in Austria, but Göth joined local Nazi youth groups and became fiercely antisemitic.
He took full party membership in 1931 and was called an Alter Kämpfer, an Old Fighter for the cause. He threw himself into the brown-shirted SA, the street brawlers who disrupted political meetings and fought communists. Later he moved to the SS, but had to flee Germany: he was wanted for possessing explosives on behalf of Nazi political groups, and he continued smuggling arms into Austria. He was arrested many times, once in connection with the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, but he slipped away from justice by hiding inside Dachau concentration camp.
He was not a prisoner. He was there to train as a camp guard, his first introduction to the camps. After the Anschluss, Göth rose steadily through the SS ranks. When the war broke out he was stationed in Poland, respected as a capable administrator, working on the paperwork for the relocation, deportation, and eventual massacre of large Jewish populations and on the establishment of ghettos in Polish cities.
He was transferred to Lublin to work on Operation Reinhard, the creation of the three extermination centers where people were murdered within minutes of arrival. He participated in the roundups of victims before their deportation, then joined an SS Death’s Head unit overseeing the construction and operation of concentration camps. His first major posting was to supervise a new camp that would be known as Kraków-Płaszów. Heinrich Himmler interviewed Göth for the command, and Göth got the job.
The camp took one month to build, incorporating the site of an old Jewish cemetery, and after the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto the prisoners judged fit for work were sent there. The unfit were slaughtered. When the first prisoners arrived, Göth addressed them with a chilling pronouncement: “I am your God. ” He wanted them to worship him.
The camp began with 2,000 inmates, but grew to hold 25,000 at its peak, and around 150,000 people passed through its wire. It was a transit camp, and conditions were appalling. Göth, meanwhile, lived in a luxurious villa, sat on his balcony, and shot prisoners with his rifle for sport. If prisoners saw his cap on the balcony railing, they knew the shooting would begin.
He feasted and drank heavily while prisoners starved. He even had a Jewish cobbler make him a new pair of boots every week. He had shot more than a hundred women and children himself during the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. At Płaszów he became steadily more savage.
A witness described a Jewish woman whose fiancé worked as a cleaner approaching Göth to plead to stay with the man. Göth refused, ordered her to turn around, drew his pistol, and shot her dead on the spot. Another witness told of his sister, Hella, in a group of women breaking gravestones into small pieces to build roads, when Göth appeared, told an elderly woman she was doing the work wrong, showed her how to do it, and then shot her. A prisoner who survived his rule described Göth as a horrible, terrifying beast who instilled the fear of death in people’s hearts.
For the slightest infraction he would rain blow after blow on a helpless face, watching with sadistic satisfaction as the cheek swelled and turned blue, as teeth fell out and the eyes filled with tears. Anyone he flogged had to count each stroke aloud; if they lost count, they had to start again. During interrogations he would set his dog on the accused, who hung by the legs from a hook in the ceiling. When someone escaped, he made the whole group from which the escapee came line up, ordered them to count to ten, and personally shot every tenth person.
One morning at roll call he shot a Jew for complaining that the man was too tall, then urinated on him while he died. Another time he caught a boy too sick with dysentery to control himself, forced him to eat all his own excrement, and then shot him. Between 8,000 and 12,000 prisoners died inside the camp under his rule, and the main execution site nearby was known as Hujowa Górka. Göth flew too close to the sun.
He was considered brutal even by SS standards, and in September 1944 he was relieved of command at Kraków-Płaszów, charged with theft and with damaging the organization’s reputation: stealing Jewish property violated Nazi law. Because the German war effort was collapsing, his case never went to trial, which saved him from the fate of the Buchenwald commandant Karl Otto Koch, who was convicted of theft and shot inside his own camp. Göth was declared mentally ill and confined to an asylum in Bavaria. In May 1945 the Americans arrested him.
He tried at first to hide the fact that he was SS, but a former prisoner recognized him. He was sent to Poland to be tried in the land of his greatest crimes. His trial ran from August 27 to September 5, 1946. The court heard of the massacres, of conditions at Płaszów, of his appalling treatment of prisoners.
He was convicted of membership in the Nazi party, of ordering torture, imprisonment, and extermination, and of personally murdering, maiming, and torturing an unknown number of people. On September 13, 1946, he was taken from his cell at Montelupich prison in Kraków, near the camp he had commanded. During the war the Nazis had executed many Poles there. Now Göth would die in the same place.
There was no sympathy for him. He was led into the execution yard, where a chair stood beneath a hook and a rope. The hangman confirmed his identity, placed the noose around his neck, and kicked the chair away. Because of his evil, it was claimed, a Polish guard pulled down on his body, strangling him slowly.
The prisoners of Płaszów knew that if their eyes met Amon Göth’s, they were likely to be dead soon after. To them, he had been the devil. Otto Moll’s path took him from a German orchestra to the burning pits of Auschwitz. He was born on March 4, 1915, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and worked as a gardener before joining the SS on May 1, 1935.
His first posting was unusual: he played in a battalion orchestra, entertaining SS men in barracks and training centers. In January 1937, returning from a performance, the truck carrying him and the other musicians crashed. One bandsman was killed. Moll suffered a severe blow to the head and a brain concussion, and lost the sight in his right eye.
Some historians later argued the injury changed his personality, making him more deadly and psychotic. One German historian claimed the SS exploited Moll and manipulated him into becoming a monster. After recovering, he joined the Death’s Head unit responsible for overseeing the concentration and extermination camps, then went back to gardening, supervising a work detail at Sachsenhausen. In 1941 he moved to Auschwitz, then expanding on a colossal scale.
Rudolf Höss had received Himmler’s permission to build a camp designed to kill as many people as possible, and he needed mass numbers of guards. Moll was put in charge of the prisoners digging mass graves for executions. For more than three and a half years he served in various roles, eventually becoming head of the labor deployment office at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1944 he was the man supervising all the crematoria at Birkenau, the main extermination center.
He was closely associated with Rudolf Höss, and Hitler personally awarded both men the War Merit Cross First Class with Swords. Moll justified everything he demanded of prisoners by screaming, “An order is an order. ”
By 1944 the crematoria at Auschwitz could not keep up with the bodies. Deportations were arriving from all over Europe.
Moll forced prisoners to dig large open pits to burn corpses because the ovens could no longer hold them, and he converted a farmhouse into another gas chamber. A former worker testified to what he saw: in that period, an average of 18,000 Hungarians were killed daily at Birkenau. Transports arrived one after another from dawn. About twenty percent of those arriving were sent into the camp, and the rest were gassed and burned.
When there were not enough prisoners to do the work, they were shot and burned in the pits. As a rule, the gas chamber was only used for groups larger than two hundred people, because it was not economical for small groups. Sometimes during the shootings prisoners resisted or children cried, and Obersturmführer Moll would throw those people into the burning pits alive. The witness described one scene directly: Moll ordered a naked woman to sit on corpses near a pit while he shot prisoners and threw them into the blazing fire, commanding the woman to jump and sing.
She did, hoping to save her life. After everyone was executed, Moll shot her too, and her body was burned. Another time Moll found rings and a watch on a boy from the work group. He stopped the boy in the crematorium, ordered him thrown into the oven, and lit a fire with paper, then pulled the boy out.
He hung him by the arms, tortured and interrogated him to find where the valuables came from. The boy told him everything and named the prisoner who had given him the objects. Then Moll set fire to the boy’s body from the waist down and ordered him to run toward the electrified wire, where he was executed. Another Sonderkommando member called Moll the most degenerate of them all.
He was put in charge of the bunkers where the victims of gassing were burned in pits, then transferred briefly to another section, and when preparations began for the Hungarian transports of 1944 he was placed in charge of all the crematoria. He organized the mass extermination of those who arrived. Just before the Hungarian transports came, he ordered pits dug beside Crematorium V and restarted Bunker II, which had been out of action. In the crematorium yard, billboards on poles told the new arrivals that they would be going to the camp where work awaited them, but first they had to shower and undergo disinfection.
For that they had to undress and place their valuables in baskets positioned in the yard. Moll repeated the same speech to the newcomers. The transports were so numerous that sometimes the gas chambers could not hold everyone, and the overflow was shot, one by one, often by Moll himself. He threw living people into the burning pits on several occasions, practiced shooting people at a distance, and abused the Sonderkommando prisoners, beating them and treating them like animals.
Those in his personal service said he used a metal wire to fish gold pieces out of a box of jewelry taken from the newcomers, carrying them out in a briefcase. He took furs and food, especially fats, left by the people sent to the gas, saying with a smile to the SS men around him that they should take the opportunity before the lean years came. Under him the Sonderkommando was reinforced to about a thousand prisoners. One charge concerned his treatment of a child.
A witness saw it in Crematorium IV, where two huge pits burned the dead. Moll tore a child from its mother and threw it into the boiling human fat that collected in the ditches around the pit, then told his assistant, “Now I will eat my fill. Now I have done my duty. ” He killed small children by throwing them alive into the boiling fat before the side pits.
When the camp commandant or other senior SS leaders appeared at the crematoria, Moll reined himself in, and the killing machine ran its usual course without excess. He was utterly brutal, slaughtering the most vulnerable, including children. He was said to be frightening and jealous, and once said that if Eichmann ordered him to execute his own family, he would do it. He burned children alive and shot women after forcing them to undress, beat prisoners to death with clubs and iron bars, set dogs on people, and threw prisoners onto the electric fence.
He was a savage executioner who personally killed 3,000 prisoners with his execution squad. As the war turned against Germany, the SS abandoned Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. Moll was sent to Dachau, arriving with a group of prisoners on a death march. The Americans who liberated Dachau arrested him.
He later confessed that he had wanted to bomb Auschwitz and kill the remaining prisoners. In November 1945 he was tried by an American military court in the Dachau trials. Shockingly, he was tried only for his actions at Dachau, not for what he had done at Auschwitz, which was not taken into account. He was charged with shooting and executing people who fell during the death march, and for executing twenty-six people he was sentenced to death.
Held at Landsberg prison awaiting execution, he was taken from his cell on May 28, 1946, and led to a yard with a gallows. He climbed the steps, the hangman put the noose around his neck and covered his head with a black cap, and the trap was sprung. It is believed that Moll and his execution squads killed 20,000 people. He was executed for crimes committed during a short period at Dachau, not for the years of slaughter at Auschwitz.
Maria Mandl ruled the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau with a savagery that earned her the name “the Beast. ” Born in Austria in January 1912, she was an active member of the Nazi movement while it was still illegal there. After the Anschluss she joined the SS and quickly found work as a camp guard. She began at Lichtenburg, one of the earliest Nazi concentration camps, in Saxony, working alongside fifty other SS women.
The camp had first held male prisoners, then became a women’s camp between 1937 and 1939. The earlier political prisoners had been tortured and beaten to death by SS guards, and the brutality continued after the women arrived. Two women who tried to escape were torn apart by dogs on the commandant’s orders. Mandl began there in October 1938, and the next year was sent, along with the guards and prisoners, to the newly built Ravensbrück, the women’s camp near Berlin.
She worked there as a supervisor from its first day. She quickly gained a terrible reputation for cruelty. When Himmler visited in 1940 and permitted flogging as a punishment, Mandl was often the one carrying it out. Sentences ranged from ten to twenty-five lashes for minor offenses, but some prisoners received up to seventy-five, delivered in batches because death was a real possibility.
Many prisoners lost consciousness and had to be revived so their punishment could be completed. Their bodies turned blue with bruises, and many were permanently crippled. Her superiors were impressed. In April 1942 she was promoted to senior supervisor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, replacing Johanna Langefeld, who had clashed with Rudolf Höss.
Mandl’s intelligence and devotion to the Nazi cause won her the post. She ran the women’s camp through terror. She took part in selections, playing god over the lives of the prisoners. Jews unable to work were sent straight to the gas chambers, and Mandl was the one deciding.
From selection to death was only minutes, and in this way she sent tens of thousands to their end. Many women she chose were subjected to barbaric and often fatal medical experiments by SS doctors like Josef Mengele. After the war, during her trial, the court heard how hundreds of women were sterilized with X-rays and had their ovaries forcibly removed for further examination before being sent to die in the gas chambers. Children were sometimes left to freeze to death in the camp winter.
Mandl forced thousands of women to stand at attention barefoot in the snow, where they collapsed from freezing temperatures and hypothermia, then ordered them to run back to their barracks. Those who could not were sent to their deaths. When she heard this testimony, Mandl replied that she had always cared for the welfare of the prisoners. Other accounts described orgies in her furnished villa near Auschwitz, wild parties of debauchery that often followed celebrations after torture sessions.
Mandl participated in selections for more than two years, and it is estimated that half a million women and children were sent to their deaths by her actions. She also established a camp orchestra. Loving music, she had a privileged group of women play instead of cleaning latrines and doing terrible hard labor. The band, made up of violins, a cello, guitars, an accordion, and other instruments, played military pieces as women arrived at the camp.
Those returning from work, exhausted, had to march in time to the music, which was requested for all occasions: commandants’ speeches, transports, and every hanging. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, Mandl was gone. She had left the camp in late 1944 for a subcamp of Dachau, and with the liberation of the camps she fled to the mountains of southern Bavaria. American troops arrested her on August 10, 1945.
Interrogators found her highly intelligent and utterly devoted to the extermination of the Jews. Held for a time at Dachau prison, she was handed over to the People’s Republic of Poland and tried in the Auschwitz trials. Hearing the testimonies of her victims’ suffering, she sat with her head bowed. She was convicted of her crimes and sentenced to death as a war criminal.
While awaiting execution, she reportedly asked forgiveness. On January 28, 1948, inside Kraków prison, one of the worst Nazi prisons in Poland, she was hanged along with twenty other condemned prisoners. As a woman, she was first. At 7:09 in the morning the hangings began.
Forced up a small step with four male prisoners, the noose was placed around her neck, the step removed, and the former Auschwitz guard was slowly strangled. It was reported that it took fifteen minutes before the first group, including Mandl, was pronounced dead. A woman who had sent half a million people to their deaths died on the rope she had known so well. Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, was born and raised in Munich in a middle-class Catholic family.
The family moved to Augsburg, where he was educated, and in 1920 he trained as an electrician. After periods working in a department store and as an accountant he was mostly unemployed. He joined the Nazi party on December 1, 1931, and the SS in 1932. During his strict SS training he worked as a prison guard, and when the war broke out he was assigned to guard concentration camps.
He was posted to Dachau in 1934 and rose quickly through the ranks. He became a leading figure at Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen, catching the attention of higher-ranking Nazis. It was clear that within the camp system Kramer had found a home and a purpose, perhaps for the first time in his life. He became an adjutant to Rudolf Höss, the notorious Auschwitz commandant who oversaw the murder of around one and a half million people.
In 1940 Kramer was Höss’s second man, accompanying him to inspect Auschwitz and helping investigate whether the site was suitable for a new oil and rubber plant, materials Germany lacked. The plan was to use camp labor for the project. For his work, Kramer was given control of his own camp, Natzweiler-Struthof, in April 1941, established in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France and the only camp the Nazis built inside France. There he committed more Holocaust crimes.
Personally, as commandant, he carried out the gassing of eighty Jewish men and women selected for a Jewish skeleton collection destined for the Reich University in Strasbourg. Forty-six were Jews from Greece, and women also suffered his brutality. Kramer later admitted during his trial that the purpose of Natzweiler was to run prisoners in the nearby quarry, and that he had gassed those individuals on Himmler’s orders. He described forcing people into the gas chamber himself and said the women inside continued breathing for about half a minute before the gas overcame them.
He was promoted to captain in 1942, and in May 1944 transferred to become the commandant in charge of operations at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the main extermination element of the complex. He oversaw the killing of tens of thousands in the gas chambers and crematoria. Brought in to help manage the gassing of newly transported prisoners, he was later held responsible for the murders at Auschwitz. He insisted, “I never took part in selections,” claiming, “I asked myself, is this really true about these people going into the gas chambers?
I did not know what the purpose of the gas chamber was. ” But evidence showed otherwise: witnesses described him taking an active role in the selection lines, loading people onto trucks and beating them severely when they resisted. On October 7, 1944, prisoners revolted and destroyed the crematoria. Kramer confirmed that corporal punishment was permitted at Auschwitz and that he had administered torture about forty times during his short time there.
He also confirmed that guards were allowed to keep dogs, which, it was alleged, were used to attack prisoners. He was said to have flogged a man twenty-five strokes, beaten prisoners regularly, fired his machine gun at them randomly, and encouraged setting dogs on them. In December 1944 he was transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen. The camp had originally been a temporary holding site for those fleeing Germany, but it had expanded during the war.
Belsen had no gas chambers, but Kramer’s rule was so brutal and terrible that he won the name “Beast of Belsen. ” He claimed that when he arrived, food was not a serious problem, but as new prisoners were transferred in, the food situation grew desperate. The Allies were bombing the Reich, and Belsen suffered badly from supply shortages. Weather also hampered deliveries, but the main problem was overcrowding, caused by the Red Army advancing toward Germany.
Around 85,000 prisoners were moved to Belsen in cattle cars or on forced marches. In July 1944, before Kramer took command, there had been 7,300 prisoners. By April 1945 there were 60,000. With the camp grossly overcrowded and German defeat looming, the administrative systems collapsed, but Kramer kept trying to govern.
In March 1945 he asked for help and resources as between 250 and 300 prisoners were dying every day from a terrible typhus epidemic. Prisoners kept arriving. Yet the end was near. As the administration fell apart and the war turned against the Reich, many guards abandoned their posts and fled, leaving prisoners to their fate.
Kramer refused to leave. When the British liberated Belsen, he walked them through the camp to show them the terrible scenes that greeted them: huge piles of corpses all around, mass graves full to bursting, and no room to bury the newly dead. The British found barracks crammed with prisoners, some too emaciated to walk, while disease raged. Kramer was imprisoned at Hamelin and tried for war crimes.
Testimony revealed the true horror of the Beast of Belsen. He beat and kicked prisoners too weak to work, selected who would go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and encouraged guards to tear prisoners’ bodies apart. It was alleged he kicked a woman to death during selections and starved a number of Russian prisoners to death for stealing bread. At Belsen, days before liberation, he shot and killed two prisoners who had found rotten potatoes on the ground.
His activities at Auschwitz also came to light. He was sentenced to death by hanging at Hamelin, executed by Albert Pierrepoint on December 13, 1945. Along with ten of his guards, the Beast of Belsen was hanged. Executions began at 9:30 in the morning and continued all day until 4:00 in the afternoon.
First came the women, including Irma Grese. Kramer was held in a small cell at Hamelin; at the end of the row of cells was the execution chamber. Pierrepoint carried out executions in pairs, and around 12:15 in the afternoon Kramer and Dr. Fritz Klein were brought from their cells.
The two-rope gallows awaited them as they climbed to the platform. At 12:19, Kramer and Klein were hanged simultaneously, the first men executed after the women. Their bodies were cut down after death was confirmed, presumably burned, and the ashes scattered in an unknown place. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was twenty-four years old when she died on the gallows for her crimes at Stutthof.
Born on May 30, 1922, in Hamburg, she grew up in a modest household with a father who worked in the port and a stay-at-home mother. As a child she was an ordinary girl who dreamed of becoming an actress. After finishing school she worked as a model, known for her beauty. The war did not change her plans; she continued doing photo shoots for German magazines and advertising agencies.
But in early 1944 something changed. She suddenly left modeling and answered an SS advertisement seeking women to work in the concentration camps. Many women enlisted: some for the money, some for a radical change. Barkmann was about twenty-one.
Perhaps she wanted money and career advancement, or perhaps she was obsessed with the idea of power over others. She passed the interview and trained as a supervisor, an Aufseherin, and was posted to Stutthof near Gdańsk, a notoriously brutal site. Of the 110,000 prisoners held behind its wire, 65,000 did not survive. The camp was run by SS guards with Ukrainian auxiliaries.
The first female guards arrived in 1942, and 295 women served there in total. Thousands died of starvation and disease, many in the typhus epidemics of the winters of 1942 and 1944. Prisoners too sick to work were sent to the camp’s small gas chamber. Executions happened daily: shootings at the rifle range, gassings, hangings during roll call to terrify the prisoners, lethal injections of phenol, beatings to death, and drownings in the mud.
Many prisoners were leased to companies for forced labor. Once she arrived, Barkmann revealed a wicked, brutal side. Known as “Mad Jenny” and the “Beautiful Ghost,” she was known for beating prisoners until they were close to death, then sending them to the gas chamber. Some of her actions shocked even the other guards, who had thought her gentle and intelligent.
She is believed to have been responsible for dozens of victims, taking part in daily selections for the gas chamber, killing with her own hands through severe beating, and sending many children and women to their deaths. As the war neared its end, she tried to flee justice. As the Red Army approached, she escaped, becoming one of the most wanted war criminals before the war even ended. She evaded arrest for a time, then was captured in May 1945 while boarding a train in Gdańsk.
She had received help while hiding, but the camp records held her photograph and the prisoners remembered her well. Her description was circulated across Europe. Put under interrogation, she claimed she had treated Stutthof prisoners well, that she had never killed or maltreated anyone, that she had helped the suffering and starving and saved some from death. Her deeds did not match her words.
Even one prison guard was deceived by her lies, began to sympathize, and she begged him to let her out of her cell for a few hours. But when he saw the inmates and her victims, he never let her out again. At the Stutthof trials, dozens of camp prisoners testified against her, and documents were produced showing her cruelties. Her lawyer argued she was mentally ill and unfit to stand trial, claiming she was insane and lacked the capacity for sound decisions.
She did not seem insane at all. She spent most of her trial flirting with the guards and caring for her hair more than for the atrocities. She laughed in the faces of witnesses. She was sentenced to death.
When the sentence was announced, she did not cry but listened calmly. Her last words in her case were: “Life is quite a big pleasure, and pleasures usually do not last very long. ”
On the morning of July 4, 1946, she was taken with ten other condemned war criminals to an execution site on Biskupia Górka hill near Gdańsk. Massive gallows had been built there to execute the former guards of Stutthof.
More than 200,000 people came to watch. Barkmann was brought before the crowd, helped onto the back of a truck, seated on a bench while the noose was adjusted. She was then made to stand, the noose placed around her neck, and the truck drove away, leaving her hanging. Within minutes, the terrible war criminal was pronounced dead before the eyes of thousands.
Alexander Piorkowski was the commandant of Dachau responsible for the deaths of thousands. Born in Bremen on October 11, 1904, he worked as a mechanic and then as a traveling salesman after the First World War. He became a member of the SA, the brown shirts, in June 1929, joined the SS in June 1933, and had already joined the Nazi party. Seen as a trusted and effective leader of men, he was given command of an SS regiment in Bremen, and the next year commanded another in Allenstein.
He retired from service for health reasons on September 19, 1936, but remained a trusted figure, and Himmler asked him to take command of Lichtenburg concentration camp. He accepted, holding the post from July to December 1937, before it became a women’s camp. Lichtenburg was housed in a former Renaissance castle at Prettin near Wittenberg in Saxony, one of the first camps the Nazis built, run by the SS from 1933 to 1939. It initially held two thousand prisoners and underwent a major change in 1937, when the male prisoners were moved out and it became a women’s camp, years before Ravensbrück opened.
The prison was run-down, and prisoners were classified as political or protective custody. The women were moved to Ravensbrück when Lichtenburg closed in May 1939. Piorkowski remained until August 1938, then was transferred to Dachau, where he first held the post of protective custody camp leader, responsible for the camp’s economic production. He was an important administrator, notorious for mistreating victims and forcing them into hard labor for the Nazis’ profit.
He supervised the daily roll call and ensured the laws were strictly applied. Then he was made commandant of the entire camp. Dachau was a vast site where more than 40,000 people were killed. Before Piorkowski arrived, many deaths had already occurred.
During his time in command, he sent more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war to their deaths, ordering them shot at an SS rifle range two kilometers from the camp at Hebertshausen. The first executions took place on November 25, 1941. The inmate population grew massively. The prison camp was heavily guarded to prevent escapes, and guards happily shot anyone who tried.
It was a place of absolute terror, and Piorkowski led the camp where terrible torture methods were used: standing cells where prisoners were kept for days, unable to sit, forced to stand twenty-four hours a day; public floggings where rule-breakers were brutally whipped, some killed; hanging from tress posts; and executions of prisoners unfit for work. Conditions only worsened, with many dying of disease, exhaustion, starvation, and violence. Many simply touched the electrified fence to end their misery. Hundreds of priests were sent to Dachau during his tenure, and many were selected for horrific Nazi medical experiments.
On August 31, 1943, Piorkowski was dismissed from his post, accused of corruption and embezzling camp money. Many commandants could not restrain themselves. What he did next is unknown. At the end of the war, the Americans brought him to trial and forced him to answer for his crimes as Dachau commandant.
His trial was part of the Dachau trials, held from January 6 to 17, 1947. He was charged with crimes against humanity, forced deportation, kidnapping, and mistreatment of prisoners at Dachau. Many witnesses testified against him, and he was sentenced to death. He filed petitions and sought clemency, but was taken to Landsberg prison, where hundreds of Nazi war criminals were executed.
On the morning of October 22, 1948, after more than a year in custody, he was taken from his cell to a yard where the gallows stood. Surrounded by American military police and a priest, his identity was confirmed, his hands bound, and he was led to the gallows. The hangman placed a black hood over his head and set the noose, then the trap was sprung and he was left hanging. After death was confirmed, his body was placed in a coffin and cremated.
There was some controversy over how active Piorkowski had actually been at Dachau: it was alleged he delegated most of the duties that led to crimes to his subordinates. Ultimately it did not save him. He died on the gallows at Landsberg. Rudolf Höss’s early life was dark before he joined the Nazi party.
He had actually been imprisoned for murder: he attacked a schoolteacher and beat him to death on the orders of Martin Bormann, the future personal secretary of Adolf Hitler. Höss joined the party early and rose through the SS, joining on the recommendation of Heinrich Himmler, who wanted more men in the group. He moved quickly into the Death’s Head units, served as a guard at various camps, and was even the man responsible for the first execution of a conscientious objector, a Jehovah’s Witness, at Sachsenhausen. He was singled out for leadership and promoted.
Then he was tasked with inspecting a site in Poland where the SS believed a large new camp could be built. He visited, wrote a report, and was ordered to establish a transit camp for 10,000 prisoners using a group of well-preserved buildings. What he built became Auschwitz. He lived on site in a villa with his wife and children.
Through 1940 the camp expanded into a vast complex, one whose main purpose was execution and extermination. Sites like the Death Wall were built, where thousands of prisoners were shot, and Höss often witnessed the killings himself. In late 1941 he was summoned to Berlin to receive personal orders from Himmler: he was to implement the Final Solution at Auschwitz. Höss experimented with different methods to kill as many people as quickly and easily as possible.
He introduced Zyklon B, a pesticide, into the camp system for use in the gas chambers, and witnessed the experiments himself. Hundreds of thousands were exterminated in his gas chambers. He later described the process with chilling detachment: “Technically it was not so difficult. It would not be difficult to exterminate even greater numbers.
The killing itself took the least time. You could get rid of 2,000 people in half an hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. The killing was easy. You didn’t even need guards to push them into the chambers.
They went in expecting a shower, and instead of water, we turned on the poison gas. The whole thing went very quickly. ”
He kept expanding Auschwitz’s killing capacity until 1942, when he became embroiled in a scandal over an affair with a female prisoner. The next year he was replaced and given other duties.
In May 1944 he returned to Auschwitz to oversee the operation that bore his name, in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in fifty-six bloody days. His facilities could no longer handle the enormous number of dead, so many bodies were burned in large open pits. Around 10,000 people were gassed every day. He ended the war at Ravensbrück, the women’s camp, where he oversaw the completion of a gas chamber and forced around 2,000 women into the death room.
Knowing he would be caught if the war ended, he went into hiding in the German town of Gottrupel under a false name, working as a gardener. His wife knew where he was. Himmler had given him a cyanide capsule in case he fell into enemy hands, but his wife was captured, and she led to his arrest: the engravings inside his wedding ring revealed his identity when British soldiers confronted him in 1946. He insisted he was a simple gardener, but a soldier named Alexander saw the ring and ordered him to remove it, threatening to cut off his finger.
The name Höss was engraved inside. The soldiers began beating him with axe handles, until Alexander stopped them. Later, Höss was brought to the Nuremberg trials, not as a defendant but as a defense witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the most senior SS officer on trial. There he made startling claims: “I commanded Auschwitz until the first of December 1943, and I estimate that at least two and a half million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million died of starvation and disease, making a total of about three million dead.
” That figure represented about seventy to eighty percent of all people sent to Auschwitz as prisoners; the rest were selected and used as slave laborers in the camp industries. He later revised his estimates downward. He was handed over to Poland to be tried in the land of his greatest crimes, where he revised the death toll to around 1. 1 million.
His trial lasted two weeks, from March 11 to 29, 1947, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. But many of his victims and former prisoners petitioned the judge and the court to allow a special execution: he would be hanged inside the walls of his former camp, on a gallows built specifically for him. The request was approved. Four days before his execution, Höss issued a shocking statement confessing his crimes: “My conscience forces me to make this declaration.
In my solitude in my cell, I have come to the bitter realization that I have committed grave sins against humanity. As commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the Third Reich’s plan for human destruction. In doing so, I inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering to the Polish people in particular.
I will pay for this with my life. May the Lord forgive me one day for what I have done. I ask forgiveness from the Polish people. ”
On April 16, 1947, he was taken from his cell and driven toward his former camp.
The execution was delayed over fears he might be killed on the way. At Auschwitz, about one hundred witnesses gathered to watch: former prisoners and members of the Polish government. A gallows with a trapdoor had been erected by German prisoners of war hours earlier, and no one was allowed into the camp without a special court permit. Armed guards were everywhere.
Höss arrived at eight in the morning and was led to the building that had once housed his office, where he drank a cup of coffee. Then he was locked in the torture building, Block 11, where prisoners had been held during his command. At ten o’clock he was brought out and walked toward the center of the camp where the gallows stood. It was said he walked with a confident, brisk step before his executioners took charge.
His hands were bound behind his back, and the executioner helped him onto the platform. A priest, Father Zaremba, was assigned to accompany him in his final moments. He approached Höss beneath the gallows, and the executioner helped him onto a stool placed over the trapdoor. The prosecutor read the death sentence, the noose was placed around Höss’s neck, and the executioner adjusted it as Höss moved his head.
When the stool was removed, the trap was triggered. The body of the former commandant dropped and hung from the rope. At 10:08 in the morning the trap opened, and thirty minutes later the former commandant of Auschwitz was pronounced dead. More than one hundred people witnessed the execution.
There were calls to make it more public, but they were refused. In the days afterward, the Polish press was barred from publishing eyewitness accounts. Höss was the last man publicly executed in Poland, hanged on a gallows built especially for him within the boundaries of the concentration camp he had commanded. The Reich’s system of camps had consumed millions, and the men and women who ran them had come to their own ends in a variety of ways: some by the rope, some by the rifle, some by the firing squad.
For those who survived the wire and the gas, the sight of their tormentors on the gallows was the only justice the world could offer.
