On the third of February 1947, in the city of Hamburg, the world heard the truth about Ravensbrück. For nearly two months, witnesses had given testimony of the inhumane mistreatment and torture inflicted by the male and female personnel of Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp for women. Now the sentences were read. Of the sixteen defendants before the British Military Tribunal, eleven were sentenced to death by hanging.

Among them stood Dorothea Binz, the former deputy chief overseer of the camp—a woman whose name would become synonymous with the brutality that had unfolded inside the camp’s gates. Binz was born on the sixteenth of March 1920 in Düsterlake, a town near Ravensbrück, then part of the Weimar Republic. Her father was a forest worker. She attended elementary and high school locally, and she was fourteen years old when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in January 1933.

From that point, Nazi propaganda became inescapable in Germany. Joseph Goebbels, head of the new propaganda ministry, cultivated a personality cult that glorified Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior. The press, film, radio, and public spaces were dominated by Nazi messaging. Portraits and statues of Hitler appeared everywhere, and every city and town renamed a street or public space in his honor.

In public, ordinary Germans were expected to praise Hitler and give the so-called German greeting, Heil Hitler. Propaganda permeated the school curriculum, and children sang odes praising Hitler’s leadership in public schools. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became chancellor. In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.

Six years of state-sponsored legislation marginalized and disenfranchised Germany’s Jewish citizens, expelling them from their professions and from commercial life. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom—a series of coordinated violent riots against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and its recently incorporated territories on the ninth and tenth of November 1938—thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps. By early 1939, only about sixteen percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. In January 1933, approximately 522,000 Jews by religious definition had lived in Germany; about 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.

In August 1939, Binz was nineteen years old. Allegedly to avoid being forced to work in a factory, she applied for a position as a kitchen manager in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. That position had already been filled, so she was hired as a guard instead. Ravensbrück had opened in May 1939, the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis.

The camp was staffed by SS men who served as guards and administrators, as well as about 150 women who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who took the job for its good pay and working conditions. Within November of that year, Binz was already guarding ten female prisoners who were sawing and driving wood. Until May 1940, she supervised prisoners in a range of tasks: carrying coke, unloading bricks, driving rubble, unloading straw sacks, cleaning floors, working in construction management, gardening, and personnel development.

In August or September 1940, she was promoted to deputy head of the cell block. This so-called bunker was where prisoners who violated camp regulations were punished—and often tortured to death. Binz, together with her superior Maria Mandl, was responsible for carrying out the canings there. In April 1941, Binz joined the Nazi Party.

When Mandl was promoted to Oberaufseherin, a chief senior overseer, in April 1942, Binz became head of the cell block. In addition, Binz assisted Mandl in selecting women for human experiments. In July 1943, Binz was unofficially promoted to deputy chief overseer; the promotion was made official in February 1944. As a member of the command staff between 1943 and 1945, she directed training and assigned duties to over one hundred female guards.

At one point, Binz trained some of the cruelest female guards in the Nazi concentration camp system, such as Irma Grese. She used indoctrination techniques to brainwash the new recruits and turned them into ruthless psychopaths like herself. Because of Dorothea Binz, Ravensbrück became a training center—a school of violence—for about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps. At Ravensbrück, Binz’s behavior toward the female prisoners became increasingly sadistic.

She targeted the weakest and most fearful inmates. Without any reason, she would beat, slap, kick, shoot, whip, or stomp and abuse the women. Holocaust survivors later testified that she aroused such terror that when she appeared at roll call, silence fell. She ordered female inmates to stand at roll call for hours.

Sometimes she either set a dog on them or kicked the women to death without any sign of mercy. During interrogations, she slapped the prisoners and participated in almost all executions. Binz also made sure that the prisoners suffered from hunger and cold, and that the female SS guards she supervised treated the prisoners with similar brutality. On one occasion, Binz observed a woman in a work detail who she felt was not working hard enough.

She walked over to the woman, knocked her down to the ground, and then took a pickaxe and proceeded to chop the prisoner with it until the lifeless body was little more than a bloody lump. Once she finished, Binz cleaned her shiny boots with a dry portion of the corpse’s skirt, mounted her bicycle, and literally pedaled her way back to Ravensbrück, all as if nothing had happened. In 1944, when gas chambers were built at Ravensbrück, Binz made numerous selections among the prisoners. Those who could no longer work were murdered.

Binz was also a sexual deviant. In addition to forcing female prisoners to have sex with her, she had sexual relations with a male guard at Ravensbrück. One of them was SS man Edmund Brüning, an adjutant to the camp’s commandant Fritz Suhren. Brüning became Binz’s boyfriend.

Binz, who became sexually aroused when observing whippings at Ravensbrück, often walked around the camp together with her boyfriend. The two were seen either laughing or engaged in heavy petting while female prisoners were tortured in front of them. The couple lived together in a house outside the camp until December 1944, when Brüning was transferred to Buchenwald. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through Ravensbrück, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others.

Of that number, over 92,000 women perished. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army on the thirtieth of April 1945, there were about 3,500 sick women, men, and children in the camp. After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Binz. She was tried at the first Ravensbrück trial, which began on the fifth of December 1946, together with fifteen other defendants.

She was accused of joint responsibility for and participation in the crimes committed at Ravensbrück. On the third of February 1947, the British Military Tribunal sentenced Binz, who admitted to having mistreated prisoners, to death by hanging. A plea for clemency by her lawyer was rejected, and the verdict was confirmed on the thirty-first of March of the same year. To avoid the execution, a desperate Binz tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists, but prison officials intervened before she could bleed to death.

Dorothea Binz was twenty-seven years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on the second of May 1947, at 9:01 am in Hamelin prison. There were no tears shed for Dorothea Binz.