The liberation of Majdanek on the night of July 22, 1944, marked one of the most significant moments in World War II history. It was the first major Nazi camp to be liberated by the Red Army, located in German-occupied Poland. Only after the liberation of the concentration camps was the full scale of Nazi crimes exposed to the world.
Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and see the evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. Among the perpetrators responsible for these atrocities was Elsa Ehrich, a female SS guard whose brutal actions would later lead her to the gallows.
Elsa Ehrich was born on March 8, 1914, in the town of Breda, then part of the German Empire. Her parents, Anna and Albert, had her baptized as a Protestant on June 1, 1914. Her father worked as a skipper, and after finishing school, Elsa began working at a slaughterhouse from 1930 to 1933.
The global economic depression had ravaged Germany, leaving millions without work. The economic misery, fear of a worsening future, and frustration with government failure created fertile ground for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party’s rise. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.
Soon after, the Nazi authorities established concentration camps across the country to handle masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. These camps, as well as the German police forces, were controlled by the SS. From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for solving the so-called Jewish question, and after 1941, its leadership planned the “Final Solution,” the annihilation of European Jews now known as the Holocaust.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. On August 15, 1940, Elsa Ehrich volunteered for service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp as an SS guard. Ravensbrück, which opened in May 1939, was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis.
The camp was staffed by SS men and 150 female supervisors. These women were either SS volunteers or those who took the job for the good pay and working conditions. The main camp contained 18 barracks, including prisoner sick bays, warehouses, a penal block, and a camp prison. Sanitary conditions were poor and deteriorated greatly after 1943.
Food rations for prisoners were meager from the outset and decreased further after 1941. The SS required Ravensbrück prisoners to perform forced labor, primarily in agricultural projects and local industry. By 1944, Germany increasingly relied on forced labor for armaments production.
In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished at Ravensbrück.
Ehrich rose rapidly through the overseer hierarchy through her eager performance of duties. From 1941, she worked as an SS report leader. Her primary duty was conducting daily and evening roll calls, which were long and grueling processes involving prisoners standing for hours in all weather conditions. Report leaders also oversaw camp discipline and training for junior SS personnel.
In mid-October 1942, Ehrich was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp, where she became the head female overseer in charge of the women’s camp. Upon arrival at Majdanek, prisoners were subjected to the camp admission process. Their belongings were taken, their personal data was written in camp files, and they were assigned prisoner numbers meant to replace their identities.
Children deported to Majdanek were registered together with their mothers under the exact same number. All newcomers were subjected to brutal and humiliating bathing and disinfection procedures.
One former prisoner described the trauma of bathing: “One of the first things that shocked us entirely was the necessity to strip right under the eyes of that whole personnel. They were all males, mostly the Germans. Resistance was our first automatic reaction. We did not want to strip, though we had to do so eventually because they started to yell and beat us.”
Women had to get dressed rapidly after clothing was distributed randomly from camp storehouses, with no attention paid to sizes or weather conditions. All prisoners were forced to attend everyday roll calls and were exploited in exhausting obligatory labor. Living conditions inside the barracks were poor, and when the first females arrived in October 1942, the barracks were still under construction and lacked basic sanitary appliances.
Ehrich was formally subjected directly to the camp commandant, but her duties enforced close cooperation with the political department and prisoner camp. She and her deputy, Hermine Braunsteiner, were responsible for daily roll calls and assignment of female prisoners to labor groups.
In the winter of 1941 to 1942, Majdanek authorities began using Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber. Mass murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943. There were three gas chambers at Majdanek, with two smaller ones holding 150 people and a larger one holding 300.
Ehrich took part in selections for the gas chamber and is believed responsible for the deaths of thousands of women and children. One Majdanek survivor recalled: “To lure them, she brought cocoa and candy to the children’s barracks, and a moment later the truck showed up. Jewish children got on them smiling, still with candy in their hands. The cars drove straight to the crematorium.”
Ehrich, once a butcher shop assistant, was depicted as primitive by her former female inmates. At Majdanek, she had the power to decide matters of life and death. She became infamous for slapping and kicking prisoners for no reason and enjoyed brutally harassing and beating especially weak, emaciated, and old women.
She had a habit of hitting women in the face with her fist until blood showed. She did not spare even children, whom she beat and killed in front of their mothers.
Amid the terror, some people made efforts to help fellow prisoners. Dr. Stefania Panovka, who tried to improve medical care for prisoners, once asked Ehrich for an allowance of milk for her patient babies. Ehrich slapped her face, yelling, “This is not a sanatorium but a death camp.”
Panovka also recalled: “Everyone would beat us, from the camp commandant to the camp charges and offices. The camp commandant would even come to the hospital at 2 in the morning while intoxicated just to beat us in the face. But no one beat us as much or as painfully as Elsa Ehrich. She beat with passion and cold cruelty in her eyes. No SS woman did it as hard and as severely as she did.”
Ehrich referred to female prisoners with contempt and hatred. On any pretext, she slapped and kicked them. She also selected children, elderly, and weaker women for the gas chambers with great zeal and never showed mercy to anyone.
In early 1943, Ehrich made an attempt to launch a Nazi brothel in the camp, but the project was abandoned after one of her slave sex workers was diagnosed with typhus. Ehrich herself became ill with typhoid in February 1943.
The uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor killing centers and the Warsaw, Białystok, and Vilna ghettos had led to increased concerns about Jewish resistance. To prevent further resistance, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the killing of surviving Jews in the Lublin District of German-occupied Poland.
Most of the remaining Jews in the area were employed in forced labor projects and concentrated in camps. On November 3 and 4, Jews were forced to strip naked and walk into previously dug trenches where they were shot. At Majdanek, the SS shot the Jews near the crematorium.
Music was played through loudspeakers at both Majdanek and Trawniki to drown out the noise of the mass shootings. Approximately 42,000 Jews were killed during the operation, known as Harvest Festival, the largest single-day massacre of the Holocaust.
When the evacuation of Jewish prisoners for the Harvest Festival killings began, SS guards went through the barracks dragging out anyone who was hiding. The sick were loaded onto trucks wearing only underwear. Prisoner Stefania Panovka threw blankets over them. Ehrich, who was supervising the loading, noticed this, pulled the blankets off, lashed Panovka with a whip, and told her, “Do not waste hospital property.”
After the Harvest Festival killings, Majdanek no longer had a majority of Jews among its prisoners. By the end of 1943, of 6,562 prisoners registered at Majdanek, approximately 71 were Jews.
In mid-March 1944, surviving Jews from various subcamps of Majdanek were brought to the main camp for eventual evacuation west to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Some were killed in the gas chambers between March and July 1944, and the SS transferred the rest to Auschwitz and other camps.
According to the most recent research, over the course of three years, among an estimated 130,000 prisoners who entered Majdanek, 80,000 people perished at the camp.
When Majdanek was evacuated, Ehrich was transferred to the Płaszów concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. After its evacuation in September 1944, she was sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany, where she worked until April 1945.
In May 1945, shortly after the end of the war, Elsa Ehrich was arrested by British occupation authorities in Hamburg. She was transferred to US custody in a camp for war criminals in Dachau before being transferred to Poland. Ehrich shared her cell with Maria Mandl, her equally sadistic Nazi comrade from Ravensbrück.
In 1948, justice finally caught up with Elsa Ehrich when she stood before the District Court of Lublin at the second Majdanek trial. She was accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On June 10, 1948, Ehrich was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death by hanging. After the announcement of the judgment, she asked Polish President Bolesław Bierut for clemency on the ground that she had a small son and wanted to atone for her guilt. President Bierut rejected the request.
Elsa Ehrich was 34 years old when she was executed in the Lublin prison on October 26, 1948. There were no tears shed for her.