On the morning of July 4, 1946, in the Polish city of Gdańsk, five young women were led to a massive wooden gallows before a crowd of thousands. The structure was built to accommodate two executions at once, and the onlookers had come to witness the death of the former concentration camp guards who had terrorized prisoners with particular cruelty. The hangmen were themselves former inmates of the very camp where these women had served. Ropes were secured around their necks, the vehicles beneath them were driven away, and their bodies were left hanging in full view.
The women were guards from Stutthof, the Nazi concentration camp that had operated near Danzig, as Gdańsk was then known. They had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for their roles in the camp’s system of persecution. But their execution was not simply a matter of their having worked there. The court had drawn careful distinctions between those who merely served and those who actively participated in crimes.
The five who were hanged had crossed that line. Stutthof was established in September 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, and grew into a vast camp complex. It held political prisoners, Jews, and other persecuted groups, along with Soviet prisoners of war. Inmates were subjected to forced labor, starvation, disease, beatings, and executions.
As the number of female prisoners grew rapidly, the camp administration increasingly relied on female guards, known as Aufseherinnen. Hundreds of women served in this role at Stutthof and its many subcamps, but only a relatively small number were ever brought to trial. The first Stutthof trial took place in Gdańsk in the spring of 1946, just one year after the liberation of the camps. Poland was still reeling from the devastation of the German occupation, which had cost the lives of millions of Polish citizens, including the vast majority of the country’s Jewish population.
Across Europe, courts were beginning to hold camp personnel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Gdańsk court heard testimony from former prisoners about the conditions inside Stutthof and about the conduct of the individual guards. Local newspapers covered the testimony in detail, and public anger ran high. The prosecution’s case rested on the argument that the accused women were not passive employees who merely followed orders.
Survivor testimonies described guards beating female prisoners, imposing brutal punishments, and participating in the machinery by which prisoners were selected for death. The evidence against each woman differed, and the court weighed each case individually. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann had served as a supervisor in the camp. Witnesses described her as exceptionally cruel toward the inmates.
She became perhaps the most notorious of the defendants, partly because photographs from the trial showed her attending to her hair and makeup and flirting with guards. Images of her execution would later circulate widely. Gerda Steinhoff held greater responsibility than some of the other guards. She had risen to the position of Blockleiterin, which gave her authority over prisoners and over some of the other guards.
She was accused of flagrant mistreatment of inmates and of participating in the broader system of persecution and murder within Stutthof. The court judged her conduct severe enough to warrant the death penalty. Wanda Klaff had also served as a guard and was known for beating prisoners. Eva Paradies behaved with particular viciousness.
During the winter, she was known to force the women in her barracks to strip and stand for hours in freezing temperatures, and she would pour buckets of cold water over them. The result was hypothermia and, in some cases, death. The case of Elisabeth Becker was distinctive. She initially confessed to involvement in selecting at least thirty female prisoners to be sent to the gas chamber, though she later recanted and questioned what she had actually done.
She was very young, and the court at one point recommended commuting her death sentence to fifteen years in prison, partly because she had served as a guard for only a short time and her conduct was judged less severe than that of Steinhoff and Barkmann. Becker also petitioned the Polish president for clemency, but the request was refused, and she was executed along with the others. A sixth guard, Erna Wallisch, was sentenced to five years in prison instead of death. Anna Praud, mentioned alongside the five condemned women, also received a five-year sentence.
Other Stutthof guards were never brought to trial at all or received lighter sentences. The court attempted, at least formally, to distinguish among different levels of responsibility. The prosecution argued that the condemned women had crossed the line from being mere camp employees to personally participating in crimes committed against innocent prisoners. On the day of execution, the five women were not hanged in secret inside a prison.
They were taken to a hill overlooking the city, where a large wooden gallows had been erected. They were helped onto a truck positioned beneath the gallows, with ropes placed around their necks. The executioner was a former Stutthof prisoner. Once the ropes were secured, the vehicle was driven away, leaving the women suspended.
The method was short-drop hanging, and it took several long minutes for them to die as the ropes tightened around their necks. Thousands of people gathered to watch. The public nature of the execution reflected the immediate post-war mood in Poland, where the enormity of the camp system was still fresh and the demand for accountability was intense. The five women were hanged regardless of their sex because the court applied the same standard to female guards as to male personnel.
Although women had been barred from many formal SS ranks, female guards were integral to the concentration camp system. The courts considered whether they had personally committed or participated in crimes just as they did with men. The same principle led to death sentences for other female guards in later trials, including Irma Grese. The Stutthof guards were executed because the post-war Polish court concluded that their individual conduct as guards amounted to participation in crimes against prisoners and, crucially, crimes against humanity.
The fact that one guard received a prison sentence and that others were acquitted or given short terms proves that simply serving at Stutthof did not automatically result in execution. It was the women’s own documented actions that condemned them, and on that July morning in Gdańsk, they paid the price for them before the eyes of the city.