On the morning of December 13, 1945, six months after the end of the war in Europe, three women were led to the execution chamber of Hamelin Prison. They had served as guards in some of the most notorious concentration camps of the Nazi regime, and now they were to die by the rope. Their names were Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Johanna Borman. All three had worked at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and all three had earned reputations for cruelty that set them apart even among the camp staff.
They had selected prisoners for the gas chambers, beaten the helpless, and shot those under their charge without hesitation. The executions at Hamelin were meant to be swift and orderly, carried out by a professional hangman behind closed doors. But the reality of what happened inside that room would be remembered far differently than the official accounts suggested. As the war turned against Germany, the camp system faced a shortage of male guards, who were being sent to the front to fight the Soviets and, later, the Western Allies.
To fill the gap, the SS recruited women for service in the concentration camps. Many received their training at Ravensbrück, near Berlin, under the instruction of more experienced female overseers. Some of these women made a career of the work, serving for years at camps like Auschwitz and building reputations built on violence and brutality. In the final months of the war, as Allied forces closed in, guards accompanied massive prisoner evacuations, forcing starving and sick inmates to march deeper into German territory.
These were death marches. Some guards attempted to flee, but others remained at the camps, maintaining order until the end. In the last months of the war, Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony became a scene of unimaginable suffering. Hundreds of prisoners, marched in from other camps, were dying each day from typhus, dysentery, and exhaustion.
In April 1945, with the Allies approaching, negotiations were conducted with Heinrich Himmler for the camp to be handed over without a fight. Inside, thousands of prisoners lay dying, while some thirteen thousand unburied corpses were scattered across the grounds. When British troops arrived, they found a horror that stunned the world. A British correspondent described the scene: “Here, over an area of more than an acre, lay dead and dying people.
You could not tell which was which. The living lay with their heads against the corpses, and around them moved the ghastly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do, with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them. Children were born here, tiny wrecks, unable to survive. ” The camp commandant, Josef Kramer, was taken prisoner, along with a number of the female guards who had worked there.
Among those arrested were the three women who would later be condemned to death. They had all served at Bergen-Belsen, but crucially, they had also served at Auschwitz, and it was for crimes committed at both camps that they were tried. Irma Grese was in her early twenties when she committed many of her offenses. A fanatical Nazi, she had been active in Nazi youth organizations before entering the camp system.
At Auschwitz, she was known for her role in selections. When transports arrived, she walked the lines, sending prisoners she deemed unfit for work directly to the gas chambers within minutes of their arrival. She was said to send women to their deaths if she envied their looks. She shot prisoners in her work details at will, as if for sport, and reportedly took pleasure in watching disturbing medical procedures.
She had transferred to Bergen-Belsen to be with her new lover, and there she continued her abuses. What shocked the world upon her arrest was her youth, her blonde hair, and her attractive appearance. She showed no remorse, coldly blaming others when evidence was presented against her. Standing trial alongside her was Elisabeth Volkenrath, also in her twenties.
She had worked at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and was known for selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. At Auschwitz, she held the rank of Oberaufseherin, chief overseer, responsible for supervising all the women’s barracks. She regularly participated in roll calls and was known for carrying out hangings and executions of prisoners who broke camp rules. She was seen patrolling the camp with various weapons, which she used against inmates.
In court, she tried to argue that conditions in the camps had been terrible for the guards as well, but the judges showed her no sympathy. The third woman condemned to death was Johanna Borman, somewhat older than the other two. She had spent years inside the concentration camp system, originally volunteering to work in one of the early women’s camps to earn more money. At Auschwitz, she earned the nickname “the woman with the dogs,” as she encouraged her large, vicious dogs to attack inmates at various times of the day.
These animals killed prisoners, acts that amounted to public murder. She was also known as “the Weasel” and sent inmates to their deaths in the gas chambers. The executions were carried out in the early hours of December 13, 1945, inside the execution chamber of Hamelin Prison. The hangman was Albert Pierrepoint, a skilled and highly experienced British executioner.
He had met with the women beforehand to measure their height and weight, calculating the length of the drop needed to break their necks as they fell through the trapdoor. The women were then held in small cells alone, in the style of condemned prisoners, until Pierrepoint, his assistant, and prison officials called for them one by one. The women were executed before the men, a gesture described as a form of decency. The condemned male guards were made to hear the trapdoor open and the necks snap from the adjoining chamber before they met the same fate.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was the first to be executed, a surprising choice given that Irma Grese was younger. She was taken from her small cell, her hands bound behind her back outside the cell due to its limited space. She was then led into the execution chamber and onto the gallows platform. Pierrepoint guided her to a chalk mark on the floor directly above the trapdoor.
He listened to her last words, placed a white hood over her head, adjusted the noose, and then quickly pulled the lever. The trapdoor opened, and Volkenrath fell to her death. The same procedure was repeated with Irma Grese and Johanna Borman. Some witnesses claimed Grese’s last word was “schnell,” “quickly,” as she begged Pierrepoint to end her life swiftly.
Others said she went to her death screaming and struggling, fully aware of what awaited her. The executions were harsh but quick. Pierrepoint had been chosen deliberately for his skill with the long-drop method of British hanging, designed to break the condemned person’s neck and end life within seconds. The intention was not to prolong suffering but to cause death as rapidly as possible.
When the women reached the end of the drop, their bodies shook and their necks broke as a result of Pierrepoint’s careful placement of the noose. His calculations ensured that death came quickly. The executions were also carried out away from public view, unlike those at Nuremberg. Only a small number of people witnessed the hangings, preventing the condemned Nazis from making a final statement before the world’s media, which might have generated sympathy for their cause and fate.
The evidence presented at trial had shown that these women had sent prisoners to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and had committed murder at Bergen-Belsen. There were other female guards, such as Herta Bothe, who had worked at Belsen and caused enormous suffering, but they escaped execution because they had not served at Auschwitz. The story of the executed guards did not end with their deaths. The bodies of the three women were buried immediately in the courtyard of Hamelin Prison.
When the prison was handed back to German authorities in the 1950s, the bodies were exhumed, placed in new coffins, and reburied in the nearby Am Wehl cemetery. There the remains of Irma Grese, Johanna Borman, and Elisabeth Volkenrath still lie today, in an unmarked communal grave shared with the male guards. Their crimes, however, were not forgotten.
The brutality they had inflicted led them to the gallows within months of the war’s end, and their actions remain among the worst committed within the Nazi concentration camp system.