At 9:34 on the morning of December 13, 1945, a 26-year-old woman was led into the execution room of Hamelin prison. Her name was Elisabeth Volkenrath. A few years earlier, she had been a hairdresser from a quiet German town, an ordinary young woman with an ordinary life. By the end of the war, survivors knew her as one of the most feared female guards of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Witnesses said she beat prisoners without mercy, sent starving women into punishment cells, and stood at selections helping decide who would live and who would be sent to their deaths. When she faced a British military court, Volkenrath denied almost everything. But the women who survived her did not stay silent. Their testimonies destroyed her defense, exposed her cruelty, and sealed her fate.
She was born Elisabeth Müllmann in 1919 in Schönau an der Katzbach, a German town that is now part of Poland. There was nothing remarkable about her beginning. She came from a working-class background, left school, and trained as a hairdresser, finding work in a local salon. To anyone who saw her then, she may have looked ordinary.
But Germany was changing, and as the Nazi regime tightened its grip, ordinary people were being pulled into something much darker. In 1938, she moved to Berlin to work in another salon. When the war began in 1939, the demand for labor in Germany’s war machine and its vast network of camps skyrocketed. In 1941, Volkenrath made a choice that would define her legacy.
She volunteered for service as an Aufseherin, a female guard in the Nazi concentration camp system. Her exact motivations remain unknown, but the consequences of that choice are well documented. Her first post was at Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s concentration camp north of Berlin. It was the main training ground for female SS guards.
There, women from all walks of life were systematically indoctrinated and desensitized. They were taught to see prisoners not as people but as subhuman enemies of the state, identified only by a number on their arm and a colored triangle on their striped uniform. Volkenrath proved to be an excellent student. She absorbed the lessons and learned to wield power with an iron fist.
She was then promoted to Oberaufseherin of Auschwitz, where her authority was absolute. Survivor testimonies from her postwar trial painted a chilling, consistent picture of a woman who seemed to revel in her power to inflict pain. She was not a distant administrator signing papers. She was a hands-on tormentor.
Her favorite tool was a rubber truncheon, which she used with terrifying frequency. One of the most damning accounts came from a survivor named Vera Fischer, who described in an affidavit how Volkenrath, without provocation, confronted her and beat her mercilessly until she lost consciousness. Fischer woke up in the camp infirmary, where she stayed for three weeks. Court records from the Belsen trial detailed dozens of such beatings, where she struck prisoners until they were unconscious or dead.
Another survivor, Helene Herzkovitz, testified to being beaten and then sentenced by Volkenrath to the camp’s standing cells, cramped, dark spaces where prisoners were forced to stand for days without food or water. One of the most infamous stories of her brutality, repeated by multiple witnesses, involved an elderly woman. Frail from starvation, the woman was struggling to climb a flight of stairs. For reasons known only to her, Volkenrath became enraged at the woman’s slow pace.
She walked up behind her and with a single, violent shove, pushed her from the top of the stairs. The woman tumbled down the hard steps and died at the bottom. Beyond these individual acts, Volkenrath played a direct role in the machinery of mass extermination. As Oberaufseherin, she was a key participant in the dreaded selections.
These were the moments when new transports of prisoners arrived or when the camp population was culled. Standing on the ramp alongside SS doctors, she helped decide who was fit for slave labor and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers. She would walk through the barracks, her gaze sweeping over the emaciated women, pointing out anyone who looked too sick or weak to work. During her trial, she denied all of this, claiming she was never present for selections.
But the testimony of numerous survivors directly contradicted her, placing her at the scene as an active participant in mass murder. As the Red Army pushed west in late 1944, the Nazi regime began emptying its camps in occupied Poland, desperate to hide the evidence of its crimes. Prisoners were forced onto brutal marches, records were destroyed, and the machinery of terror began retreating into Germany. In the final weeks before Auschwitz was liberated, Volkenrath was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany.
Bergen-Belsen did not have gas chambers, but death was everywhere. The camp had become a dumping ground for prisoners evacuated from other camps. It was overcrowded, starving, filthy, and overwhelmed by disease. Typhus spread through the barracks, food was almost gone, and bodies lay unburied across the camp.
Into this dying world came Elisabeth Volkenrath. She did not bring mercy. She brought the brutality of Auschwitz with her. At Bergen-Belsen, she was again placed in a position of authority, and survivors said her cruelty did not change.
Even as the Third Reich was collapsing around her, she continued to rule through fear. When British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they found a scene almost impossible to comprehend. Thousands of bodies lay across the camp, while the living were weak, sick, and barely surviving. The captured SS guards, including Volkenrath, were forced to help bury the dead.
But survivors later testified that even then, under British watch, she still showed cruelty toward prisoners working nearby. In the autumn of 1945, a British military tribunal was held in a gymnasium in Lüneburg, Germany. It became known as the Belsen trial, one of the first major war crimes trials after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Forty-five former SS personnel and camp officials from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz were placed before the court.
Among them was Elisabeth Volkenrath, listed as accused number seven. The case against her was built on the voices of the women who had survived her. One by one, they stood before the court and described what they had seen. They spoke of beatings, punishment, and the fear that followed her through the barracks.
Witnesses also accused her of taking part in the selections at Auschwitz. Volkenrath denied it. But the testimonies kept coming, and together they painted the same picture. This was not a powerless woman trapped inside the system.
This was a guard who had used her authority with violence and who survivors remembered as one of the most feared women in the camps. When it was her turn to take the stand, Volkenrath pleaded not guilty. Her testimony was a master class in denial. She tried to portray herself as a low-level functionary simply doing her job.
In a stunning attempt to gain sympathy, she claimed the conditions were harsh for the guards too, stating that it was terrible in the camps, but also terrible for them. When confronted with dozens of accounts of her beating prisoners, she flatly denied them, admitting only to occasionally slapping a prisoner’s face. She claimed she didn’t know prisoners by name, only by their numbers. Regarding the selections at Auschwitz, she was adamant she was never there.
She dismissed the consistent, detailed accounts from numerous survivors as a coordinated campaign of lies. But her defense crumbled under the sheer weight of the evidence. On November 17, 1945, the tribunal found Elisabeth Volkenrath guilty on both counts for her crimes at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The sentence followed swiftly: death by hanging.
The execution of the Belsen convicts was scheduled for December 13, 1945, at Hamelin prison. The man tasked with the sentence was Britain’s most experienced executioner, Albert Pierrepoint. Pierrepoint was a professional who viewed his work as a technical craft, using the long drop method of hanging, a scientific technique designed to break the neck instantly. The length of the drop had to be perfectly calibrated to the person’s weight.
In the days leading up to the execution, the gallows, built inside a prison workshop, were tested with sandbags to ensure the mechanism was flawless. Thirteen prisoners from the Belsen trial were sentenced to hang that day. The executions were scheduled at roughly half-hour intervals. The three women, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Irma Grese, and Johanna Bormann, were to be executed first, individually.
On the morning of December 13, the prison was tense. The execution schedule was followed to the minute. At 9:34 a. m.
, Volkenrath was escorted to the execution chamber. Reports from those present noted her composure. She walked steadily, her face a mask of calm. Inside the execution room, the process was swift.
She was positioned on a chalk mark on the trapdoor. Pierrepoint’s assistant secured her legs while Pierrepoint placed a white hood over her head and fitted the noose around her neck, positioning the knot just under her left ear. He then stepped back, took hold of the large wooden lever, and pulled. Elisabeth Volkenrath dropped in an instant.
The rope went taut, and the force of the long drop did its work exactly as calculated. Her neck was broken instantly. A few minutes later, a doctor officially certified her death. The gallows were then prepared for Irma Grese, who followed at 10:03 a.
m. The precise, methodical process continued until all thirteen were executed. The bodies, including Volkenrath’s, were buried in the prison yard and later moved to an unmarked grave in a nearby cemetery. The story of the hairdresser who became a mass murderer had reached its final, unceremonious end.
The case of Elisabeth Volkenrath is a chilling look at the human capacity for cruelty. It forces a question that still has no simple answer: how does an ordinary person become a monster? Her descent began with a choice to join a system built on hatred and was accelerated by indoctrination, ambition, and the intoxicating allure of absolute power.
In the universe of the concentration camp, where all moral lines were erased, she discovered a profound cruelty within herself and chose to let it flourish.