The Nazi concentration camps were engineered as places of systematic destruction, yet even within that manufactured hell, the SS found itself chronically short of staff. To fill the gap, they turned to the prisoners themselves, recruiting privileged inmates known as kapos to carry out the heaviest and most brutal work. Those who rose to the top of this internal hierarchy received the rank of Oberkapo, or head prisoner-officer, and were granted powers that set them apart from every other soul in the camp. Unlike the masses of prisoners who perished by the hundreds of thousands from exposure in unheated barracks, the kapos enjoyed real comforts.
They lived in the same blocks as other inmates but were given a separate room, closed off, heated, and even fitted with fans. They had access to basic hygiene, better shoes, and sometimes civilian clothing. Their food was far superior, a direct consequence of their role in distributing rations, which allowed them to quietly take more for themselves. In exchange for these privileges, they were expected to work not out of fear but out of a sense of obligation to their SS masters.
Their duties included keeping order in the barracks, distributing food, and supervising the labor of other prisoners. Cruelty toward the condemned was not just common but effectively required. Because so many prisoners competed for these positions, the selection process was fierce. According to the memoirs of female prisoners, the kapos often committed even greater atrocities than the guards and overseers who formally ran the camps.
Women kapos were assigned to the female barracks, where their authority was nearly absolute. They were frequently issued clubs to make maintaining order easier. Many female inmates later recalled being so terrified of their kapos that they would hide under their beds when one entered the block. In the Majdanek camp, where the women’s barracks were overcrowded and where some of the most infamous overseers worked, the most brutal and cruel female prisoners were chosen to serve as kapos.
These were women who had been imprisoned as criminals or for reasons entirely unrelated to politics. Under the supervision of the guards, they committed horrors that were often worse than those carried out by the camp administration itself. One rule, for example, forbade prisoners from looking directly at a kapo. Anyone who broke this rule could be punished by having smoke blown in her face or by being beaten with a club.
The female kapos exercised overwhelming control over the prisoners sent out to work and over the work itself. Frequently, it was they, not the SS guards, who savagely beat exhausted inmates without any justification, either during the work or on the way to it. The more atrocities a kapo committed, the more likely her SS masters were to notice and reward her zeal. But no matter how many privileges were granted, the kapos could always be stripped of their rank.
Once demoted, the Nazis could do whatever they pleased with the guilty woman. Most often, she was simply thrown back into the general barracks, where the other prisoners treated their former tormentor with unrestrained savagery. Sometimes, on the orders of the camp leadership, a disgraced kapo was executed by lethal injection or by shooting. Even such a death, however, was considered more merciful and humane than the fate that awaited ordinary prisoners.
There were rare exceptions, however, where individual kapos behaved with a level of humanity that stood out against the overwhelming cruelty. During the trial of the Bergen-Belsen camp administration, a female kapo named Lydia Zwinstein appeared as a witness. She not only refused to commit atrocities against the other prisoners but also denounced the actions of one of the camp’s leaders. When the camp needed to recruit one hundred people to work in the kitchen, at least six hundred volunteered.
During the roll call, the prisoners were unable to stand straight, and an SS man named Wayne Gardner beat the kapo who had allegedly failed to restore order. Zwinstein testified before the court: “When they failed to restore order, Wayne Gardner fired a shot into the air. At that moment, I said in German: I do not want to stay in this group, because I do not want to die after all this suffering. Wayne Gardner heard me, and hit me on the head about fifteen times with a rubber dagger, and after that I lost consciousness.
” Her testimony was a notable anomaly. During the same trial, fourteen other kapos sat in the dock, convicted of committing atrocities against prisoners. Another exception involved the chief kapo at a small, obscure camp in the Polish town of Gędingen. There, the women recruited as kapos were practically indistinguishable from the other prisoners, both in terms of their treatment of inmates and in the privileges they received.
During the liquidation of the camp or following the mass executions, the Nazis sent these kapos to the gas chambers first. Yet these cases were unique. The general pattern was that the kapos survived only through their devotion to their SS masters. In Auschwitz, there was a mother of two named Hildi Lobau, who distinguished herself as a camp senior by torturing sick and weak prisoners.
She was granted a special privilege by the administration: several dogs were assigned to her, and she would gleefully set them on prisoners who could not move or stand. Many of those unfortunate victims never got up again. In Ravensbrück, one of the most notorious kapos was Carman Mory. The circumstances of her death sentence and subsequent reprieve remain unclear, but it is known that through the intervention of a friend of her father, her name was struck from the execution list, and she continued to serve as a kapo in the barracks.
From that moment onward, Mory seemed determined to prove herself, and she became a true demon. She was described as one of the most psychologically deviant, masochistic, and insatiably lustful women in the camp. After the war, her crimes were justly punished. Despite receiving a lenient sentence at first, she was later retried and condemned to death.
Her friend Eugenia Vanschmidt was no less cruel and deranged. Although she never reached Mory’s level of atrocity, she earned a reputation among the prisoners as one of the most brutal kapos in Ravensbrück. In the camps of Ravensbrück, Majdanek, and Auschwitz, the female kapos wielded power comparable to that of the guards. Within their barracks, they had rights that surpassed everyone else’s.
Whenever they wished, they could beat the unfortunate prisoners, often to death. Their duties included tearing children away from their mothers, after which the infants were often sent to the gas chambers. In practical terms, a kapo’s life in the camp consisted of terrorizing prisoners, controlling their work, and sending them to the gas chambers or to execution squads for shooting. Given this record, it is not surprising that after the war many of these women faced justice.
One of the most notorious was Elisabeth Willmann, nicknamed the dumbest prison warden. During her service, she proved herself so thoroughly that she was promoted to the position of overseer. Even in that role, she personally participated in selecting female prisoners to be sent to the gas chamber. Vera Salvequart, another infamous prisoner who worked as a camp nurse, administered poisoned powders to inmates, claiming they would give them strength.
When the powders were unavailable, she gave them shoes that looked good but were in fact poisoned. The prisoners died in terrible agony. Yet despite their privileged status, the kapos faced a genuine nightmare of their own as the war reached its end. When the Red Army and the Allied forces began liberating one camp after another across Europe, the camp administrations simply fled, leaving the kapos to face the prisoners alone with no one to protect them.
The prisoners took their revenge. What exactly happened remains shrouded in obscurity, with only scattered memoirs and photographic documents providing a partial picture of what many interned women suffered on the eve of their release. It is generally believed that women in a state of rage are crueler than men. These women had survived a genuine hell, and many had had their children, including newborns, torn from them and sent to the gas chambers.
Many kapos were killed on the spot, either strangled or hanged. After the liberation of the camps, the bodies of the female kapos were found torn apart and mutilated to such a degree that identification was nearly impossible. In the barracks, the prisoners beat their overseers to death with wooden boards torn from their bunks. Others were drowned in tubs or basins of water.
Many had their heads smashed. Some were stabbed with sticks. These days of slaughter were the most terrible for the women who could not escape or lost their way among the other prisoners.