Carmen Mory was born on July 2, 1906, in Bern, Switzerland, into a family that would one day make her an unlikely figure in the darkest machinery of the Third Reich. Her father was a British doctor, Ernest Millore, and her mother was a Filipino woman who had been taken in during one of his colonial ventures. The family’s wealth came largely from a Swiss businessman named Samuel Bischoff, who was her mother’s common-law husband. The marriage was never registered, and when Bischoff died, his estate became a legal battlefield.
The young Carmen watched her mother fight for a share of the inheritance, a lesson in ruthlessness that would define her later years. Named after the Virgin of Mount Carmel, a Spanish Catholic devotion popular in the Philippines, Carmen was raised with a religious education, though her appearance gave her little advantage in the world. She grew to just over 150 centimeters tall and was considered plain, a fact that would shape her ambitions and her resentments. Her family’s money gave her music lessons, travel, and fluency in six languages, and by the early 1920s she was performing as a singer in Bern’s restaurants and concert halls, while also working as a correspondent for local newspapers.
By 1930, at the age of 24, Carmen moved to Berlin, drawn by the most lucrative opportunity of her journalism career. She arrived three years before the Nazis fully seized power, and for a time she enjoyed the city’s cultural energy. But by 1932, as the NSDAP was consolidating its grip, she began writing articles for ultraright publications, aligning herself openly with the ideology of the coming regime. What made this remarkable was that Carmen Mory was herself of mixed Filipino and Swiss descent, far from the blonde Aryan ideal the Nazis would soon enforce.
Rather than face persecution for her appearance, she decided to join the persecutors. In 1933 and 1934, using the contacts she had made as a journalist, she became an informant for the Gestapo, working on her own free will. She was sent to her native Switzerland to monitor anti-fascist circles, reporting on the moods and movements of German refugees and left-wing activists. Her own family and friends knew nothing of her secret mission.
Later, she was dispatched to France, where she is believed to have identified Jewish and communist leaders among the emigrant community, and possibly collected intelligence on the Maginot Line. The full scope of her work remains unknown, as the Gestapo’s records of her status were either destroyed or lost. In 1938, French intelligence finally arrested her. After two years of detention and a trial, the court of the Third French Republic sentenced her to death.
The public, however, learned nothing of this, and some historians believe France used her as a double agent, forcing her to reveal the identities of Gestapo collaborators within France. The exact circumstances of her release are still unclear. She was pardoned in 1940, possibly due to the influence of an influential friend of her father’s among French medical authorities, or possibly because she offered her services to French intelligence herself. What is documented is that when Carmen Mory returned to Berlin in the autumn of 1940, the Gestapo had lost trust in her.
She was arrested at the airport and taken directly to the office of Heinrich Himmler, who personally interrogated her for what some researchers estimate lasted an entire week. After the ordeal, she was released and forced to swear an oath not to leave Germany. She was intended to work on Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts aimed at France and Britain, but before that plan could take effect, she attempted to escape. The attempt failed, and instead of a radio studio, she was sent to Ravensbrück.
Ravensbrück was the only major concentration camp built exclusively for women, established in May 1939 in the state of Brandenburg, roughly 90 kilometers north of Berlin. It was designed to hold 3,000 prisoners, but by February 1945 the population had grown to over 46,000. Conditions were brutal: barracks meant for 150 women housed many more, and prisoners died of starvation, disease, exhaustion from forced labor at the Siemens plant, hours-long roll calls in thin clothing, beatings, and attacks by dogs. About 50,000 women are estimated to have been killed there, some gassed, some shot, many simply worked to death.
The camp’s guards, recruited from local women, were notoriously cruel, and prisoners could receive 25 lashes for minor infractions like curling their hair. Among the prisoners were Soviet female soldiers, political activists, sex workers, and large numbers of Jewish and Romani women. Carmen Mory arrived in this nightmare and immediately recognized an opportunity. Some prisoners chose to become kapos, camp functionaries who collaborated with the SS in exchange for privileges.
They received clean quarters, better food, and exemption from the harshest labor, and in return they policed, informed on, and brutalized their fellow prisoners. Carmen, with her talent for deception and quick decision-making, became one of them. Her exact activities before 1944 remain poorly documented, but it is believed she initially worked as an informant for the camp’s Gestapo branch, using the conspiratorial skills she had perfected in Paris. Over time, she earned a promotion to block elder, one of the few prisoners granted that rank.
She lived in a separate section of the barracks with the other kapos, enjoying improved food and freedom from manual labor, her only duties being observation and reporting. Her cruelty became notorious. She worked mainly in the 10th block, the medical block where women with mental disorders and tuberculosis were housed. Witnesses described her behavior as inhuman and bestial.
She singled out the mentally unstable, women whose fragile psyches made them easy targets, and beat them with a stick, sometimes to the point of disability. Even hardened guards were reportedly disturbed by her violence. She was accused of being indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least 60 Jewish women, of participating in selections for the gas chambers, and of tearing children away from their mothers, children who were then used for experiments or killed. According to the Yad Vashem organization, she was considered one of the most violent kapos in all of Ravensbrück, earning the nickname the Black Angel of Ravensbrück.
Mory formed a close relationship with Dr. Percival Claude, a doctor at the camp known for his willingness to conduct lethal medical experiments. The two were described as inseparable, and their relationship was widely rumored to be intimate. Their passion, witnesses suggested, allowed them to escape the moral weight of their actions, retreating into a private world where the future did not matter.
Claude, however, avoided the fate that awaited Carmen. After the war, he hid in Europe for two and a half years and then disappeared into medical missions in Africa, never facing trial. When British troops liberated Ravensbrück in 1945, Carmen Mory acted quickly to reinvent herself again. She was fluent in English, and she offered her services to the British officers, helping them locate and identify the camp’s medical personnel and guards.
She pretended to be an ordinary lower-level medical worker who had herself been a prisoner, and some even pitied her. Her assistance was so precise and so effective that the British simply let her go. For a little over a year, she tried to live quietly among the ordinary German population, but former prisoners recognized her and reported her to the British military authorities. She was arrested and put on trial.
The trial, held in 1947, was part of the wider Ravensbrück war crimes proceedings. Despite a year of collected evidence against her, Carmen Mory was unrepentant. She claimed all accusations were false, insisting that if she were guilty she would have confessed. Her courtroom behavior was extraordinary.
She refused food, insulted the guards, calling them English pigs, threw leftover food at them, and behaved more like a reporter covering the proceedings than a defendant. At one point she mistakenly walked to the witness stand and had to be escorted back to her place. She objected to questions, gave long speeches, and even wrote a letter to the British military prosecutor expressing regret that she would not live to see her planned execution. The tribunal found her guilty of causing the deaths of at least 60 women and of brutalizing many more, and sentenced her to death.
The British never carried out the sentence. On the night of her conviction, Carmen Mory cut her own wrists in her prison cell. She knew how to do it quietly, having learned from the professionals she had once worked alongside. By morning she had bled to death, and when the guards found her, some witnesses claimed there was a faint smile on her face.
She had cheated the executioner, just as she had cheated everyone else throughout her life. The Black Angel of Ravensbrück, who had nailed herself to the Aryan cause despite her own origins, had escaped the noose in the only way left to her.