Three women who served as SS guards at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were hanged at Hameln Prison on December 13, 1945, marking the first executions of female war criminals under British law in the twentieth century and closing one of the most harrowing chapters of the post-war reckoning with Nazi atrocities.
Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Johanna Bormann were convicted of crimes against humanity at the Belsen Trial, a 54-day proceeding that 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the world the systematic cruelty inflicted upon tens of thousands of prisoners at the camp in northern Germany. Their executions were carried out by Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most experienced hangman, using the long-drop method.
The Belsen Trial, which ran from September 17 to November 17, 1945, brought 45 SS guards and former camp workers before a British military court. The defendants faced charges related to the horrific conditions at Bergen-Belsen as well as atrocities committed at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, where many had previously served.
What shocked observers around the world was not only the scale of the cruelty but the fact that so many of the perpetrators were young women. Some were barely out of their teens when they committed their crimes, having been indoctrinated into the Nazi regime’s machinery of death.
Bergen-Belsen was established in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp and was taken over in part by the SS in 1943, eventually becoming a concentration camp complex with multiple sections for different prisoner groups. Between 1943 and 1944, thousands were transported there, forced into slave labour in the shoe commando, recovering leather from footwear for recycling.
The camp later became a recovery facility where sick prisoners arrived from other camps, supposedly to regain their health. Instead, the vast majority were put to work and died of disease, starvation, and inadequate medical care. In August 1944, a women’s camp was established, bringing large numbers of female prisoners who mostly stayed only briefly before being moved to other locations for slave labour.
It was at Bergen-Belsen that Margot and Anne Frank were transported, and both died within the barbed wire fences of the camp. Their fate became one of the most enduring symbols of the Holocaust’s toll on innocent lives.
By late 1944, Josef Kramer, known as the Beast of Belsen, was in charge, and under his leadership the camp swelled dramatically. Approximately 85,000 people were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and within a year the prisoner population had risen tenfold, causing catastrophic overcrowding.
The lack of food led to mass malnutrition and starvation. Disease swept through the camp with devastating outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery. Bergen-Belsen was designed to house only 10,000 prisoners, but the influx created conditions that killed scores of people daily.
It is estimated that over 120,000 prisoners passed through the camp during its operation.
When British and Canadian forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they encountered scenes of unimaginable horror. They found over 13,000 unburied bodies and 60,000 prisoners in a terrible state, many dying of starvation and disease. The majority had been abandoned without food or water for days, and 500 were dying each day.
The BBC reported the scenes: here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which. The living lay with their heads across the corpses.
Around them moved the awful ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people with nothing to do and no hope of life.
Babies had been born in the camp, tiny things that could not live. A mother driven mad screamed at a British soldier to give her milk for her child and thrust a tiny bundle into his arms before running off crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
One soldier described the day at Belsen as the most horrible of his life. The British began providing care and support for the prisoners, but revenge killings did take place, and even SS guards shot and killed some prisoners who tried to get food from storehouses.
Over the following days, prisoners were deloused and survivors were moved to a different camp. The British forced many SS staff to bury the bodies in mass graves, and the camp was eventually burned to the ground by flame-throwing tanks due to the typhus epidemic.
Almost 500 people had worked at Bergen-Belsen during its operation. From the trials, 11 defendants were sentenced to death, including the three women whose executions drew particular attention.
Irma Grese, known as the Beautiful Beast and the Hyena of Auschwitz, was only 22 when she faced the court. She was the youngest person to die under British law in the twentieth century. Her own father had thrown her out of his home in disgust at her decision to become a concentration camp guard.
Grese served at multiple camps and was known for participating in selections at Auschwitz, choosing women and children to be sent to their deaths in the gas chambers. She murdered prisoners with her own hands and weapons, and was notorious for setting dogs on prisoners, encouraging them to rip their victims to bits.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was also young when she faced the judges. She worked as an overseer inside Auschwitz and was noted for selecting prisoners to go to the gas chambers. She was well regarded within the Auschwitz command and oversaw all camp sections for female prisoners, effectively serving as head of the women’s prison.
Volkenrath was a prolific murderer, often beating prisoners unconscious with a truncheon. She once pushed an elderly prisoner down stairs to her death and was known for shooting prisoners at will.
Johanna Bormann, known as the woman with the dogs, was older than Grese and Volkenrath. She worked in several different camps and was selected to work inside Auschwitz, where she abused prisoners terribly. She was known for setting her dogs on prisoners and murdering them, and she also took part in selections.
Other women convicted at the Belsen Trial received prison sentences. Herta Ehlert, Ilse Förster, Hertha Bothe, Irene Haschke, Gertrude Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrude Feist, Frieda Walter, and Hilde Lobauer were all sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, having been found guilty of fewer offences than those condemned to death.
The executions were carried out on December 13, 1945, at Hameln Prison. Albert Pierrepoint, an experienced executioner who used the long-drop method, had met with the condemned prior to the executions to determine their height, weight, and the drop needed to snap their necks.
Pierrepoint wrote in his biography about meeting Irma Grese. She walked out of her cell and came towards us laughing, he wrote. She seemed as bony a girl as anyone could ever meet.
When asked her age, she paused and smiled. Eventually she said 21, which we knew to be correct.
Grese was five feet five and a quarter inches tall and weighed 150 pounds. She was given a drop of seven feet four inches. She was chosen to be the first of the condemned to die, though there is some debate as to whether she or Volkenrath was executed first.
Pierrepoint described the execution morning. We climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were awaiting. The German officer at the door flung it open, and we filed past a row of faces and into the execution chamber.
Brigadier Paton-Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised. He gave me the signal, and a sigh of released breath was audible in the chamber.
At 9:34 am, Grese walked into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing round it, then walked to the centre of the trap where a chalk mark had been made. She stood on the mark very firmly. As the white cap was placed over her head, she said in her voice, schnell, the German word for quick.
The drop crashed down. The doctor followed into the pit and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes, her body was taken down and placed in a coffin ready for burial.
Elisabeth Volkenrath continued to deny her involvement in the Holocaust following her death sentence. She stated that she did not know where the prisoners she selected were going and claimed to have never heard of the gas chambers. At around 10:04 am, she was brought from her cell, her identity confirmed, and handed over to Pierrepoint for execution.
She was only 26 when she was executed, and even younger when she committed her horrific crimes.
Johanna Bormann was the outlier of the three women executed. She was much older than Grese and Volkenrath but displayed the same sadistic tendencies. When Pierrepoint met her, he stated that she limped down the corridor looking old and haggard.
She was 52, standing only a little over five feet, and was trembling as she was put on the scale. In German, she said, I have my feelings.
Bormann was executed with efficiency at 10:38 am, her drop having been calculated at eight feet eight inches. She was the final woman executed following the Belsen Trial.
The men condemned at the trial were then fetched from their cells to face their sentences. Pierrepoint performed 11 executions that day inside Hameln Prison.
The executions of the female guards of Bergen-Belsen demonstrated to the world the depths of cruelty to which these three women in particular had descended. The Belsen Trial brought to global attention the terrible capacity of humans to inflict suffering upon one another, with the suffering of those inside the camp shown in front of the world’s media.
The suffering of those responsible for the horrific conditions at Belsen was short-lived and was no match for what they inflicted on innocent people. Bergen-Belsen was the place where Anne Frank and tens of thousands of others died because of a regime that sought to exterminate so many people from the face of the earth.
The executions of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Johanna Bormann were justified. But for so much suffering, only a few were executed. Much interest fell on those who were simply sentenced to time in prison, and there was considerable debate as to whether more people could have been sentenced to death for the crimes of Bergen-Belsen.
The Belsen Trial and its aftermath remain a stark reminder of the consequences of hatred, indoctrination, and the failure of humanity to intervene before millions perished. The images of the camp’s liberation, captured on film, continue to serve as evidence of the horrors that were committed and as a warning to future generations.