On December 22, 1947, in Kraków, Poland, former personnel of Auschwitz, the deadliest of the German Nazi concentration camps, heard their verdict. After a month of horrifying testimony, it emerged that many SS guards had taken part in inhuman torture and mass murder of prisoners, often for pleasure, and that their cruelty went far beyond what their superiors had ordered. One of them was the guard Hildegard Lächert.
Hildegard Martha Lächert was born on March 19, 1920, in Berlin, which was then part of the Weimar Republic that governed Germany from 1918 to 1933. After finishing school, she began training as a seamstress but interrupted it and trained as a nurse instead.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933. Women like Hildegard were central to his plan to create an ideal Aryan community. Hitler valued women both for their activity in the Nazi movement and for their biological strength to preserve and spread the race.
In Nazi thinking, a larger and racially purer population would strengthen Germany's military power and secure colonists for conquered territories in Eastern Europe. The aggressive population policy of the Third Reich encouraged so-called racially pure women to bear as many children as possible.
Nazi population policy changed radically in 1936, when the SS leadership created a state-run program known as Lebensborn, meaning "Fountain of Life." The Lebensborn regulation prescribed that every SS member should father four children, whether within marriage or outside it. Lebensborn homes provided shelter for unmarried mothers with children, ensured birth certificates and financial support, and found adoptive parents for the children.
German women, however, played a fundamental role in the Nazi movement that went far beyond the party's propaganda that a woman's role was to bear children and be a mother in the household. Of an estimated 40 million German women in the Reich, about 13 million served in Nazi Party organizations. They worked as social workers, teachers, secretaries, nurses, auxiliary forces in the armed services and police, and in many other positions, including as guards in the camps.
In August 1939, shortly before the start of World War II, Lächert gave birth to an illegitimate son. When war broke out in September 1939, she was assigned to work in a munitions factory. Her second child, a daughter, was born in April 1941.
In April of the following year, Lächert was deployed to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only large women's camp established by the Nazis. Both male SS members served there as guards and administrators, along with 150 women who served as guards.
These women were either SS volunteers or had taken the job for the good pay and working conditions. Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for SS guards, who were taught there how to handle the prisoners they would oversee. These prisoners were to work until their death, and the task of their guards was to extract maximum work while they were still alive.
Ravensbrück thus became a training center, or school of violence, for about 3,500 women who served at Ravensbrück or in other concentration camps. One of them was Hildegard Lächert, who was transferred in October 1942, after completing her training, to the Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The Majdanek camp was under construction throughout its existence. It also contained warehouses of clothing and personal belongings stolen from Jews before their deaths in the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka II. In these warehouses, female prisoners sorted and repaired clothing.
In the winter of 1941 to 1942, the camp leadership began using Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners who were too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber. Mass murder by poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943. There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek. At least two of them were showers adapted for the use of Zyklon B, and at least one of them served to kill people.
The SS at Majdanek killed tens of thousands of Jews. Most of them came to the camp as forced laborers and either died as a result of brutally inhuman living conditions or were killed in the gas chambers. After the Germans decided they could no longer work, selections took place, and Hildegard Lächert took part in them, becoming a mistress over the life and death of many prisoners.
Lächert paid special attention to children. She offered them sweets to lure them into trucks that then took them to the gas chambers. With a pistol and a whip always at hand, she was notorious for beating prisoners without reason.
In the camp, Lächert stood out among the other guards for her sadism, and because of her cruelty and brutality she became known as "Bloody Brigitta," which in Polish means Krwawa Brygida. She was also an alcoholic, and the more she drank, the more sadistic she became.
On one occasion she set her German shepherd on a young woman, and the dog tore her apart. This happened in the sight of other female prisoners, who all saw Lächert smiling.
The Polish Holocaust survivor Bogna Javorska recalled after the war: "I was held at Majdanek together with my mother. One day, when soup was being distributed, I realized that I had forgotten to take spoons for myself and my mother. After I gave my bowl to my mother, I ran to get them. When Lächert saw that my mother was holding two bowls, she began to beat her in the face and kick her. At that moment I returned and tried to explain the situation to her. In response, I received several punches in the face. At that time my mother was 40 years old. She died during the liquidation of the camp."
She continued: "On another occasion, Lächert beat my colleague because of a cigarette she found in her pocket. I saw her after she returned from the room. Lächert was covered in bruises and her whole face was swollen. I also saw Lächert knock a Jewish woman to the ground in the garden. While searching for hidden valuables, Lächert pushed her to the ground, lifted her dress with a stick, and began performing a gynecological examination. While searching for valuables, Lächert, a trained nurse, pushed the stick into the woman's vagina. The woman groaned and screamed so terribly that we ran away because we could not bear to watch it. Lächert did this in the sight of the female prisoners working in the garden. That woman was a Polish Jew brought to Majdanek after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Later I saw that woman lying covered in blood. I don't know her name. Perhaps they took her to the gas chamber, or she simply died."
Javorska continued: "In June 1943, a Jewish woman was hanged and we were driven to the gallows. We turned our eyes away so that we would not have to look at the execution. Lächert, standing next to our block, turned our heads toward the gallows and kept laughing. I never heard of any prisoner whom Lächert helped in any way. Once Lächert struck my friend Kunka on the head so hard that she had to spend a long time in the infirmary. The wound she received left a permanent scar, and her hair never grew back there."
In the camp, Lächert constantly harassed female prisoners and made their lives miserable at every step. Toward the end of March 1943 there were frosts, and Lächert denied sweaters to the female prisoners working in the garden, that is, in the open air. She did so even though the sweaters had been officially issued and the camp leadership had allowed the prisoners to wear them. The sweaters were withheld only from the women who worked in the garden; the women who worked under a roof were not deprived of their sweaters.
Another witness recalled that at the time when gassing was being carried out on a large scale and the crematorium could not keep up with burning the dead bodies, a large pit was dug in the garden where corpses were thrown and burned. Hildegard Lächert was seen many times approaching the pit with a pleased expression on her face and inhaling the smoke with relish.
At Majdanek, Lächert often took female prisoners to the washroom, where male personnel worked and tried to disinfect the women's pubic areas, and many of them tried to avoid this procedure. Lächert was the one who caught the women attempting to avoid this disinfection, and she laughed when the Kapo before whom they were brought poured a decontamination substance over them.
On one occasion, when Lächert noticed two young Greek women washing toilets, she pushed both of them inside and laughed as they drowned and swallowed the contents in the latrine. Another Holocaust witness testified that Jewish women gathered bread during the day or bought it from other prisoners and hid it for later, and Lächert then took it from them.
She behaved badly toward male prisoners as well. Once Lächert was seen beating one of the camp prisoners with a whip that ended in an iron ball and kicking him with her steel boots until he was covered in blood and no longer looked like a human being at all.
Because of pregnancy, Lächert left the camp in August or September 1943, and her third child, who died shortly after birth, was born in April 1944. During postwar interrogations she refused to give the name of the child's father. She said only that he was an SS member from Lublin, which was only 25 kilometers from the camp.
After the birth of her son in April 1944, she ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau and in Rajsko, a subcamp of Auschwitz where women were assigned to two labor details, gardening and agriculture. At Rajsko, Lächert was known for bringing SS members home, and because of these visits she neglected her basic work duties and disrupted the daily order of the female prisoners, who often had to wait two to three hours for roll call. Her bad behavior toward female prisoners continued there as well, but she was less cruel.
Lächert left Auschwitz in January 1945, when Soviet troops approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as death marches. Prisoners had to march long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
From January 1945, Lächert worked in the transit camp of Bolzano in Italy, where she remained until the camp was closed in April 1945. After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Lächert when she was tried in the Auschwitz trial, which began on November 24, 1947, and lasted one month.
On December 22, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków sentenced Hildegard Lächert, a mother of two children, to 15 years in prison. Under an amnesty, however, Lächert was released from prison in December 1956. She even received 6,000 German marks from the West German government as an alleged prisoner of war.
After her release, Lächert briefly cooperated with the CIA and the BND, the German intelligence service, which at that time commonly conducted interviews with Nazi war criminals released from prisons in Eastern Europe. But because she was quickly deemed useless, her cooperation with these agencies ended after only a few months.
In August 1973, her dark past caught up with her again when West German authorities arrested her in connection with the upcoming third Majdanek trial and interrogated her about her past at Majdanek. Lächert was released, but in June 1979 she was arrested again as a suspect and brought to trial.
That same year, Lächert was nominated by a right-wing group as a candidate for the European Parliament. One of their lawyers, Ludwig Bock, even argued that there was no evidence that more than 100,000 Jews had died during the Nazi period, and suggested that Hitler did not carry out a policy of exterminating Jews and that the gas chambers found in the camps might have been mere laundries, or were even built by occupation units after Germany's capitulation. He even called for the arrest of one witness because she testified that on Nazi orders she had carried a canister of poison gas to Majdanek.
Although the prosecution demanded a life sentence for Lächert, the court ultimately sentenced her to only 12 years in prison for participation in selections for the gas chamber, mistreatment of prisoners, and complicity in the murders of 1,196 people. Lächert, however, never had to serve this sentence, because her imprisonment in Poland and the time she spent in custody awaiting trial were counted as having served the sentence.
She spent the rest of her life as a free woman and died on April 14, 1995, in Berlin at the age of 75. No tears were shed for Hildegard Lächert.