On February 3, 1947, in Hamburg, Germany, the former staff of Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany, heard their sentences read. After nearly two months of gruesome testimonies, the world learned the full extent of the inhumane mistreatment and torture carried out by the camp’s male and female personnel during its six years of operation. Of the 16 defendants, 11 were sentenced to death by hanging.
One of those condemned was Dorothea Binz, the former deputy chief overseer. Binz was born on March 16, 1920, in Düsterlake, a town near Ravensbrück, then part of the Weimar Republic. She was 14 years old when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933.
Nazi propaganda became inescapable across Germany. Joseph Goebbels, head of the new propaganda ministry, created a cult of personality that glorified Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior. Propaganda dominated the press, film, radio, and public spaces. Portraits and statues of Hitler appeared everywhere, and cities and towns renamed streets and public spaces in his honor. In public, ordinary Germans were expected to praise Hitler and give the so-called German greeting, “Heil Hitler.”
Propaganda also permeated school curricula, with children taught to praise Hitler’s leadership. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became chancellor. Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.
Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation marginalized and disenfranchised Germany’s Jewish citizenry, expelling Jews from their professions and commercial life. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom, a series of coordinated violent riots against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories on November 9 and 10, 1938, thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. In January 1933, approximately 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany; around 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
In August 1939, when Dorothea Binz was only 19 years old, she applied for a position as a kitchen manager at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, allegedly to avoid being forced to work in a factory. Since that position had already been taken, she was hired as a guard instead. Ravensbrück opened in May 1939 and was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis.
The camp was staffed by SS men who served as guards and administrators, as well as around 150 women who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for good pay and working conditions. By November, Binz was already guarding ten female prisoners who were sawing and driving wood. Until May 1940, she also supervised prisoners carrying coke, unloading bricks, driving rubble, unloading straw sacks, cleaning floors, and working in construction management, gardening, and personnel development.
In August or September 1940, Binz was promoted to deputy head of the cell block. In this so-called bunker, prisoners who violated camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death. Binz, together with her superior Maria Mandl, was responsible for carrying out the canings there. In April 1941, Binz joined the Nazi Party. When Mandl was promoted to chief senior overseer in April 1942, Binz became head of the cell block. In addition, Binz assisted Mandl in selecting women for human experiments.
In July 1943, Binz was unofficially promoted to deputy chief overseer, and the promotion was made official in February 1944. As a member of the command staff between 1943 and 1945, she directed training and assigned duties to over 100 female guards at one time. Binz trained some of the cruelest female guards in the Nazi concentration camp system, such as Irma Grese. She used indoctrination techniques to brainwash new recruits and turned them into ruthless psychopaths like herself.
Thanks to Dorothea Binz, Ravensbrück became a training center, or a school of violence, for about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps. At Ravensbrück, Binz’s behavior toward the female prisoners became increasingly sadistic. She would beat, slap, kick, shoot, whip, stomp, and abuse the weakest and most fearful inmates without any reason.
Holocaust survivors later testified that she aroused such terror that when she appeared at roll call, silence fell. She ordered female inmates to stand at roll call for hours, and sometimes she set a dog on them or kicked women to death without any sign of mercy. During interrogations, she slapped prisoners and participated in almost all executions. Binz also made sure that prisoners suffered from hunger and cold, and that the female SS guards she supervised treated prisoners with similar brutality.
On one occasion, Binz observed a woman in a work detail who she felt was not working hard enough. She walked over to the woman, knocked her down to the ground, and then took a pickaxe and proceeded to chop the prisoner with it until the lifeless body was little more than a bloody lump. Once she finished, Binz cleaned her shiny boots with a dry portion of the corpse’s skirt, mounted her bicycle, and pedaled her way back to Ravensbrück as if nothing had happened.
In 1944, when gas chambers were built at Ravensbrück, she made numerous selections among the prisoners. Those who could no longer work were murdered. Binz was also a sexual deviant. In addition to forcing female prisoners to have sex with her, she had sexual relations with a male guard at Ravensbrück. One of them, SS man Edmund Brüning, an adjutant to the camp’s commandant Fritz Suhren, became her boyfriend.
Binz, who became sexually aroused when observing whippings at Ravensbrück, often walked around the camp with her boyfriend. The two were either seen laughing or engaged in heavy petting while female prisoners were tortured in front of them. The couple lived together in a house outside the camp until December 1944, when Brüning was transferred to Buchenwald.
In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished. The camp was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945, when there were about 3,500 sick women, men, and children inside.
After the war, justice finally caught up with Binz when she was tried at the first Ravensbrück trial, which began on December 5, 1946. Together with 15 other defendants, she was accused of joint responsibility for and participation in the crimes committed at Ravensbrück. On February 3, 1947, the British Military Tribunal sentenced Binz, who admitted to having mistreated prisoners, to death by hanging.
A plea for clemency by her lawyer was rejected, and the verdict was confirmed on March 31 of the same year. To avoid execution, a desperate Binz tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists, but prison officials intervened before she could bleed to death.
Dorothea Binz was 27 years old when British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on May 2, 1947, at 9:01 a.m. in Hamelin prison. There were no tears shed for Dorothea Binz.