In December 1945, a twenty-two-year-old woman stood in a prison in Hamelin, Germany, waiting to be hanged. By then she had earned one of the most notorious reputations of the Second World War: Irma Grese, the woman prisoners called the Beautiful Beast. Officials measured her weight and height, calculated the drop needed to break her neck, and prepared to execute her under British law. The hangman was Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most experienced executioner, a man who would later carry out many more executions of Nazi war criminals.
Grese had been convicted of war crimes committed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and her execution was set for December 13, 1945. Grese had wanted to be a nurse, but she was rejected by Karl Gebhardt, Heinrich Himmler’s chief SS physician, who decided she did not meet his expectations. Instead, she was directed toward work inside concentration camps. When she came of age, she was sent to Ravensbrück, a camp for women prisoners, to train as a guard.
Her father was furious that his daughter had joined the SS, and the two quarreled. Grese returned to Ravensbrück and was later transferred to Auschwitz, which was undergoing enormous expansion. A new women’s camp had just opened and was desperate for female guards. At Auschwitz, Grese held several posts.
She started as a telephone operator, then was assigned to oversee the punishment unit, where prisoners deemed troublemakers were held. There she began committing acts of extreme violence, patrolling with a rubber truncheon, a whip, and a pistol. She beat prisoners to death and sometimes fired randomly at those she believed were not working hard enough. She also supervised selections.
When new arrivals came to the camp, Grese chose those unfit for work and sent them directly to the gas chambers. According to one prisoner, Grese was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen, with a perfect body, an angelic face, and innocent blue eyes, yet she was the most depraved and cruel person she had ever met. Grese was fascinated by horrific medical experiments on human beings and was known for beating prisoners with her own hands. It was believed she was personally responsible for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths.
In the last months of the war, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where her brutality continued. She forced prisoners suffering from typhus, who were near death, to take part in pointless physical exercises, causing more deaths from exhaustion. When British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, Grese was arrested. She could have fled but chose to stay in the camp and even tried to attack a British officer during her arrest.
At the Belsen trials, she was charged with war crimes at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. She defended herself by blaming Heinrich Himmler for everything. She appeared cold and arrogant in court and was somewhat confrontational. She was convicted on two counts of war crimes on the fifty-fourth day of the trials.
When she learned she would be hanged, she broke down and wept, and her tears were interpreted as fear. Her plea for clemency was rejected, and she was moved to Hamelin prison. On the morning of December 13, 1945, Grese was taken from her cell to the execution room. Pierrepoint had already met with her, measured her, and calculated the distance of the drop required to kill her instantly.
She was taken to the gallows and positioned over a trapdoor where Pierrepoint had drawn a chalk X on the floor. Her arms and legs were secured, a white cap was placed over her head, and the noose was put around her neck. Pierrepoint released the trapdoor, and Grese fell through. Her neck broke, and she died.
According to Pierrepoint, her last word was “schnell,” German for “quickly. ” She was the youngest prisoner on the list, but she was not hanged first; the first execution that day was Elisabeth Volkenrath. The reason Grese was hanged rather than shot lay in British practice. Hanging was the standard legal method of execution in Britain for murder and war crimes.
Unlike some countries that used firing squads for military criminals, British authorities relied on the gallows. Once convicted under British law, her method of execution was determined by legal custom rather than by her gender, nationality, or the horror of her crimes. The British also considered long-drop hanging more humane than other methods. Short-drop hangings caused slow strangulation that could last minutes and were widely criticized as cruel.
By the late nineteenth century, British executioners used the long-drop system, designed to break the prisoner’s neck quickly by calculating the correct fall distance based on body weight. In theory, this caused instant unconsciousness and faster death. There was also a desire to demonstrate justice through discipline and law rather than revenge. The crimes connected to Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz had shocked the world, and there was widespread anger toward the convicts.
Yet British authorities wanted to show that even those accused of atrocities would be punished through formal judicial procedures. By using the same gallows procedure applied in other capital cases, Britain presented itself as acting according to law, not mob fury. Hamelin prison had the secure environment and gallows required for such sentences. For officials in the chaotic aftermath of war, hanging was a reliable method that could be carried out discreetly and efficiently, with minimal risk of disorder.
Elisabeth Volkenrath, the woman hanged before Grese, had a similar history. Born Elisabeth Marlow, the daughter of a forester, she grew up in a large family. After finishing school, she worked as a nanny and cook, then as a hairdresser. Before the war she absorbed Nazi politics and joined the SS in October 1941.
She trained as a supervisor at Ravensbrück under Dorothea Binz. In March 1942, she requested a transfer to Auschwitz, the vast extermination and labor complex where the Final Solution was being carried out. She worked as a guard in the prisoners’ sewing workshop, then moved to the women’s section at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942. After falling ill with typhus, she recovered and took a position in the post office at Birkenau in late December 1942, supervising up to thirty prisoners who inspected parcels arriving at the camp, many from the Red Cross.
She was also charged with distributing bread. She remained at Auschwitz-Birkenau until September 1944, when she became head of the women’s section at Auschwitz I. At her trial, Volkenrath was accused of participating in selections, deciding which prisoners would be killed immediately in the gas chambers, and helping load prisoners onto trucks that carried them to their deaths. She denied these charges, as did many SS guards.
Far more shocking were the accusations about her treatment of women prisoners. Witnesses said she regularly beat women, and she admitted to slapping prisoners. One woman, Vera Fischer, testified that Volkenrath beat her so severely she spent three weeks in the hospital. Volkenrath was seen on about eighty occasions beating prisoners unconscious, armed with a rubber truncheon, and she beat many women to death.
Helena Hakibush testified that Volkenrath interrogated her about a ring and necklace she was wearing, forced her to run behind a bicycle to SS headquarters, beat her with a rubber truncheon, then put her in a cellar where she was given only bread and water every three days. Later she was forced to work in the latrines, contracted typhus, and nearly died. Volkenrath was accused of throwing an elderly woman down a staircase, killing her instantly. She confiscated food, water, and supplies from prisoners, leaving them barely enough to survive.
She imposed so-called sports, forcing prisoners to perform exhausting exercises as punishment, sometimes so severe that prisoners died from exhaustion. She was once said to have caught a sick girl taking vegetables, forced her to kneel holding the stolen vegetables above her head for four hours, and then beat her unconscious with a rubber truncheon. She was known as a brutal guard who did not hesitate to beat prisoners until they lost consciousness, and sometimes until they died. After the evacuation of Auschwitz, Volkenrath was sent to Bergen-Belsen on February 5, 1945, serving under Commandant Josef Kramer, known as the Beast of Belsen.
She claimed she contracted typhus again shortly after arriving. The camp was in a horrific state, with starvation and despair everywhere. When British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they found about ten thousand corpses and around sixty thousand prisoners barely alive. Volkenrath remained in the camp instead of fleeing.
She was sent to Celle prison, where the British forced her to remove and bury corpses in mass graves. Through prisoner testimony, the extent of her brutality became clear. She was tried in the Bergen-Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945, in Lüneburg. Charged with crimes at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she pleaded not guilty.
She admitted being present at selections but denied participating, claimed she knew nothing about the gas chambers, admitted slapping prisoners, and said the accusations of abuse were lies. She even claimed she had been punished because she had to live like the prisoners. Volkenrath was sentenced to death. On December 13, 1945, at Hamelin prison, she was the first woman executed.
Pierrepoint placed her over the chalk-marked trapdoor, put the noose around her neck, and she died within seconds. Her body was cremated. She was only twenty-six years old when she was hanged, and she had committed many of her crimes at Auschwitz at an even younger age; when she first worked in a concentration camp, she was twenty-two. Her actions demonstrated a genuine passion for inflicting brutal punishment on prisoners.
Herta Cachparová faced a very different fate. Born on June 21, 1923, in the town of Třešť, she walked with a limp because of her right leg, and she was bullied at school. Her family spoke both Czech and German, and after Hitler took control of the Sudetenland, she was granted Reich citizenship. In 1940 she began working as an interpreter for the German criminal police in Jihlava, and the Gestapo found her useful because she spoke both languages.
She took part in interrogations of Czechs suspected of resistance, and her collaboration continued for years. As the Red Army advanced, she left her job and returned to her parents’ home. After the Prague uprising, resistance groups in Třešť targeted those who had helped the Germans. Cachparová spoke to German soldiers about the looting of her house and identified eleven men and boys she blamed.
All eleven were executed by firing squad in the town square. It was claimed that among them were people who had bullied her at school. The Germans released her from a rebel prison, and she fled to Austria, where she worked in various jobs, some for the Red Army. In February 1946 she was arrested and sent to Czechoslovakia to face charges of collaboration.
At her trial, she said: “I know I caused the death of many people. I did it out of revenge. ” The court sentenced her to death for collaboration and treason. Her execution was carried out by hanging on a pole, a method used in Czechoslovakia and Hungary at the end of the war.
She was taken to a meadow near Terezín, where a three-meter-tall wooden pillar stood. When she reached the pillar, she lost composure, screamed, and fell to the ground, her knees shaking. Guards had to carry her to the platform. She was wearing a short dress and continued crying and screaming.
The executioner worked quickly, strapping her to the pole, binding her legs, passing a rope through a pulley, securing her arms, and placing a noose around her neck. He then dropped her. Her body convulsed, and her head moved noticeably. Doctors checked her pulse, but there was no heartbeat.
Her execution became a public event, and people bought tickets to see her die, an atmosphere some compared to a medieval carnival. She was buried in Jihlava’s central cemetery beside German soldiers who had died in the region. Jenny Wanda Barkmann joined the League of German Girls as a young woman, where millions of young women were indoctrinated with Nazi beliefs. After school she dreamed of becoming a model and completed several photo shoots, but in 1944, at age twenty-one, she joined the SS and trained as a camp guard at Stutthof.
The camp was known for its brutal conditions; about sixty-five thousand people, roughly sixty percent of those sent there, died from disease, starvation, or in the gas chamber. Guards who worked there, including Barkmann, were notorious for their fierceness. She was called Mad Jenny because she was so violent with her truncheon and weapons. Prisoners saw her kill people and then laugh.
She also took part in selections, sending hundreds of people to the gas chamber. She gained the nickname the Beautiful Ghost, because prisoners noticed her beauty but also her rage and violence. She remained at Stutthof for about a year. In 1945, as the war was clearly lost, she left the camp and hid in the Danzig region.
She was arrested at a train station while trying to escape after four months in hiding, recognized by former prisoners. At the Stutthof trials, she ignored questions, lied, and tried to claim she had saved prisoners. Her lawyers argued she was mentally ill. She laughed at witnesses and never asked for forgiveness.
Sentenced to death, she said: “Life is a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short. ” On July 4, 1946, at least twenty thousand people gathered to watch the executions of the Stutthof guards on Biskupia Górka hill, where five large gallows had been built. The event resembled a fair, with locals selling food and drink. Barkmann, the first of eleven former guards to be executed, was brought before the crowd, forced onto the back of a truck used as an execution platform, and the noose was placed around her neck while she stood on a chair.
The truck drove away slowly, and she strangled to death over several minutes before the crowd. Elisabeth Becker, born in Danzig on July 20, 1923, also joined the League of German Girls at age thirteen. In 1938, at fifteen, she worked as a tram conductor in Danzig, and later as an agricultural assistant. When the war turned against Germany, the SS advertised for women to train as camp guards, and Becker responded.
She went to Stutthof, which held thousands of Polish prisoners in brutal conditions, with epidemics, starvation, and a gas chamber added in 1943. Becker was known as a cruel guard, especially involved in selections, choosing the weakest prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers. She worked at the camp for only about four months before fleeing in January 1945. She returned home, but Polish police arrested her three months later.
At the first Stutthof trial in Danzig, she was convicted and sentenced to death. She admitted selecting at least thirty women to be sent to the gas chambers. She sent appeals for clemency to the Polish president, and the court considered reducing her sentence to fifteen years because her actions were considered less cruel than those of other guards and because she had served the shortest time. But the president refused clemency.
On July 4, 1946, she was executed on the gallows at Biskupia Górka before a crowd of about two hundred thousand people. She was twenty-two years old. Maria Mandl, born in January 1912, the daughter of a shoemaker, left school at twelve. She worked as a maid in Switzerland and Austria and eventually joined the Nazi cause.
After losing her job, she was encouraged to accept a position as a camp supervisor, attracted by the higher pay. She trained in Nazi racial policies and was sent to Lichtenburg, a women’s camp, where she was influenced by the commandant and took part in brutal punishments. She was seen whipping women stripped and tied to a post, and she once beat a prisoner with a key until she lost consciousness. She was later transferred to Ravensbrück, the new women’s camp near Berlin.
There she targeted women with unusual hair, kicked a woman to death during a roll call, and trained prospective guards how to instill terror. After a breakup with a male guard, she took out her anger on prisoners and shot several of them. She was then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she became the head of the women’s camp under Rudolf Höss, ruling with an iron fist. She stood at the camp gates, and if any prisoner looked at her, that prisoner was taken away and shot.
She took part in selections on the train ramps, sending thousands of men, women, and children to the gas chambers, and her signature appeared on extermination lists. A former prisoner recalled hearing Mandl playing beautiful music on a piano in her room days after killing a Jewish woman. As the Red Army approached Poland, Mandl was transferred to the Mühldorf subcamp of Dachau. In May 1945 she fled into the Bavarian mountains, but American forces arrested her on October 8, 1945.
She was extradited to Poland in November 1946 and held in Montelupich prison in Kraków. In December 1947 she was tried in the Auschwitz trial, convicted of involvement in the deaths of five hundred thousand people, all sent to the gas chambers under her authority. She was sentenced to death. On January 24, 1948, at 7:30 in the morning, she was led to the execution chamber, where hooks on the ceiling held ropes already prepared.
Boxes sat beneath the nooses, and Mandl was helped onto one. The executioner placed the noose around her neck and kicked the box away. She struggled and was strangled slowly, her body left hanging for some time. Her last words were “Long live Poland.
” After her death, her body was donated to medical science. Each of these women had followed a different path into the Nazi system, but all ended on the gallows. Some were hanged under British law at Hamelin, some before enormous crowds in Poland, and one on a pole in Czechoslovakia. Their executions marked the end of the war’s most infamous female camp guards, women whose crimes had made them symbols of the camp system’s cruelty.
Whether the method was the long-drop gallows, a slow strangulation in a prison chamber, or a public hanging on a hill, the proceedings were meant to show that even the worst atrocities would be answered by formal justice, not by the same violence these women had once wielded.