On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany launched a massive, unprovoked invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. Within weeks, Poland was crushed between two invading powers. By mid-September, the Soviet Union attacked from the east, and Warsaw surrendered on September 28. A day later, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned the country according to the secret protocol of their non-aggression pact.
After the Polish army was defeated, the Germans moved to ruthlessly suppress the Polish people, whom they deemed racially inferior. In the weeks that followed, German SS, police, and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including members of the nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. Roughly 1. 8 million Jews still living in German-occupied territory were confined in ghettos.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, more than 3 million Polish Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps. One of those camps was Stutthof, and one of its most infamous guards was Jenny-Wanda Barkmann. Barkmann was born on May 30, 1922, in Hamburg, then part of the Weimar Republic. She was ten years old when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933.
Soon after, she joined the League of German Girls, the female branch of the Hitler Youth. These organizations were central tools for indoctrinating German youth with Nazi ideology. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had roughly 100,000 members; by the end of that year, membership had surpassed two million. Jews were excluded.
Boys were prepared for military service, while girls were trained for their futures as wives and mothers, drilled in skills such as sewing, cooking, nursing, and household chores. The League emphasized group athletics like rhythmic gymnastics, which officials judged appropriate for the female body. Membership demanded intense commitment, weakening the influence of parents, teachers, and clergy. Young members were encouraged to report on their families, neighbors, and schools to Nazi leaders.
In 1936, membership became mandatory for all boys and girls aged ten to seventeen. Schools reinforced the message, filling classrooms with Hitler’s portrait and textbooks that promoted obedience, militarism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Barkmann was seventeen when the war began. Germany attacked Poland at dawn on September 1 with more than 2,000 tanks, nearly 900 bombers, and over 400 fighter planes.
In total, Germany committed sixty divisions and nearly 1. 5 million men. The campaign demonstrated a new kind of mobile warfare, combining air power and armor in a coordinated assault. The world quickly adopted a new term for it: Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s border and declared war on Germany on September 3, but they could not save Poland. The Soviet invasion from the east on September 17 sealed Poland’s fate, and the Polish government fled the same day. The last operational Polish unit surrendered on October 6. The partition of Poland followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, one week before the war began, by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.
The dividing line between the two powers ran along the Bug River. In September 1939, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of the town of Stutthof, about twenty-two miles east of Danzig. The original camp, surrounded by barbed wire and eight barracks built by prisoners in 1940, was created as part of the ethnic cleansing of Polish elites, including the intelligentsia and religious and political leaders. Before the war, the Germans had already drawn up arrest lists and secretly surveyed the area for suitable camp sites.
Stutthof first functioned as a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief. In November 1941, it became a labor education camp under the German Security Police. In January 1942, it was reclassified as a regular concentration camp under SS jurisdiction. In 1943, the camp was enlarged with thirty new barracks surrounded by electrified barbed wire.
A crematorium and gas chamber were added the same year, ready for mass executions when Stutthof was incorporated into the Final Solution in June 1944. The gas chamber could hold up to 150 people per execution. Eventually, the Stutthof system expanded into a vast network of forced labor camps, with 105 subcamps across northern and central German-occupied Poland. Tens of thousands, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported there, mostly non-Jewish Poles.
Conditions were brutal. Typhus epidemics swept the camp in the winter of 1942 and again in 1944, killing many. Prisoners deemed too weak or sick to work were gassed with Zyklon B. Gas executions began in June 1944, and 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed before the camp was evacuated.
Camp doctors also murdered sick prisoners with lethal injections of phenol. More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof and its subcamps. Until 1942, nearly all prisoners were Polish. In 1944, the inmate population grew sharply, with Jews making up a significant portion of the new arrivals.
In July 1944, the first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz; in total, 23,566 Jews, including 21,817 women, were transferred to Stutthof from Auschwitz. The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann became a camp guard in January 1944. That June, after the women’s subcamp of Stutthof Bromberg Ost was established in Bydgoszcz, the SS began conscripting women from Danzig and nearby cities to train as guards because of a severe shortage.
Even among the notoriously sadistic female guards at Stutthof, Barkmann became infamous for her exceptional cruelty. She beat prisoners, sometimes to death, with her bare hands or with a whip. Her victims included children; she selected them, along with their mothers, and sent them to the gas chamber without remorse. Because of her attractiveness and her brutality, prisoners nicknamed her the Beautiful Specter.
The evacuation of the Stutthof camp system began in January 1945, when nearly 50,000 prisoners, overwhelmingly Jews, remained in the camps. Around 5,000 prisoners from subcamps were marched to the Baltic coast, forced into the water, and machine-gunned. The rest were marched toward Lauenburg in East Germany, but Soviet forces cut them off, and the Germans forced the survivors back to Stutthof. Marching in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by the SS, thousands died along the way.
In late April 1945, with Soviet forces surrounding the camp, the remaining prisoners were taken out by sea. Again, hundreds were forced into the water and shot. It has been estimated that more than 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuations. When the Soviets liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945, they found only about 100 prisoners who had hidden during the final evacuation.
Altogether, some 100,000 prisoners passed through Stutthof; roughly 60,000 perished, and another 22,000 were transferred to other concentration camps. In the final phase of the fighting for Danzig, Barkmann tried to escape the advancing Soviet troops but was arrested by the Polish militia in May 1945 at the Danzig railway station. During her first interrogation, she claimed she had always treated Jews well, had never bullied prisoners, and had secretly helped the unfortunate and saved them from death. Her lies did not save her.
She was tried at the first Stutthof trial, which began on April 25, 1946. During the trial, Barkmann seemed less concerned with her fate than her appearance. She wore stylish clothes, changed her hairstyle daily, and reportedly flirted with prison guards. She and her former female colleagues were said to have behaved insolently, giggling and joking during the proceedings.
The trial ended on May 31, 1946. Eleven defendants convicted of crimes against humanity were sentenced to death by hanging, five of them women. While four of the women, Wanda Klaff, Gerda Steinhoff, Elisabeth Becker, and Ewa Paradies, cried and pleaded for their lives, Barkmann remained calm. After the verdict, she remarked, “Life is indeed a pleasure and pleasures are usually short.
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Her execution was held publicly and became a spectacle recorded by official press photographers. After the war, only three public executions of war criminals took place in Poland. One was held on Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk, the former Danzig. On July 4, 1946, eleven Nazi criminals from the Stutthof camp, including twenty-four-year-old Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, were hanged before a crowd of 200,000 people.
Newspapers had announced the execution three days earlier. Workplaces gave employees the day off and provided transport. Security forces feared a lynching, and the militia and army struggled to control the enormous crowd. The day was warm and sunny.
Precisely at 5:00 p. m. , eleven open trucks brought the condemned to the execution ground, their hands and legs bound with cords. On each truck stood one convict, six men and five women.
The trucks were backed under the gallows, and the condemned were made to stand on the tailboards. Former prisoners of Stutthof, dressed in striped uniforms, volunteered as executioners and placed simple rope nooses around the convicts’ necks. The execution was arranged so that each truck drove forward, leaving the convicts hanging. The drop was intentionally short, so the nooses did not break their necks.
Each criminal died by slow strangulation, a process lasting ten to twenty minutes. When the first truck moved forward, the convict aboard, Johann Pauls, the former commandant of the gardens in Stutthof, managed to shout “Heil Hitler! ” before he slid off the platform and hanged. The crowd answered with insults.
As his body went still, another truck moved, and the next criminal began what witnesses described as a rope dance. Those awaiting their turn watched what was coming. When one truck driver failed to start his engine several times, a former prisoner pushed the convict off the platform. The crowd waved and shouted, “For our husbands, for our children.
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After the last convict died, the security forces allowed the crowd to approach the gallows. People tore buttons off the corpses, cut pieces of fabric, and kicked and smashed the bodies. The crowd was then driven away, and the bodies were removed. Rumors later claimed that after Barkmann’s body was cremated, her ashes were taken back to Hamburg and dumped into a toilet in the apartment where she was born.
That story was false. The bodies of the executed were taken to the Medical University of Gdansk, where they were used as teaching aids in anatomy classes. There were no tears shed for Jenny-Wanda Barkmann.