Even though her name never became as notorious as those of Ilse Koch or Irma Grese, Alice Orlowski was no less feared among the women who passed through the Nazi concentration camp system. Her career was marked by frequent transfers from one camp to another, a pattern that would later help conceal some of the worst crimes she committed as a warden. Her full name was Alice Minna Elisabeth Orlowski. She was born in 1903.
According to some accounts, she was cast out by her family because of her commitment to Nazi ideology, and she reportedly married a Jewish immigrant jeweler, though no documentary evidence of that marriage has survived. Nothing is known for certain about her education either. Some reports suggest she never finished regular schooling, though whether she was expelled or left on her own remains unclear. What is certain is that she was already 36 years old when the Second World War began.
She entered the concentration camp system as a fully conscious adult, and her decision cannot be blamed on youthful romanticism or naivety. The reason she volunteered for the camp service was simple: money. She was drawn by the high salary and the opportunity for rapid advancement. Nothing is known about her previous jobs, and it seems likely she had been scraping by on casual earnings or enduring a harsh existence with low-paid work and no family support.
The fate of her husband, and indeed of her family in general, if she had one, remained a mystery. Orlowski began her murderous career at Ravensbrück concentration camp. After initial training under Maria Mandl, she was transferred to Majdanek in 1942. There her mentor was one of the most brutal female executioners in the entire camp system, the so-called stomping maiden Elsa Ehrich.
Orlowski quickly absorbed Ehrich’s methods and added a trademark style of her own. She developed a habit of throwing children over the heads of the condemned prisoners as she drove them into the gas chambers. Working alongside Ehrich, she became one of the most terrifying warders in the camp. It was she and her partner who led victims to the gas chambers and closed the doors behind them, leaving the prisoners to face certain death.
Her diligence was noticed quickly. Orlowski was entrusted with supervising the women prisoners who sorted the valuables and money taken from the dead, always in partnership with an executioner. She also enriched herself along the way, keeping small items for her own benefit. Her next assignment took her to the Plaszow concentration camp, where she earned the title of the model overseer.
There she became a close confidante of the camp commandant, Amon Göth, the so-called butcher of Plaszow. Göth was known for casually shooting prisoners with his sniper rifle and then killing their relatives, claiming he had no use for the discontented. He entrusted Orlowski with the storage of documents relating to the mass executions of prisoners. These records were kept meticulously, and they might have produced devastating testimony, but they remained in Orlowski’s possession until the very end of the war.
Only after Germany’s collapse did this exemplary employee decide to destroy them all. According to some reports, Orlowski became the butcher’s right hand not only because of her pedantry, though no documentary proof of a closer connection exists, only suspicions among the few surviving prisoners of the camp. During the camp’s existence, an estimated 150,000 people were exterminated there. Paperwork aside, Orlowski never forgot her main passion: tormenting prisoners.
In Plaszow she developed another form of entertainment. She used a whip to beat out prisoners’ eyes, a punishment that amounted automatically to a death sentence, since blind prisoners could not work and were sent to the gas chamber. She then refined this cruelty with a small improvement. When a new transport of prisoners arrived, Orlowski would personally select the unfortunates who were destined to be blinded on their very first day in the camp and sent to the gas chamber that same day.
Her next relocation was logical enough: to Auschwitz concentration camp. There she took an active part in the infamous death marches of January 1945, when prisoners were transferred to other camps to keep them from being liberated by the Red Army and Allied units. Orlowski accompanied the columns of prisoners. Yet from that point on, her behavior changed dramatically.
Prisoners later recalled that she comforted the tormented, sometimes even helped them, and incredibly, even slept alongside them. More likely, the warden was simply afraid of reprisals for her earlier deeds and decided to at least partially redeem herself in the face of future trials. To some extent, she succeeded. After the liberation of Ravensbrück, Orlowski was arrested by Red Army units and sent to Poland.
She was tried in the Kraków trial of November 24 to December 22, 1947, but only as a defendant in the death marches. Perhaps because of that limited charge, and taking into account the testimonies of surviving prisoners, the punishment was relatively mild: fifteen years in prison. She served only ten and was released for good behavior. Her activities as a warden in Plaszow were not considered during the trial, especially since almost no one had survived to speak about the eye beatings.
Ravensbrück, meanwhile, lay on German territory and fell outside Polish jurisdiction. These factors, combined with the testimonials of death march survivors describing her kindness, led to this outcome. Later, however, the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal turned his attention to Orlowski, presenting what he considered indisputable evidence that the former warden had been not only a kind and compassionate figure during the death marches but also a brutal executioner at Majdanek. As a result, she was taken into custody again in 1975 for a new case, the so-called Third Majdanek Trial, held in Düsseldorf, Germany.
But Orlowski did not live to hear the verdict. She died in 1976 at the respectable age of 73, still awaiting the outcome of the proceedings. Historiographers write almost nothing about her post-war life and do not even quote from her court appearances. It is possible that the gray, unremarkable Orlowski deliberately chose this tactic in order to simply disappear, to make sure nobody paid attention to her.
In many ways, she nearly succeeded. Despite the atrocities she committed, Alice Orlowski remains hardly known today, overshadowed by the other female wardens whose names became far more famous.