Alice Minna Elizabeth Ealing, better known by her married name Orlowski, never achieved the grim fame of Ilse Koch or Irma Grese, but among the women who served as wardens in the Nazi concentration camp system, she was every bit as feared. What set her apart was not simply cruelty, although she had that in abundance, but a career that moved her from camp to camp, a constant shuffling that later helped conceal the worst of her crimes. She was born in 1903, and according to some accounts, her embrace of Nazi ideology was so extreme that her family cast her out. Details of her life before the war remain thin.
She reportedly married a Jewish immigrant jeweler, though no documentary evidence of the marriage has survived. Her education, too, is uncertain, with some reports suggesting she never finished regular schooling. What is clear is that she was 36 years old when the Second World War began, an adult making deliberate choices rather than a young woman swept into extremism by circumstance. The reason Orlowski entered the concentration camp system was entirely mundane: money.
She was drawn by the high salary and the promise of rapid advancement, likely because she had little else in the way of prospects. Prior to her enlistment, the source suggests she may have struggled with casual earnings or barely made ends meet, and she seems to have had no family to anchor her. The fate of her husband, like so much of her private life, remained a mystery. Her path into atrocity began at Ravensbrück, where she was not yet formally part of the SS but soon earned a reputation among prisoners as a model overseer, a nickname they gave her with bitter irony.
After initial training under Maria Mandl, Orlowski was transferred in 1942 to the Majdanek concentration camp. There she found a far more brutal instructor: Elsa Ehrich, known as the Stomping Mayor, one of the most vicious female executioners in the system. Orlowski absorbed Erlich’s methods quickly and added her own trademark horror. She developed the habit of throwing children over the heads of the condemned as she drove prisoners into the gas chambers.
Working side by side with Erlich, Orlowski became one of the most terrifying wardens in the camp, personally leading victims to their deaths and sealing the doors behind them. Her willingness was noticed. Orlowski was tasked with supervising the women prisoners who sorted the valuables and money stripped from the dead, and she took her own cut, helping herself to small items along the way. In time, she was promoted and transferred to the camp at Plaszow, where she earned the title of model overseer in earnest.
She quickly became a close confidante of the camp commandant, Amon Göth, the butcher of Plaszow, who was known to shoot prisoners with his sniper rifle for sport and then kill their relatives, claiming he had no use for the disgruntled. Göth entrusted Orlowski with the storage of documents concerning the mass executions, records kept with meticulous care. These files remained in her possession until the very end of the war, and only when Germany had fallen did she decide to destroy them. The full testimony contained in those documents was never heard in court.
Some survivors suspected there may have been more than professional trust between Orlowski and the commandant, but no documentary proof of such a connection ever surfaced. The camp itself was a place of unimaginable horror, with an estimated 150,000 people exterminated during its existence. Yet paperwork never distracted Orlowski from her main passion: the torment of prisoners. At Plaszow, she invented a new form of cruelty.
She would use her whip to beat out prisoners’ eyes, and since a blind prisoner could no longer work, that mutilation was an automatic death sentence. The blinded victims were sent to the gas chamber. She then refined the practice. When a new transport of prisoners arrived, Orlowski would personally select those who were to be blinded on their very first day in the camp and sent to the gas chamber that same day.
Her next relocation was to Auschwitz, where she took part in the infamous death marches, the forced transfers of prisoners between camps as the Red Army and Allied forces closed in. During these marches, however, her behavior changed dramatically. Prisoners later recalled that she comforted the tormented, sometimes even helped them, and, almost unbelievably, slept alongside them. The most likely explanation is simple fear.
Aware of what awaited her if Germany lost, Orlowski was trying to build a defense in advance, seeking to soften the judgment that would come in future trials. To some extent, her strategy succeeded. After the liberation of Ravensbrück, Orlowski was arrested by Red Army units and sent to Poland, where she stood trial in Kraków from November 24 to December 22, 1947. She was prosecuted specifically as a defendant in the death marches, and that narrow charge shaped everything that followed.
Survivors of those marches testified to her apparent kindness, describing a warden who had comforted them, and the court took that into account. Her crimes at Plaszow and Majdanek were ignored, largely because almost no one had survived those camps to speak against her. Her activities at Ravensbrück, which fell within German jurisdiction, were likewise not considered. The result was a remarkably light sentence: fifteen years in prison, with time served for good behavior reduced to only ten.
Orlowski was released, and for a time it seemed she would vanish into obscurity. But later, the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal turned his attention to her and presented indisputable evidence that the woman who had appeared so kind during the death marches was also the brutal executioner of Majdanek. In 1975, Orlowski was arrested again to stand trial in the so-called Third Majdanek Trial in Düsseldorf, Germany. She did not live to hear the verdict.
In 1976, at the age of 73, she died while the case was still ongoing. The post-war life of Alice Orlowski remains almost entirely undocumented. Historians record nothing of her years after release, and no statements from her court appearances have been preserved. It is possible that the unremarkable, gray-haired woman deliberately chose a strategy of invisibility, hoping that no one would think to look for her.
In that aim, she nearly succeeded, and despite the scale of her crimes, her name remains far less known than those of other female wardens. The trials had exposed what she did, but in the end, she slipped through history’s grasp, carrying her secrets to the grave.