Inside the Stutthof concentration camp, a number of female guards inflicted misery, death, and suffering on a daily basis. Many of them were never tried for their crimes and slipped away from any form of justice at the end of the Second World War. But a series of executions carried out on Biskupia Górka, a massive hill in Gdańsk, targeted those Stutthof criminals who had been sentenced to death. Among them were several women, including Eva Paradies, who was executed at just 25 years old on a huge gallows platform in front of roughly 20,000 spectators.
She was one of the many young women in their twenties, zealous Nazis who treated prisoners inside the concentration camps with brutality. She paid the ultimate price for her crimes. Stutthof concentration camp opened immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War, and the first transport of prisoners was sent there to build the camp and its various structures. By 1944, however, the number of prisoners at Stutthof rose sharply, and most of the new arrivals were Jewish prisoners coming from other camps such as Auschwitz.
Around 24,000 prisoners were sent there from that largest of concentration camps. To deal with the enormous number of people being transferred, new guards were dispatched to Stutthof, and a number of them were recruited specifically from the local area. Conditions at the camp were terrible. It was a brutally harsh camp where thousands of prisoners succumbed to hunger and disease, and many died from epidemics such as typhus that ravaged the camp.
The prisoners came from many different countries, and executions were carried out daily, with various prisoners being shot at the shooting range. Gas chambers were also used, while some prisoners drowned in mud or were beaten to death by guards. In total, around 65,000 people were killed at the camp, many of them dying from the forced labor they were compelled to perform. One of the women who worked at Stutthof and who had been recruited to serve there was Eva Paradies, who developed an extremely bad reputation among the prisoners.
She was born on 17 December 1920 in Labuhn in the Weimar Republic, and little is known with certainty about her early life. She is believed to have been a fervent Nazi. She arrived at Stutthof in August 1944 to undergo training alongside a number of other women, learning to become an Aufseherin, a supervisor of the women’s camp and female prisoners. Once her training was complete, she became a guard at the camp.
She was notorious for being extremely brutal and savage, frequently beating female prisoners with her whip and other weapons. One witness recounted an incident in which she ordered a group of female prisoners to undress in the freezing winter cold and then had icy water poured over them. If any of them moved, Paradies would beat them. This kind of punishment was very common inside concentration camps and was often used to punish a large number of female prisoners at once inside the barracks when one of them had committed a minor breach of the rules.
Eva Paradies continued to torture and beat prisoners, and at some point she was transferred briefly to the Bromberg subcamp before being moved back to the main Stutthof camp. In April 1945, she took part in the mass evacuation of prisoners out of Stutthof as Allied forces and the Red Army approached. She was among the last group to transport female prisoners to the Löwenberg concentration camp. During the death march, she escaped, aware that she would be prosecuted at the end of the war.
She tried to hide for as long as possible, but she was ultimately captured. She was imprisoned and interrogated for a short time, then brought before the Stutthof trials, where she was one of 16 defendants charged with involvement in the camp’s atrocities. The court handed down a number of death sentences against a group of women who had served at the camp, and Eva Paradies was one of those sentenced to death. On 4 July 1946, at the age of only 25, Eva Paradies was taken to Biskupia Górka in Gdańsk.
On top of the huge hill, a large gallows platform had been erected to end the lives of the guards who had worked at Stutthof. The former guards were brought before 20,000 people who had gathered to watch the executions on a central triple gallows. Johann Pauls, the former camp commandant, and another female guard named Gerda Steinhoff were hanged first. On the two side gallows, Eva Paradies and Jenny Wanda Barkmann, two young women notorious for their brutality, were brought in on a truck.
The two were seated on a bench above the truck. Then the executioners stepped forward, and one of them placed the noose around Eva Paradies’s neck. The final preparations were carried out with the rope still around her neck. She stood on the platform, and then the truck slowly drove away, leaving Eva hanging from the noose.
It took several minutes before her death was announced, as she slowly strangled while the crowds watched. Eva Paradies was only 25 years old when she was executed by short drop, and she was one of eleven former Stutthof and Karpus guards executed that day. She was a woman who instilled fear in the hearts of Stutthof’s prisoners, and her actions contributed to the camp’s high death toll. But alongside women like Jenny Wanda Barkmann, Elisabeth Falkenrath, and Irma Grese, she was one of a number of young women who turned to savagery inside the concentration camps.
She paid the price for her crimes on the gallows at Biskupia Górka, before a crowd of thousands who had come to witness the reckoning.