On July 4, 1946, eleven convicted guards from the Stutthof concentration camp were taken from their cells and loaded onto a truck. They were driven to a massive gallows where a crowd of roughly 20,000 people had gathered on Biskupia Górka hill in Gdańsk, demanding their deaths. The five women and six men were hanged publicly, left dangling for a prolonged period before their deaths were confirmed. The executions were brutal and theatrical, resembling spectacles from the Middle Ages, but those who watched had spent years living in terror under German occupation, and many had been imprisoned in the very camp where these guards had served.
They had personal reasons to want revenge and to see what they considered justice done. Yet the hangings were far worse than anyone had imagined. Stutthof concentration camp sat in an isolated forested area near a swamp, close to the city of Danzig, now Gdańsk. Many of the prisoners who found themselves behind its barbed wire came directly from that city.
The camp opened in 1939 and operated until the end of World War II. Around 85,000 people died there under appalling conditions. Tens of thousands perished from starvation and disease, particularly severe typhus epidemics that swept through the camp. The SS guards subjected prisoners to daily abuse, and those too ill to continue forced labor were sent to the small gas chamber inside the camp.
As the war turned against Germany, the camp was evacuated, and thousands of prisoners were marched to the nearby sea, where they were shot with machine guns in the water. Thousands died in the final weeks of the camp’s existence. When Stutthof was liberated on May 9, 1945, only about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide in the camp survived. Only a few guards remained on site.
A manhunt began for the men and women who had worked there, and some were arrested in nearby Gdańsk. Surviving prisoners testified against their former tormentors, and women such as Jenny Wanda Barkmann were captured and brought before the Stutthoff trials. The trials brought many of these guards to justice, and some were sentenced to death. Among them were five women: Jenny Wanda Barkmann, Eva Paradies, Elisabeth Becker, Gerda Steinhoff, and Wanda Klaff.
The former camp commandant Johann Pauls was also convicted along with several other guards. The executions took place publicly on July 4, 1946, before a crowd of about 20,000 people on Biskupia Górka hill in Gdańsk. The event received broad local coverage, and entire families came to witness the deaths of the eleven condemned as if it were a medieval carnival. Vendors sold food and drinks to make money.
One by one, the guards were brought out, and they were made to stand near the gallows to watch their former colleagues executed before them. The women were hanged first, which was described as a form of courtesy. The first to die was Jenny Wanda Barkmann, a 24-year-old guard known as the “Beautiful Spectre” or the “Wilde Jenny. ” She was notorious for her cruelty inside the camp.
Barkmann was helped onto the back of a truck and forced to sit on a stool. While this was happening, an official read aloud the charges for which she had been convicted, reminding the large crowd of the crimes Barkmann had committed. All the executioners were themselves former Stutthof prisoners, and they were tasked with placing the nooses around the guards’ necks. Barkmann was helped onto the stool, and the executioner, who wore striped prison clothing, secured the rope around her neck.
A signal was given for the truck to move away slowly, and it began to drive forward. As the truck moved, the rope tightened around Barkmann’s neck, and she was left hanging above the ground. She began to kick and struggle while the twenty thousand people watched and shouted. The method of execution was slow strangulation.
There was no immediate breaking of the neck, and Barkmann was left to suffer for minutes until her body finally went still and stopped swinging. Only after several minutes was her death confirmed, and then the other ten guards were hanged one by one in exactly the same way. The executions were horrifying for many reasons beyond the method itself. The gallows were deliberately massive, perhaps four to five meters high, built so that everyone in the vicinity could see the hangings from miles away.
This was intended to send a clear public message that those who had served as guards at the nearby camp were being punished for their crimes. The structure was designed for maximum impact. The gallows also allowed for multiple executions at once, with four sets that could hang two guards together and a larger central gallows that could accommodate three people. The women were executed first, reportedly as a courtesy, but the others were forced to watch their former colleagues die.
This amounted to psychological torture, and several guards became hysterical when they realized what was coming next. The hangings were not efficient. They ensured prolonged suffering rather than a quick end. Slow strangulation took many minutes until the body finally relaxed.
The crowd watched every agonizing minute. The bodies were also left hanging long after death before being taken down. It is not entirely certain what happened to the bodies after the executions, but it is assumed they were donated to a local hospital or university for medical students to dissect. This procedure was often carried out with convicted war criminals in Poland at the end of World War II.
Another disturbing aspect of the day was the presence of young people and children in the crowd who witnessed the entire proceedings. Some families attended together, and those children would never forget what they saw on Biskupia Górka hill that day. Stutthof was a place of immense horror, and at the end of the war, stories of guard brutality were told to the liberators by the men and women who had been held there. For many who watched the executions in Gdańsk that day, there was a feeling of justice and revenge for the suffering that the former Stutthof guards had inflicted on them and countless others.
But the executions themselves were a terrifying public spectacle, ruthless and cruel in their own right. The crowd on the hill that day saw eleven people slowly strangled to death, and those who had once controlled life and death inside the camp faced their end in a manner deliberately designed to be as harsh and public as the suffering they had once inflicted.