At nine thirty-four on the morning of December 13, 1945, Irma Grese stepped from her cell in Hameln prison and walked into the execution chamber. She was twenty-two years old, and she had just become the youngest woman to be executed under British law in the twentieth century. The hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, had already measured her and calculated the drop required to break her neck. She stood firmly on the chalk mark at the center of the trap, and as Pierrepoint placed the white cap over her head, she said one word in German: Schnell.
Quick. The trap fell, and she was dead within moments. She was the first of three women hanged at Hameln that morning, each of them a former guard in the Nazi concentration camp system whose crimes had horrified the world. At the end of the Second World War, Allied forces liberated camps across Germany and Poland and found something they had not expected: female guards whose cruelty matched that of their male counterparts.
Many of these women had begun the war as ordinary civilians, working as nurses, hairdressers, and even models. As the Nazi Party extended its grip over Germany, the SS had opened a network of camps for women, and to staff them, they recruited and sometimes conscripted female overseers. Some were drawn from the League of German Maidens, the Nazi youth organization that had already turned teenage girls into devoted followers of the regime. Others volunteered, attracted by good pay, the prospect of promotion, and the chance to serve the Reich.
Many received only short training stints before being sent to camps such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Stutthof, and Ravensbrück, where they were schooled in how to keep prisoners in submission through terror. Inside the camps, these women oversaw the women’s barracks. They shot and tortured prisoners, carried out public executions in roll call yards, beat inmates to death, set dogs on them, and played direct roles in selections for the gas chambers. When Allied investigators gathered evidence after liberation, they found that many of these guards had been remembered clearly by survivors.
Multiple witnesses independently described the same women committing the same acts of brutality. Prosecutors used camp records, photographs, and medical reports alongside survivor testimony, and the evidence was often overwhelming. The trials that followed shocked the public. In the 1940s, many societies still regarded women primarily as caregivers and mothers, and the Nazis themselves had encouraged German women to focus on raising children for the Reich.
The idea that women could willingly participate in mass murder was deeply unsettling. Female guards therefore attracted enormous media attention, and newspapers frequently described them as sadistic and monstrous. But gender did not spare them. They were tried as criminals, and some were sentenced to death.
The most famous of these proceedings was the Belsen trial, held by the British military in 1945. It dealt with staff from Bergen-Belsen and those who had also worked at Auschwitz. The best-known female defendant was Irma Grese, who had served at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Belsen. Survivors accused her of beating prisoners with a whip, shooting inmates, setting dogs on people, and participating in selections for the gas chambers.
Alongside her stood Elisabeth Volkenrath, who had risen to oversee all sections of the women’s camp at Auschwitz and was known for beating prisoners unconscious with a truncheon, and Johanna Bormann, another Auschwitz guard notorious for unleashing her dogs on prisoners. All three were found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Holocaust survivors offered some of the most harrowing testimony at the trials. Irma Grese was described as having played God with people’s lives during selections at Auschwitz, choosing which women and children would be sent to their deaths.
Elisabeth Volkenrath claimed after her sentencing that she did not know where the prisoners she selected were being sent and said she had never heard of the gas chambers. Johanna Bormann, at fifty-two the oldest of the three, told Pierrepoint when he weighed her that she had her feelings. None of this spared them. Their executions were carried out by Pierrepoint with clinical efficiency, each woman hanged within minutes of the last.
Bergen-Belsen itself had become a site of catastrophic suffering. Originally established in 1940 as a camp for Allied prisoners of war, it was taken over by the SS in 1943 and turned into a concentration camp. Its population swelled enormously as the Germans lost territory, and by late 1944, Josef Kramer, later known as the Beast of Belsen, was in charge. Around eighty-five thousand people were transported to Belsen, far beyond its intended capacity of ten thousand.
Overcrowding led to devastating shortages of food, and disease swept through the camp in waves of typhus, typhoid, and dysentery. There were no gas chambers at Belsen, but tens of thousands of prisoners died from the conditions. Among them were Margot and Anne Frank, who both perished there in 1945. When British and Canadian forces entered the camp on April 15, 1945, they found more than thirteen thousand unburied bodies and around sixty thousand prisoners in a terrible state, with hundreds dying each day from starvation and disease.
The SS guards, including Kramer, had remained in the camp, claiming they were there to maintain order. The British forced them to bury the dead in mass graves, then burned the camp to the ground with flame-throwing tanks to stop the spread of typhus. Newsreel footage and photographs of the liberation shocked the world and created enormous pressure for quick justice. Almost five hundred people had worked at Belsen, and forty-five former staff were eventually tried.
Other female guards were prosecuted in the Stutthof trials, held in Poland after the war. Stutthof had been the first camp established outside Germany’s borders, opening on September 2, 1939, and it held Jews from across Europe, Polish resistance fighters, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, and many others. Around one hundred ten thousand people passed through the camp, and an estimated sixty-five thousand died there from starvation, disease, execution, and the gas chamber that began operating in June 1944. Among the guards who served there was Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, only twenty-four years old, who selected prisoners for the gas chambers and beat women prisoners to death.
During her trial in Gdansk, she seemed more concerned with her hair than the proceedings, smirking during the presentation of horrific evidence and flirting with the guards in the courtroom. On July 4, 1946, Barkmann and four other condemned women, along with a number of men, were taken to a hill in Gdansk known as Biskupia Gorka. A crowd of around two hundred thousand people had gathered to watch. The gallows were enormous, built tall enough that the entire crowd could see, and wide enough to hang three people at once on the central structure.
The condemned were loaded onto trucks, which were backed up to the gallows. Barkmann was hanged first. She stood under the gallows in a simple dress while her arms and ankles were bound, then the truck drove away, leaving her suspended in the air in front of the vast crowd. She lost a shoe as she struggled for breath before going limp.
The other women were executed in the same manner, and their bodies were left hanging while the men were brought up to die beside them. At the Auschwitz trial in Krakow, which began on November 24, 1947, forty-four former staff members faced the court, including five women. The most high-profile was Maria Mandl, who had served as a senior overseer at the women’s camp at Auschwitz and was described by survivors as a beast. Witnesses testified that she stood at the ramp during transports, beating prisoners with a whip and sending around ninety percent of each arriving transport directly to the crematorium.
She tore children from their mothers’ arms and beat the mothers so badly they did not get up again. She also signed lists that sent hundreds of thousands of women and children to the gas chambers. Therese Brandl was accused of taking part in selections and forcing children to stand out in the frost overnight. Both were sentenced to death and executed by hanging in Krakow prison on January 28, 1948.
Mandl was the first of the group to die, and it took the doctor fifteen minutes to confirm that all those in the first group, including her, were dead. Ravensbrück, the central camp for female prisoners in Germany, opened in May 1939 and ultimately held around one hundred thirty thousand prisoners, with roughly fifty thousand dying there. It also served as the training ground for more than four thousand female overseers who went on to serve in camps across the Nazi system, including Irma Grese and Maria Mandl. Between 1946 and 1948, seven Ravensbrück trials were held, and twenty-one women were among the thirty-eight defendants.
Dorothea Binz, a deputy warden who beat, shot, and whipped prisoners daily and set her dog on them, was sentenced to death and hanged at Hameln prison in May 1947. Others condemned for their roles included nurses who had administered lethal injections and overseers who had selected prisoners for the gas chambers. The executions of these women did not end the debate over justice. Only a relatively small number of the thousands of women who had worked in the camp system ever received death sentences.
Many were imprisoned, some were released after short periods, and others escaped punishment entirely, particularly during the Cold War when interest in prosecuting lower-ranking personnel declined. Courts varied in how strictly they judged responsibility, with later trials often demanding more precise evidence of direct involvement in murder. For survivors, the trials and executions represented a long-awaited attempt at justice after years of unimaginable suffering. Yet many felt that the punishment handed down was small compared to the scale of the crimes.
The women who were hanged had helped send thousands to their deaths, had killed prisoners with their own hands, and had inflicted misery on those who were defenseless. Their executions were swift, but the suffering they had caused had lasted for years. For the world that had seen the images from Belsen and Auschwitz, the sight of young women going to the gallows was difficult to reconcile with traditional ideas of womanhood, but the evidence of their cruelty made the verdicts clear. In the end, the trials established an important principle: women could be held equally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Gender offered no protection when the evidence showed that they had willingly taken part in mass murder.