Herta Ehlert was one of the 45 male and female Nazi SS guards who faced justice in 1945 during the Belsen trials for crimes committed during World War II in brutal Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Ehlert was born on March 26, 1905, in Berlin. Before the war, she worked as a saleswoman.
Her criminal career in the concentration camps began in November 1939, when she became a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She held that post for three years before being transferred to Lublin.
According to her own testimony, she was not cruel enough to the inmates, and the transfer was meant as a punishment. However, the female prisoners of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Ehlert worked before the end of the war, had very different recollections of how she treated the camp's prisoners.
Through the small window in the kitchen she supervised, Ehlert spied on the Jews. She was known as a skilled master of whips and sticks.
On one occasion, Ehlert noticed that a prisoner was wearing a ring and a locket. She accused the prisoner of stealing, searched her, then ordered her to undress and beat her with a stick until the floor beneath was covered in blood.
She then locked the woman in a cellar without food or water for three days. The woman managed to survive her detention in the cellar, as well as brutal interrogations for three weeks, thanks to her sister, who smuggled in food and water.
Tragically, after surviving this horrible torture, the woman was sent to clean the latrines. Weak and exhausted from her horrific abuse, she contracted typhus and died.
At the Belsen trials, Ehlert refused to confess to any of the charges brought against her. When asked about her cruelty, she admitted only to having slapped a few prisoners with a single open hand, denying the witness's testimony of her brutality.
Her denial of the truth did not help her escape punishment for her crimes. Herta Ehlert was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Unlike Irma Grese, she avoided a death sentence. In the end, she spent only a few years in prison before she was released early in the 1950s.
She changed her name to Irmgard Naumann and lived as a free woman until her death in April 1997, at the age of 92.