Five former female guards of the Stutthof concentration camp were hanged together before a crowd estimated at 200,000 people on a hill overlooking Gdansk, bringing to a close one of the most closely watched war crimes proceedings to emerge from the ashes of the Second World War.
The executions, carried out at Biskupia Górka on July 4, 1946, marked the culmination of the first Stutthof trial, a proceeding that shocked observers around the world not only for the scale of the atrocities described in the courtroom but for the identity of some of the defendants: women, several of them barely out of their teens, who had served as overseers inside a camp where an estimated 65,000 prisoners perished.
Jenny Wanda Barkmann, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff, Ewa Paradies and Gerda Steinhoff were condemned to death for their roles in the mass murder, torture and systematic cruelty inflicted on inmates at the camp, which operated east of Danzig and became the first concentration camp established outside Germany’s pre-war borders.
The women were executed alongside a number of male defendants, eleven condemned prisoners in total, in a public spectacle that authorities permitted in part to demonstrate to the local population that the crimes committed at Stutthof would not go unpunished.
Barkmann, who was 24 years old at the time of her death, was the first to be hanged. According to accounts of the execution, she wore a simple dress and stood on the back of a truck beneath a towering wooden gallows as her arms and ankles were bound and a noose was placed around her neck.
As the crowd watched, the truck pulled away, leaving her suspended in the air. Witnesses described her hands and feet twitching as she struggled for breath, one of her shoes falling away, before her body went limp. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The remaining four women were executed in the same manner, one after another, before the male defendants were hanged on an adjacent structure. The gallows were built large enough to accommodate two executions at once, with a central beam capable of supporting three, and tall enough that the crowds massed on the hillside could see the proceedings clearly.
The five women had been convicted after a trial in Gdansk in which prosecutors presented evidence that they had beaten prisoners to death, selected inmates for the gas chambers, and participated enthusiastically in the brutal regime that defined daily life at Stutthof.
Barkmann, in particular, drew attention in the courtroom for her demeanor. Observers noted that she appeared more concerned with her hair than with the testimony being heard, that she smirked during the presentation of horrific evidence, and that she flirted with guards inside the courtroom. Her conduct stood in stark contrast to the suffering described by survivors who took the stand against her.
Erna Beilhardt, the sixth woman tried in the first Stutthof proceeding, was spared the gallows and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The five condemned women were executed together with the men sentenced in the same trial.
Stutthof began operations on September 2, 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland, and was initially used to intern Polish civilians, including politicians, religious leaders and intellectuals targeted in the Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing in West Prussia and the Danzig region.
Lists of intended prisoners had been drawn up before the invasion, and the camp expanded rapidly. Within weeks of opening, its population swelled from roughly 150 prisoners to around 6,000, all of them Polish at that stage. Over the course of the war, some 110,000 people from across Europe passed through its gates.
Among them were Jews deported from across the continent, resistance fighters, Soviet prisoners of war, communists and psychiatric patients. The main camp oversaw approximately 40 subcamps, where prisoners were used as slave laborers for German companies, including an armaments factory and a Focke-Wulf aircraft plant.
Conditions inside Stutthof were catastrophic. Disease was rampant, starvation killed thousands, and typhus epidemics in 1942 and 1944 swept through the barracks, prompting selections in which SS officers and doctors chose the sick and weak for death in a small gas chamber on the site.
Mass murder using Zyklon B began in June 1944. An estimated 4,000 prisoners, most of them Jewish women and children, were killed in the gas chamber before the camp was evacuated. Executions by gunfire were also routine, with many Polish resistance fighters shot dead after being imprisoned.
Doctors killed injured and sick prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections. Allegations surfaced that the SS used human fat from corpses to manufacture soap, and that hundreds of prisoners were executed for that purpose. Many inmates drowned in the boggy mud that surrounded the camp grounds.
The brutality of the guards became a central focus of the postwar trials. Barkmann was identified as a guard who personally selected prisoners for the gas chambers and who regularly beat women to death. Other female overseers were implicated in similar acts, clubbing and beating prisoners until they died.
In late January 1945, as Soviet forces advanced, a full-scale evacuation of Stutthof was ordered. Some 50,000 prisoners, most of them Jewish, were forced out of the camp. About 5,000 were marched to the Baltic coast, where guards drove them into the water and opened fire with machine guns.
Other columns marched toward eastern Germany but were cut off by Soviet troops and forced to turn back. Thousands died during the death marches from exposure, starvation and summary execution in the freezing winter conditions. Prisoners who remained were later taken from the camp by sea, and more were thrown into the water and shot.
An estimated 25,000 prisoners died during the evacuation. When the camp was finally liberated on March 9, 1945, only about 100 prisoners were found there, survivors who had hidden from the death marches.
After the war, the Nuremberg trials sought to bring the leaders of the Nazi Party to justice, but a vast number of lesser-known proceedings were held to punish the staff who had operated the camps. The Stutthof trials, a series of four proceedings held in Gdansk between 1946 and 1947, were among them.
Despite roughly 2,000 SS staff having worked at Stutthof, only 72 SS officers and six female overseers were ever brought to trial, a fact that has drawn criticism from historians and survivors who argue that the vast majority of perpetrators escaped accountability.
The first trial placed the six women, accused of serving as Aufseherins, before the court alongside male defendants. Witness statements and documentary evidence detailing the camp’s horrors were presented over the course of the proceedings.
For the crowds that gathered on Biskupia Górka on the day of the executions, the hangings represented a measure of retribution for the suffering inflicted inside the camp’s barbed wire fences. The condemned were transported to the hill by truck under Soviet guard, and the executions were carried out in full public view.
The five women left hanging from the gallows as the men were executed beside them, their bodies suspended before a crowd that stretched across the hillside, formed the final image of a proceeding that authorities intended as a warning and a reckoning.
All of the guards executed that day were put to death for the barbaric treatment of prisoners. The women who died on the gallows had held different roles inside the camp, but prosecutors argued they shared a common willingness to inflict mass suffering, to murder prisoners with their own hands, and to select others to die in the gas chambers.
The Stutthof trials remain a reminder of the scale of the crimes committed within the Nazi camp system and of the relatively small number of perpetrators who were ever made to answer for them. For the survivors of Stutthof, and for the families of those who perished there, the executions of July 4, 1946, offered what many described as a small measure of justice for horrors that could never be fully answered.