LÜNEBURG, Germany — Three women who served as guards at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were hanged at Hamelin Prison on December 13, 1945, becoming the first women executed under British military law in the aftermath of World War II, as the world received its first unfiltered glimpse into the industrialized horror of the Holocaust.
The executions, carried out by Britain’s most experienced hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, concluded the so-called Belsen Trials, a five-month proceeding that began just weeks after British and Canadian forces liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, and that predated the Nuremberg Trials themselves.
Irma Grese, 22, the youngest woman ever sentenced to death under British law, was the first to mount the gallows. Known to prisoners as the “Beautiful Beast,” the “Hyena of Auschwitz,” and finally the “Angel of Death,” Grese had risen from a teenage volunteer at Ravensbrück to become the senior female overseer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she commanded some 18,000 women.
Witnesses described her as perpetually armed with a whip, a pistol, and heavy boots, accompanied by trained attack dogs. Survivors testified she lashed well-endowed women across the breasts with a braided cellophane whip, inflicting infections that were later cut open with unsterilized knives and no anesthesia.
As Grese walked to the gallows, Pierrepoint attempted to place a black hood over her head. She refused and violently shook it off, reportedly determined to look her executioner in the eyes until the final second. Guards restrained her while the hood was forced into place.
Witnesses claim Pierrepoint slapped her, though the written record does not confirm it.
What the official report does confirm is that Grese shouted “Schnell” — “quickly” — as she waited for the lever to be pulled. But her death was neither quick nor clean. Pierrepoint, a veteran of more than fifteen years of executions, placed the noose incorrectly, causing a slow and painful death by strangulation rather than a snapped neck.
Witnesses concluded the error was deliberate, driven by the contempt Pierrepoint held for the young “Angel of Death.”
Johanna Borman, a small woman nicknamed “the Weasel,” was hanged next. Completely defeated, she told the executioner, “I have my feelings.” Her death was swift and relatively painless, as was that of Elisabeth Volkenrath, who had claimed during her trial that conditions in the camp were unbearable not only for prisoners but for her and other camp workers as well.
The three women were among 45 female guards who had staffed Bergen-Belsen, part of a 480-member Nazi contingent. Twelve women were ultimately imprisoned for their roles in the genocide, and together with their male counterparts, they were held responsible for some 50,000 deaths at the camp.
When Allied soldiers of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment entered Bergen-Belsen, nothing in six years of war had prepared them for what lay inside. Intelligence reports had indicated the site held only prisoners of war. Instead, troops found 60,000 dying people and 13,000 unburied corpses, victims of a typhus epidemic that had raged unchecked for months.
The camp had never been designed as an extermination facility, but under the brutal regime of SS Captain Josef Kramer, the “Beast of Belsen,” it became perhaps the deadliest camp in Germany without a gas chamber. In the final months before liberation, some 35,000 people perished — many of them Jews who never knew how close they came to freedom.
Liberation did not end the dying. Thousands of starved and beaten prisoners died within their first week of freedom, their bodies simply giving out. In Bergen-Belsen, the daily death rate after liberation reached nearly 500, compared to 200 at Dachau.
Rich food brought by rescuers proved too much for deprived systems to handle.
In the chaos that followed, revenge killings erupted in a satellite camp where some 15,000 prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora camp had been relocated alongside 170 capos who had overseen them. Thousands of inmates attacked the capos with their bare hands, beating and stomping them until British authorities entering the barracks found only pools of blood and pulp that could no longer be identified as human.
The British forced former SS personnel to bury the dead in mass graves — the same task the SS had once forced upon Jewish and Polish prisoners. Denied gloves, protective clothing, and adequate rations, the SS workers were shouted at and threatened to keep them laboring. Within two months, 17 staff members had died of typhus, one committed suicide, and three were shot while attempting to escape.
The Belsen Trials, held at an old gymnasium in Lüneburg, marked the first occasion on which film was submitted as evidence in a war crimes proceeding. Between 1945 and 1949, British military courts in the British zone of Germany tried 937 persons on war crimes charges. Of those, 677 were convicted and 230 sentenced to death, with 174 executions carried out by the end of 1945 — most at the fearsome Hamelin Prison.
Albert Pierrepoint, a low-ranking officer treated as the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel for the task, was flown to Germany specifically to conduct the hangings. He was housed in a luxurious hotel and collected daily by jeep. In total, 191 men and 10 women were hanged at Hamelin, plus one man, Teofil Wesc, who was shot.
Pierrepoint carried out every hanging himself with what observers described as great professionalism, assisted by Company Sergeant Major Richard Anthony O’Neal and Sergeants James Hunter, Edwin James Roper, and Alexander Hurry.
A British female prison governor or deputy governor was required to be present at female executions. The Deputy Governor of Strangeways Prison, a woman named Wilson, attended the first three hangings.
The gallows, erected in the west wing of Hamelin’s main prison building, was modeled on the design at Pentonville Prison in London, with trap doors wide enough to permit double hangings — the norm at the facility. Prisoners were permitted the services of a minister of their religion before execution.
Pierrepoint came from a family of executioners. His father, Henry, and uncle, Thomas, had both served before him. Henry Pierrepoint had written repeatedly to the Home Office requesting appointment as one of the King’s executioners, finally joining the list in 1901 and becoming principal executioner of Britain by 1905.
He was removed from the official list in 1910 after reportedly arriving at work intoxicated. Over a decade-long career, he participated in more than 100 hangings.
Albert Pierrepoint surpassed his father’s record dramatically. He began as an assistant executioner in September 1932 at age 27, working alongside his proud Uncle Tom that December. By October 1941, he had undertaken his first hanging as lead executioner.
Over a 25-year career, he would execute some 600 people.
Before the war, Pierrepoint ended the lives of some of Britain’s most notorious criminals: Gordon Cummins, the “Blackout Ripper”; John Haigh, the “Acid Bath Murderer”; and John Christie, the “Rillington Place Strangler.” He was renowned for his meticulous attention to detail, always testing the gallows with a weighted bag before an execution and carefully calculating rope length and drop distance based on each prisoner’s height and weight.
During the war, he hanged 15 German spies and several American servicemen convicted of capital crimes in England, including the famous spy Karel Richter in December 1941. For the Belsen trials, he was sent abroad for the first time, establishing his operations at Hamelin Prison. Between December 1948 and October 1949, he executed 226 people there, often more than 10 in a single day and on several occasions groups of up to 17 over two days.
But for his first hangings at Hamelin — the Nazis condemned at the Belsen Trials — he took his time. Three women and 10 men were hanged on December 13, 1945. He executed the women one at a time, beginning with Irma Grese, then hanged the men two at a time, as the specially built gallows were designed for that purpose.
When he pulled the lever, the trap doors beneath both men opened and they plummeted to their deaths. All the men and the women, with the exception of Grese, were reported to have died instantly from a snapped neck.
Pierrepoint retired in 1956 after the government failed to pay him his full fee when an execution was called off at the last minute. Considering the attitude disrespectful after 25 years of service, he sent his resignation telegram immediately. He spent his final years running a pub with his wife in Southport, near Liverpool, and died on July 10, 1992, at age 87 in a nursing home where he had lived for the last four years of his life.
Irma Grese’s path to the gallows began in tragedy and fanaticism. She quit school at 15, shortly after her mother ended her own life. A Nazi devotee from an early age, she volunteered for training at Ravensbrück at 18, enraging her father.
When he discovered her new work uniform, she denounced him to authorities, and he was arrested soon after. It was then, by her own account, that she realized she enjoyed the power of forcing people to do her will.
Grese arrived at Ravensbrück in April 1941 but was told to return six months later when she turned 18. Her performance earned her a transfer to Auschwitz in early 1943, where she was placed in charge of 18,000 female prisoners. Of the roughly 2,500 female guards who served in the Nazi camp system, she was considered without question the worst.
She pursued not only sadistic gratification but sexual gratification as well. Sexual relations between SS and prisoners were strictly prohibited, but intercourse between SS members of opposite sexes was encouraged. According to witnesses, all female guards — married or unmarried — had one or more constant SS lovers.
While it typically took a month to train a female guard to her fullest depraved potential, Grese completed the process in three weeks. She felt she had reached a major milestone in her life.
She earned 54 Reichsmarks per month, significantly less than colleagues at Ravensbrück, and trained under Theodora Binz, a sadist who continued serving at Ravensbrück throughout the war. Binz began her career in September 1940, became an SS Chief Overseer by 1943, held that rank until the war’s end, and was finally hanged on May 2, 1947, at Hamelin — the same place where her disciple had died two years before.
Elisabeth Volkenrath, four years Grese’s senior and less vicious by comparison, began her career in October 1941 as a guard at Ravensbrück, where she met Grese, who would become her superior at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Volkenrath was sent to Auschwitz in early 1942 without promotion, having failed to demonstrate the same level of sadism as Grese.
At Auschwitz, she met her future husband, an SS block leader named Heinz, and together they became a deadly couple, actively participating in selections of people destined for the gas chambers in both the female and male wings of the death camp. Volkenrath earned a reputation for murdering Jews that ultimately secured her promotion to Chief Overseer for all female camp sections at Auschwitz, a position she held until the camp’s liberation, when she fled and was sent to Bergen-Belsen.
There, in the heart of the German homeland, she continued the killings — this time through starvation and denial of medical attention rather than gassing. Witnesses at the Belsen Trials claimed female guards killed the weaker prisoners, throwing girls to the ground and trampling them. Upon entering the camps, female guards were trained to become hardened and to punish prisoners severely when necessary.
Many became accustomed to beating and kicking prisoners, sometimes to death, with their jackboots, sticks, and truncheons — or, in Grese’s case, a whip made of cellophane.
Volkenrath carried a gun everywhere she went inside the camp. Testifying at the Belsen Trials, she admitted participating in tortures — for example, forcing prisoners to hold their hands above their heads for long periods, beating those who lowered them. But she insisted it was always on orders from others, and that she could not disobey without being punished or imprisoned herself.
She did admit to participating in torture but denied complete responsibility for her actions. She also tried to protect others, claiming she spoke to the commandant several times about conditions in the camp and asked why prisoners did not receive more food, only to be told the railways had been bombed and there was no way to supply the camp.
During the final months at Belsen, Volkenrath was in charge of the women’s bathhouse. With no coal available, every prisoner had to take a cold bath and dress quickly. Those who did not dress fast enough were beaten with sticks while still undressed and wet in the cold snow until they were unresponsive, at which point their block mates had to drag them and their clothes back to the barracks.
Her time at Bergen-Belsen was short but bloody. She arrived on February 5, 1945, and was appointed Chief Overseer, but fell ill within days and was hospitalized for over a month. When she returned, she tried to make up for lost time, throwing prisoners down stairs, slamming them against walls, and beating them mercilessly.
She was later accused of heinous crimes at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen — 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, torture, and participation in selections — though she adamantly insisted she took no part in selections, arguing she merely observed and kept order. Eyewitness testimony ultimately secured her conviction for crimes that were atrocious and deliberate in nature.
Johanna Borman, born September 10, 1893, in Burkenfelder, East Prussia, never married. At her trial, she stated she went to work for the SS only to make more money, but her actions suggested she was extremely lonely, embittered, and seeking something that would make her feel important — which the SS provided. Considerably older than many other guards, over 50 at the time of her arrest, she did not fit the Nazi feminine ideal of blond-haired, blue-eyed women like Irma Grese.
Before becoming a guard, Borman worked at an insane asylum, earning only 20 marks per month. Evidence suggests she was involved with the T4 euthanasia program for the insane. According to her testimony, she became part of the SS as a civilian employee in March 1938 to increase her income.
Once in the camp system, she earned more than 150 marks per month — considerably more than at any previous job.
Initially assigned to Ravensbrück as a kitchen helper, she later became a guard, known for cruelty and a propensity for violence, often applied through her dog. On May 15, 1943, she was assigned to Auschwitz, where she probably took part in selections for Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor responsible for some of the Holocaust’s most gruesome medical experiments — charges she denied at trial.
Borman was then sent to the Birkenau detachment until December 1943, followed by an assignment to Budy, a subcamp of Buna, where she worked as a Commando and took part in selections, again denied at trial. She was finally sent to Bergen-Belsen, where, by her own words, she was put in charge of looking after the camp pigs.
She used her status to engage in barbaric abuses — beatings, whippings, and savage torture against prisoners who tried to steal the pigs’ food. Her dogs continually provided a way to express power over the innocent. Numerous survivors testified that she set her dog on prisoners, including one account of her setting the animal on a menstruating woman.
In her defense, Borman claimed she purchased a dog as a pet and kept it only as such. She stated she gave the dog away and did not have it while working at Budy, taking it back only once it fell ill, and certainly never used the animal to attack prisoners under her care. Five different survivors testified to the contrary.
It remains unclear why she so emphatically denied ever letting her dog attack anyone — as if attempting to save the dog’s reputation.
Further evidence of the practice comes from Heinrich Himmler himself, who actively encouraged the use of dogs as a tool for female guards in the death camps.
Hertha Ehlert’s case demonstrates how seemingly ordinary individuals can quickly become instruments of death. She had worked as a bakery assistant in Berlin until called for SS work by the labor exchange on November 15, 1939. Women were not allowed to formally join the SS but could work for them, and it was not uncommon for the SS to issue official uniforms and credentials to women.
Throughout her trial, Ehlert maintained she was a conscript and held only minor positions, taking no part in torture or killing. At Ravensbrück, she said, her duties consisted of ensuring civilian workers did not mix with prisoners and later accompanying work parties outside the camp. In October 1942, she was moved as a female guard to the Majdanek camp near Lublin, Poland, claiming the transfer was punishment for being too nice to prisoners — not giving harsh enough punishments and helping feed them.
According to the Belsen trial, however, she received a bonus and better working conditions at that camp, proving she had not been punished.
By mid-1944, she was transferred to Kraków, where SS officers noticed she was too lenient, polite, and helpful to prisoners, so the SS returned her to Ravensbrück for another training course — this time under Dorothea Binz, who had also trained Irma Grese. Faithful to her reputation, Binz made a ruthless killer out of Ehlert.
Ehlert was later moved to Auschwitz as a female overseer, supervising women in charge of Commandos, then served at the Auschwitz subcamp in Risko, Poland, before transfer to Bergen-Belsen, where she became Deputy Wardress under the direct orders of Volkenrath and Grese. It was during this time that she committed most of the crimes for which she was ultimately convicted.
Immensely obese and struggling to walk, Ehlert was nevertheless sly, vicious, and an absolute master with the whip. Initially she was barely an overseer in charge of the kitchen, spying through a small window on Jewish women peeling potatoes, washing dishes, and performing other chores. Once, she ordered the working women to undress completely, then searched each one thoroughly, looking for rings, money, wristwatches, and other valuables.
She remained at her post until the final liquidation of the Kraków camp. Days before liberation, she was sent on a death march with thousands of prisoners, eventually reaching Bergen-Belsen, where she was employed during the war’s final months. When the British Army liberated Belsen, Ehlert was arrested and tried at the Belsen Trials.
Asked whether she had committed theft, witnessed severe beatings, or committed murder, she denied all accusations. Multiple eyewitnesses testified to torture and beatings at her hands. She pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Found guilty at Belsen but innocent at the Kraków camp for lack of evidence, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Her sentence was later reduced to 12 years, and she was released early on May 7, 1953, having served barely half her initial term. She lived the rest of her life as a free woman.
Hildegard Bothe, born January 8, 1921, in Teterow, Mecklenburg, came of age as Nazi power rose. Little is known of her social class or family life; she may have had literacy problems and viewed SS camp work as upward socioeconomic mobility. She held various jobs, including domestic work, until deciding to train as a nurse — training that lasted only a short period before she entered the camp system.
In October 1942, Bothe was conscripted as an overseer at Ravensbrück, where she was taught to manage a Commando. She stayed just over a week before being sent to Stutthof near Danzig, remaining two years until July 1944, when she was sent to Bromberg. After six months, in January 1945, she was forced to evacuate along with other camp personnel, marching for six weeks until reaching Bergen-Belsen.
At Belsen, Bothe initially worked in the bathhouse but was later assigned to the wood Commando, a position she held until her capture by the British Army in April 1945. Supervising about 60 prisoners — both male and female used for slave labor — she was one of the few overseers assigned to the duty alongside a male SS guard. She denied carrying weapons but admitted slapping prisoners who attempted to steal.
Numerous survivors testified that while prisoners carried their meager food rations, Bothe shot at them for sport. Part of her duties was ensuring wood was delivered to the kitchen and other areas. Several survivors related that she beat inmates with her fists and pieces of wood for minor infractions such as stealing scraps of food or wood.
At her trial, it was related that when first assigned to the bathhouse, she beat a naked woman with a rubber stick, inflicting grave harm and pain.
Bothe admitted that while working in the wood Commando, she beat or slapped prisoners for stealing but denied ever using extreme force or objects other than her hands. Her trial strategy, like that of other women, was to deny taking part in killings and claim she only followed orders. She continually asserted she was ordered to do everything she did, but sometimes did not follow orders when she deemed them too harsh on prisoners.
One survivor alleged Bothe beat a Hungarian Jew named Eva to death with a block of wood for unknown reasons. Another prisoner testified to seeing her shoot two prisoners in the back for no apparent reason. Her defense reminded the court that several witnesses testified she never carried a pistol, though others testified otherwise.
She also allegedly beat a woman for stealing turnip peels so severely that the woman died from her injuries; after realizing the woman was dead, Bothe ordered women inmates to remove and dispose of the body.
She admitted only that there were many cases of prisoners stealing from her Commando, and that when she caught thieves, the only punishment was a minor slap on the face, after which she would try to recover the stolen items. Her defense attorney maintained she was only 24 when captured and had arrived at Bergen-Belsen when conditions had already disintegrated, arguing she could not be held responsible for the camp’s state. The argument proved convincing, and after long debate over whether to convict, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison and released on December 21, 1951.
Irene Haschke’s role was brief but deadly. Little is known about her apart from the fact that she worked for a few months in the Bergen-Belsen kitchen. She had been a textile factory worker for most of the war until 1944, when the SS recruited her as a camp guard at age 23.
Despite her short participation, her name was mentioned by several witnesses. Testimony established that Haschke liked to spill prisoners’ soup and refuse them another ration, forcing them to wait until the following meal. When not in the kitchen, she walked around camp with a rubber stick, frequently beating girls for no apparent reason.
About 14 days before liberation, a woman went to fetch water from the camp’s water system. Haschke pushed her in. The woman drowned, and Haschke ordered two other girls to fish the body out and bury it in a nearby lot.
Notably, Haschke never had duties related to repressing inmates — only overseeing work in cookhouses two and three. Everything she did was entirely on her own initiative. She frequently took out her rage on inmates in the kitchen and elsewhere, and prisoners were especially afraid of her violent outbursts precisely because they were unprovoked.
She simply started beating prisoners whenever she felt like it, for no reason at all. Hurting unarmed people was a sport to her.
At her trial, she admitted beating prisoners who spilled soup and made a mess on the kitchen floor. She also claimed most of the crimes she was accused of were actually carried out by two male supervisors, head cooks Carl Francio and Nicholas Jenner. Most testimony pointed to her as the culprit, and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Nothing is known about her life after her release in 1951; she had no known family or permanent residence at the time.
British intelligence was notorious for failing to follow up on freed Nazis, many of whom continued to profess the same ideology for decades after the war. The cases of Haschke and Ehlert are similar — two women who had never hurt a fly were placed inside a machine destined to cause only pain and death, and they delivered exactly what was expected of them.
None of the women expressed any regret for what they had done or sympathy for their victims. To them, prisoners were simply expendable victims without a future or rights, destined to die one day or another. Whether acting on direct orders or their own accord, they committed some of the worst crimes known to humankind and paid the price.
The chilling testimony of hundreds of victims during the few months of the Belsen Trials helped establish their culpability. The lesser offenders received 10-year sentences. The most prominent and vicious killers were hanged at Hamelin Prison — Irma Grese, the “Beautiful Beast of Belsen”; Elisabeth Volkenrath, the sadistic SS wife; and Johanna Borman, who used her dog to torture and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 prisoners.
All met an obscure and tragic end, their names forever bound to the darkest chapter of human history.