On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen, one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. The British forces found 13,000 unburied bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. Thousands more inmates would die of diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis in the months following liberation.
The British captured male and female Nazi personnel responsible for these horrors. Some were forced to help bury the dead in mass graves. Others were found in the camp's hospital, recovering from typhus themselves. One of them was a German Nazi guard named Anna Hempel.
Anna Hempel was born on June 22, 1900, in Grünberg, then part of the German Empire. She was married with a son when the Second World War began on September 1, 1939. In May 1944, when she joined the SS, she was working in a textile factory.
That same month, she began a three-week course at Ravensbrück concentration camp to become a guard. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
Ravensbrück was staffed both by SS men, who served as guards and administrators, and by 150 women, who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good pay and work conditions. The camp also housed a training facility for female SS guards. About 3,500 women were trained at Ravensbrück and went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
From Ravensbrück, Anna Hempel was sent to Grünberg, a sub camp of the larger concentration camp system known as Gross-Rosen. The camp was used for forced labor, and female prisoners worked in textile and munitions factories. The textile factory produced material for uniforms, army coats, parachutes, and blankets that the German military needed.
In early 1945, as Allied bombing drew closer, the female inmates of Grünberg were taken on a death march on January 28. In freezing cold, the women had to march without shoes, their feet wrapped in rags. Their possessions consisted of a thin blanket, a tin bowl, and a spoon. Each received a hunk of bread to eat.
The Germans were frantically moving prisoners out of camps near the front and taking them to be used as forced laborers inside Germany. Many perished or were murdered along the way, and the exact number of victims is unknown. Part of this death march was in unheated freight trains.
After more than three weeks, on February 17, 1945, Anna Hempel and prisoners from Grünberg arrived at Bergen-Belsen, a camp for sick people. Sanitary conditions were terrible. There was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking.
Between January and March 1945, when prisoners were sent on death marches from other concentration camps, about one-third of those who arrived in the transports were already dead. Almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station because they were too weak and sick to walk. On one occasion, out of a transport of 1,900 inmates, over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners received almost no food during these death marches, and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during the freezing winter months, prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands.
In March 1945, due to starvation, thirst, and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of prisoners was between 250 and 300.
At Bergen-Belsen, Hempel had two days off duty. Then for two days she worked in the bath-house. The bath houses were designed to disinfect 400 prisoners and their clothing every day. Steam flowing out of the floor killed lice to protect prisoners from typhus and other diseases. Because disinfecting clothing took longer than disinfecting prisoners, the prisoners had to wait outside, wet and naked in the cold weather.
After working in the bath house, Hempel worked in Kitchen No. 2 in the men's compound. According to her trial testimony, for a few weeks she was the only supervisor of 34 women and 18 men who worked 14 to 16 hours a day. Their daily job was to cook food for starving prisoners. The 17,000 rations they cooked every day consisted of one litre of soup at mid-day and three-quarters of a litre at night. The prisoners received no bread at all.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anna Hempel was known as a cruel and sadistic guard. When it seemed to her that prisoners were slacking, she would beat them terribly. On a few occasions she was seen beating young starving girls simply for stealing turnips. To make them suffer even more, she beat them with her special riding-whip.
Another tool she used to beat prisoners was a rubber truncheon. Once she was seen hitting a very sick man who collapsed in a heap on the ground. The reason was that the starving prisoner had stolen a little food from the kitchen.
When it seemed to her that her fellow Nazi colleagues did not beat the prisoners properly, she went to the camp's commandant, Josef Kramer, to complain. Herta Ehlert, another female Nazi guard who served at Bergen-Belsen alongside Anna Hempel, was so horrified by how cruelly Hempel treated the prisoners that she went to Kramer to complain that Hempel beat prisoners to such an extent that it was disgusting.
Hempel's reign of terror ended on April 8, 1945, when she was taken ill with typhus and went to the hospital in the Wehrmacht Barracks Area at Belsen. Seven days later, on April 15, the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen, and Anna Hempel was arrested.
She was tried at the Belsen Trial, which began on September 17, 1945. Hempel refused to confess to any of the charges brought against her. When asked about her cruelty, she only admitted to having beaten a starving prisoner over his back with a stick because, as she testified, she had caught him filling his pockets with turnips and could not bring herself to slap his face.
However, the reason she could not bring herself to slap his face was that she knew he, as well as other prisoners, had typhus and she did not want to touch them with her hands. Instead, Hempel beat them with a stick, truncheon, whip, or whatever she could get hold of. She claimed she had beaten the prisoner this way only once.
Her lies did not help her escape justice. The British Military Tribunal found Anna Hempel guilty of the crimes she had committed at Bergen-Belsen and sentenced her to 10 years imprisonment. Unlike Irma Grese, she avoided the death sentence and ultimately spent only six years in prison until she was released in April 1951.
Nothing more is known about her remaining life or how she died. There were no tears shed for Anna Hempel.