On the night of July 22, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army reached Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp to be liberated. It stood in German-occupied Poland.
The liberation became one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Only after the camps were opened did the full scale of Nazi crimes become exposed to the world.
Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and see the evidence for themselves. Among those responsible for the atrocities there was Ela Erich, also known as Ela Len Freda Erich.
She was born on March 8, 1914, in Breda, then part of the German Empire. Her parents, Anna and Albert, had her baptized as a Protestant on June 1, 1914, and her name was spelled Elza in the church records.
Her father worked as a skipper. After finishing school, Elza began working at a slaughterhouse.
From 1930 to 1933, the global economic depression ravaged Germany and left millions without work. Economic misery, fear of the future, and frustration with a failing government created fertile ground for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Soon afterward, the Nazi authorities established concentration camps across the country to hold masses of people arrested as alleged subversives.
These camps, along with the German police forces, were controlled by the SS. From 1939, the SS took responsibility for solving the so-called Jewish question.
After 1941, its leadership planned, coordinated, and directed the so-called final solution, the annihilation of the European Jews now known as the Holocaust. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On August 15, 1940, Ela Erich volunteered for service as an SS guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ravensbrück opened in May 1939 and was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
The camp was staffed by SS men as guards and administrators and by 150 women who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who took the job for the good pay and working conditions.
The main camp contained 18 barracks. Two served as a prisoner sick bay, two as warehouses, one as a penal block, and one as the camp prison until a separate prison was built in 1939.
The remaining 12 barracks housed prisoners, who slept in three-tiered wooden bunks. Each barrack had a washroom and toilets, but sanitary conditions were poor and deteriorated greatly after 1943.
Food rations were meager from the outset and decreased further after 1941. The SS required Ravensbrück prisoners to perform forced labor, primarily in agriculture and local industry.
By 1944, Germany increasingly relied on forced labor for armaments production. In total, some 132,000 women from across Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, and Roma.
Of that number, over 92,000 women perished at Ravensbrück. Erich rose rapidly in the overseer hierarchy through the eager performance of her duties.
From 1941, she worked as an SS report leader. Most report leaders in the SS were known for their brutality.
Their primary duty was to conduct daily and evening roll calls, often a long and grueling process in which prisoners stood for hours in all types of weather. The report leader also oversaw camp discipline and the training of junior SS personnel.
In mid-October 1942, Erich was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp. There she became head female overseer in charge of the women's camp.
On arrival at Majdanek, prisoners underwent the camp admission process. Their belongings and clothes were taken, their personal data was recorded, and they were assigned prisoner numbers meant to replace their identities.
Children deported to Majdanek were registered together with their mothers under the exact same number. All newcomers were also subjected to a brutal and humiliating bathing and disinfection process.
Former Majdanek prisoner Jadwiga van Jeta described the trauma of bathing. One of the first things that shocked us entirely, she said, was the necessity to strip right under the eyes of the whole personnel, who were mostly German men.
Resistance was the first automatic reaction, she recalled, but the women eventually had to comply because the guards began to yell and beat them. Afterward, clothing from the camp storehouses was distributed randomly, with no attention to sizes or weather.
SS men then escorted the newly admitted women to the women's camp field. All prisoners were forced to attend daily roll calls and were exploited in exhausting obligatory labor.
Living conditions inside the barracks were poor. When the first women arrived at Majdanek on October 7, 1942, the barracks in their part of the camp were still under construction and lacked even the most basic sanitary appliances.
Although Erich was formally subject to the camp commandant, her duties required close cooperation with the political department and the prisoner camp. Erich and her deputy, Hermina Briner, were responsible for daily roll calls and for assigning female prisoners to labor groups.
In the winter of 1941 to 1942, Majdanek authorities began using Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber. Mass murder with poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943.
There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek. At least two were shower rooms reconfigured for Zyklon B, and at least one of those two was used to kill people.
The two smaller chambers could hold 150 people, and the larger one 300. All three used Zyklon B, and at least two could also use carbon monoxide.
Erich took part in selections for the gas chamber and is believed responsible for the deaths of thousands of women and children. One Majdanek survivor later recalled that Erich brought cocoa and candy to the children's barracks, and a moment later the truck arrived.
Jewish children got on smiling, still with candy in their hands, the survivor said. The cars drove straight to the crematorium.
Erich, once a butcher shop assistant, was described as primitive by former female inmates. At Majdanek, however, she had the power to decide matters of life and death.
She became infamous for slapping and kicking prisoners for no reason. She enjoyed brutally harassing and beating especially weak, emaciated, and old women.
She had a habit of hitting women in the face with her fist until blood showed. She did not spare even children, whom she beat and killed in front of their mothers.
Amid this terror, brutality, sadism, and killing, some people tried to help their fellow prisoners. Dr. Stefania Panovka, who worked to improve medical care, once asked Erich for an allowance of milk for her patient babies.
Upon hearing this, Erich slapped her face and yelled that this was not a sanatorium but a death camp. Panovka also recalled that everyone beat the prisoners, from the camp commandant to the camp guards and officers.
Camp commandant Anton Thumann would even come to the hospital at 2 a.m. while intoxicated just to beat them in the face, she said. But no one beat them as much or as painfully as Elsa Erich.
She beat with passion and cold cruelty in her eyes, Panovka recalled. No SS woman did it as hard and as severely as she did.
Erich referred to female prisoners with contempt and hatred on any pretext, slapping and kicking them. She also selected children and elderly and weaker women for the gas chambers with great zeal and never showed mercy.
In early 1943, Erich attempted to launch a Nazi brothel in the camp. The project was abandoned after one of her slave sex workers was diagnosed with typhus.
Erich herself became ill with typhoid in February 1943. The same year, uprisings at the Treblinka and Sobibor killing centers and in the Warsaw, Białystok, and Vilna ghettos led to increased concerns about Jewish resistance.
To prevent further resistance, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the killing of surviving Jews in the Lublin District of German-occupied Poland. Most of the remaining Jews there were employed in forced labor projects and concentrated in the camps of Trawniki, with at least 4,000; Poniatowa, with at least 11,000; and Majdanek, with about 18,000.
They were killed on November 3 and 4. In all three camps, Jews were forced to strip naked and walk into previously dug trenches, where they were shot.
At Majdanek, the SS shot the Jews near the crematorium. Jews from other labor camps in the Lublin area were also taken to Majdanek and shot.
Music was played through loudspeakers at both Majdanek and Trawniki to drown out the noise of the mass shootings. Approximately 42,000 Jews were killed during the operation known as Harvest Festival, the largest single massacre of the Holocaust.
When the evacuation of Jewish prisoners to be killed during the operation began, SS guards went through the barracks dragging out anyone who was hiding. Anyone who was sick was loaded onto trucks.
Because the sick were only wearing underwear, prisoner Stefania Panovka threw blankets over them. Ela Erich, supervising the loading, noticed this, pulled the blankets off, lashed Panovka with a whip, and told her not to waste hospital property.
After the Harvest Festival killings, the Lublin-Majdanek camp no longer had a majority of Jews among its prisoners. At the end of 1943, of 6,562 prisoners registered at Majdanek, approximately 71 were Jews.
In mid-March 1944, surviving Jews from various subcamps of Majdanek were brought to the main camp for eventual evacuation west to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Around 834 Jews were imprisoned in Majdanek.
Some were killed in the gas chambers between March and July 1944, and the SS transferred the rest to Auschwitz and other camps. According to the most recent research, over the course of three years, among an estimated 130,000 prisoners who entered Majdanek, 80,000 people perished at the camp.
When Majdanek was evacuated, Erich was transferred to the Płaszów concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. After its evacuation in September 1944, she was transferred to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany, where she worked until April 1945.
In May 1945, shortly after the end of the war, Elsa Erich was arrested by the British occupation authorities in Hamburg. She was transferred to U.S. custody at the camp for war criminals in Dachau before being transferred to Poland.
At Dachau, Erich shared a cell with Maria Mandl, her equally sadistic Nazi comrade from Ravensbrück. In 1948, justice finally caught up with Ela Erich when she stood before the District Court of Lublin at the second Majdanek trial.
She was accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. On June 10, 1948, Erich was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death by hanging.
After the judgment was announced, she asked Polish President Bolesław Bierut for clemency, saying she had a small son and wanted to atone for her guilt. President Bierut rejected the request.
Ela Erich was 34 years old when she was executed in Lublin prison on October 26, 1948. There were no tears shed for Elsa Erich.