On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany. British forces found approximately 13,000 unburied bodies and nearly 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starving. Thousands more inmates died from diseases such as typhus in the months following the camp’s liberation.
British forces captured male and female Nazi personnel responsible for the camp’s horrors and forced them to help bury the dead in mass graves. Among those captured was Elisabeth Volkenrath, who would become one of the most infamous female perpetrators of the Nazi regime.
Volkenrath was born on September 5, 1919, in Schönau an der Katzbach, then part of the Weimar Republic. She was one of six children of a forest worker and his wife. In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, Volkenrath was 13 years old.
She soon became a member of the League of German Girls, the female section of the Hitler Youth. These organizations were primary tools used by the Nazis to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology. By the end of 1933, membership in the Hitler Youth had grown from about 100,000 to over 2 million.
Girls in the League of German Girls were trained for their futures as wives and mothers. They learned skills such as sewing, nursing, cooking, and household chores. In 1936, membership in Nazi youth groups became mandatory for all boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 17.
After completing elementary school, Volkenrath worked as a nanny and cook’s assistant. From May 1938 until the beginning of the war, she worked in a hairdressing salon. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.
Volkenrath completed six months with the German National Labor Service. In 1941, she was conscripted into the SS and sent to Ravensbrück, where she trained as a guard. Ravensbrück opened in May 1939 and was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis.
Some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through Ravensbrück, and over 92,000 of them perished. The camp was staffed by SS men and about 150 female supervisors. Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for female SS guards.
At Ravensbrück, Volkenrath worked with outside commandos and had to ensure prisoners did not escape and completed their work. Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments. These experiments included breaking prisoners’ legs, infecting wounds with bacteria, and testing various methods of bone setting and transplantation.
In March 1942, Volkenrath was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. She first worked in a tailoring shop where prisoners mended uniforms. Volkenrath regularly struck the elderly women employed there with her fists, sometimes so hard that they fell to the ground.
From December 1942, she was responsible for a parcel store where she supervised a group of 25 to 30 prisoners. She was also in charge of the distribution of bread to the prisoners. Through her eager performance of her responsibilities, Volkenrath rose rapidly in the overseer hierarchy.
In November 1944, she was promoted to chief senior overseer, supervising a dozen female guards and several dozen kapos. Volkenrath became known for her exceptional sadism and brutality and became one of the most hated SS women in the camp.
One of her duties was taking part in gas chamber selections. Volkenrath later claimed she never took part in selections and that her duty was only to be present and keep order. However, Holocaust survivors later testified that Volkenrath herself made selections from prisoners as they returned to camp from outside work.
During these selections, prisoners did not know if they were being chosen for a working party, transfer to another camp, or the gas chamber. Volkenrath kept order in the selection parades by beating, kicking, and ill-treating prisoners who tried to escape. She then helped load the women to be killed onto lorries that took them to the gas chambers.
On one occasion, when Volkenrath was personally picking out victims from 1,400 prisoners, only 300 were left after the selection had been made. One of her favorite habits at Auschwitz was to beat women with anything at hand without any reason until they lay still.
Two Holocaust survivors testified that on about 80 occasions, Volkenrath beat female prisoners, often with a rubber truncheon, until they were unconscious. Many of these persons were carried away dead. One survivor testified that Volkenrath had beaten her so severely that she ended up in hospital for three weeks.
The working day at Auschwitz began at 4:30 in the summer and 5:30 in the winter. Prisoners were counted during roll calls that often lasted from three to nine in the morning. Volkenrath specialized in making these roll calls as difficult as possible, forcing prisoners to hold their hands above their heads for hours and beating them if they lowered them.
She also took away food and water from starving prisoners, explaining that they had too much of it. Volkenrath enjoyed submitting prisoners to punitive physical exercises, which included running with hands held up, exhausting marches on bare feet, and crawling on gravel on their elbows.
In 1943, Elisabeth became Elisabeth Volkenrath after marrying Heinz Volkenrath, who had worked at Auschwitz since 1941 as an SS block leader. She left Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, when Soviet forces approached and the SS began evacuating the camp complex. These forced marches became known as the death marches.
On February 5, 1945, she arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Sanitary conditions there were terrible, with no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945, about one-third of prisoners who arrived in transports were already dead.
The camp was so overcrowded that prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor. Due to starvation and typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate was between 250 and 300 prisoners. Yet even in such harsh conditions, Volkenrath enjoyed beating half-starved prisoners.
On one occasion, she caught a sick girl taking vegetables and made her kneel and hold the vegetables above her head. When the girl could no longer hold her arms up, Volkenrath beat her on the head, back, and legs with a rubber truncheon. The girl was knocked unconscious and no one was allowed to assist her.
On another occasion, a female prisoner was accused of wearing a stolen ring. After being beaten, she was made to run behind a bicycle to the SS headquarters, where Volkenrath and others beat her. The woman was then put in a cellar with food and water for only three days but survived brutal interrogations for three weeks.
On the day after British forces arrived to liberate the camp, Volkenrath was witnessed beating a young girl with her fist so violently that the girl collapsed and did not move again. Volkenrath then went away, leaving her where she lay.
On April 17, 1945, two days after Bergen-Belsen’s liberation, Volkenrath was captured by British forces. She was tried at the Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945. Volkenrath pleaded not guilty on all charges and denied everything.
When asked about the brutal beating of prisoners, she responded that it was true she slapped women who did not obey orders. She said if they were more intelligent, they would obey orders and everything would be all right.
On November 17, the British Military Tribunal sentenced Elisabeth Volkenrath to death by hanging. She was 26 years old. British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on December 13, 1945. Volkenrath was the first to be executed that day, with her time of death recorded at 9:34 am.