Ruth Neudeck was born Ruth Hartmann on July 5, 1920, in Brawen, then part of the Weimar Republic. She was 12 years old when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933.
Nazi propaganda became inescapable during her teenage years. Schools introduced textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and anti-Semitism.
The first concentration camp at Dachau was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler took power. By the time World War II began in September 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already immigrated or been marginalized by more than 400 Nazi decrees and regulations.
Neudeck worked as a payroll accountant when the war broke out. In July 1944, she arrived at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp to begin training as a camp overseer. At that time, she was already married to a man named Neudeck.
Ravensbrück opened in May 1939 and was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis. It was staffed by SS men and about 150 female supervisors. The camp also served as a training center for roughly 3,500 female guards.
Starting in the summer of 1942, SS doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments. They broke prisoners’ legs with hammers, infected open wounds with aggressive bacteria, and tested various bone-setting and transplant methods, often without anesthesia.
Neudeck impressed her superiors with her brutality toward imprisoned women. By the end of July 1944, she was promoted to the rank of block leader.
She was known as a twisted sadist who enjoyed taunting and beating prisoners. She beat prisoners who had lice, forced them to strip naked, doused them with cold water, and ordered them to stand in the cold. On one occasion, she cut a prisoner’s throat with the blade of a shovel.
By early December 1944, Neudeck had become leader of prisoner block 27, which housed about 700 women. After a brief sick leave, she served for ten days as leader of the punishment block.
In mid-January, she was transferred to Uckermark, a satellite camp near Ravensbrück. Uckermark was used as an extermination camp for women who were sick, no longer efficient, or over 52 years old.
As camp leader, Neudeck had five female overseers under her command. She participated in the selection and execution of over 4,000 women and children. Killing methods included striking, poisoning, starvation, and gassing.
Holocaust survivor Sakova testified that Neudeck insisted no woman, even if dying, could remain inside the barracks during roll call. Those who tried to stay behind were forcibly dragged outside by Neudeck herself.
Sakova recalled a chilling morning when prisoners placed a dying woman on two chairs hoping she could pass away in peace. Neudeck walked past, saw the woman, and brutally kicked her off the chairs, accelerating her death.
Another survivor, Erica Bman, testified that she witnessed Neudeck pulling women selected for the gas chambers into lorries by their hair. Neudeck beat them in the face and kicked their partly naked bodies with the heels of her boots.
After loading them onto the lorry, Neudeck shouted that the women should not make a fuss because the place they were going would be warm and they would not need clothing. She was sadistically referring to the heat of the gas chambers.
While working at Uckermark, Neudeck became a widow and remarried, taking the name Ruth Clus after her second husband.
From mid-February 1945, she served as head of the Barth sub-camp, part of the Ravensbrück complex. After the camp was dissolved on April 28, 1945, Neudeck fled and was later arrested by the British army.
She was tried in the third Ravensbrück trial, held from April 14 to April 26, 1948. Charges included mistreatment of female prisoners and participation in the selection of women for the gas chambers.
At trial, Neudeck admitted to beating prisoners of block 27 with a whip. She commented that she could not hit prisoners with her hand because they all had lice.
She also stated that when she took over the Uckermark camp, there were about 4,000 prisoners. After six weeks, only a thousand remained. The rest had been eliminated in the gas chamber.
She defended herself by claiming she had only accompanied transports to the gas chamber and had not selected prisoners herself.
On April 26, 1948, the British Military Tribunal found Ruth Neudeck guilty and sentenced her to death by hanging. She filed a plea for clemency, claiming she was young and inexperienced, but the court rejected it.
Ruth Neudeck was 28 years old when British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on July 29, 1948.