On June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on the Normandy coast in France. The invasion marked a turning point in World War II and signaled the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.
The following month, Soviet forces liberated Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland. Only after the liberation of the camps did the full extent of Nazi horrors become known to the world.
Many prisoners had been subjected to forced labor and starvation. Years of mistreatment left them skeletal and barely able to move.
One of the perpetrators of these crimes was Elisabeth Becker. She was born on July 20, 1923, in Neuteich, then part of the Free City of Danzig.
The Free City of Danzig was created after World War I under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The treaty imposed harsh terms on Germany, including the loss of territories such as West Prussia and Danzig to Poland.
Germany resented these losses. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933, he sought to overturn the treaty’s provisions.
By May 1933, the Nazi Party had become the leading political force in Danzig. Anti-Polish sentiment increased, and policies of Germanization and segregation were enforced.
Polish political opposition was repressed. Politicians were imprisoned or murdered. Polish children were denied access to Polish-language schools, and Polish businesses faced restrictions.
From 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited. The use of Polish in public places was banned, and Poles were barred from many restaurants.
In 1936, Elisabeth Becker joined the League of German Girls, the female branch of the Hitler Youth. These organizations were used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology.
Boys and girls were taught racial awareness and physical fitness. They were encouraged to support the Nazi regime and often attended party rallies.
At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, about 100,000 young people participated. Reports stated that 900 girls between the ages of 15 and 18 returned home pregnant after the event.
Schools also played a role in spreading Nazi ideas. Children were taught loyalty to Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism.
In 1938, at age 16, Becker became a tramway conductor in Danzig.
World War II began on September 1, 1939. That same month, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of the town of Stutthof, about 22 miles east of Danzig.
The original camp was surrounded by barbed wire and contained eight barracks built by prisoners. It was initially a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief.
In November 1941, it became a labor education camp for political prisoners. In January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp under the SS.
In 1943, the camp was expanded. A new camp with 30 barracks was built, surrounded by electrified barbed wire. A crematorium and gas chamber were added that year.
The gas chamber had a maximum capacity of 150 people per execution. In June 1944, Stutthof was included in the Final Solution.
The camp system eventually became a vast network of forced labor camps. About 105 subcamps were established across northern and central German-occupied Poland.
Tens of thousands of people, possibly as many as 100,000, were deported to Stutthof. Most prisoners were non-Jewish Poles.
Conditions were brutal. Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics in the winter of 1941–42 and again in 1944. Those too weak or sick to work were gassed.
Gassing with Zyklon B began in June 1944. Around 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in the gas chamber before the camp was evacuated.
Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners with lethal injections of phenol. More than 60,000 people died in the camp and its subcamps.
Until 1942, nearly all prisoners were Polish. In 1944, the number of inmates increased significantly, with Jews forming a large proportion of new arrivals.
The first group of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July 1944. In total, 23,566 Jews, including 21,817 women, were transferred to Stutthof.
Camp staff included SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries. In June 1944, the SS began conscripting women from Danzig and nearby cities to serve as guards.
One such woman was Elisabeth Becker, who was working as an agricultural assistant in Danzig at the time. On September 5, 1944, she became a guard at the Stutthof women’s camp.
Becker was 21 years old and devoted to her job. She became known as a ruthless overseer.
She brutalized prisoners and beat inmates, sometimes to death, with her hands or a whip. In some cases, she drowned female inmates in mud or clubbed them to death.
Her victims included children. She beat them and selected them, along with their mothers, for the gas chamber.
In January 1945, the evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp system began. At that time, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners in the system.
About 5,000 prisoners from Stutthof subcamps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine-gunned. Others were marched toward Lauenburg in East Germany.
When the prisoners were cut off by Soviet forces, the Germans forced them back to Stutthof. Many died during the march in severe winter conditions.
In late April 1945, remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea. Hundreds were forced into the sea and shot.
It is estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation.
When Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945, they found only about 100 prisoners who had hidden during the final evacuation.
Altogether, some 100,000 prisoners passed through Stutthof. Around 60,000 perished, and another 22,000 were transferred to other camps.
Elisabeth Becker escaped from the camp in January 1945 after contracting typhus. She returned home to Neuteich and was hospitalized in Danzig.
She was arrested on April 13, 1945, and placed in prison to await trial.
Becker was tried at the first Stutthof trial, which began on April 25, 1946. She confessed to selecting at least 30 female prisoners to be gassed.
She later retracted her confession, claiming she had admitted to it only because she had been beaten.
She and her female co-defendants pleaded not guilty to war crimes. They were said to have behaved insolently, giggling and joking during the proceedings.
The trial ended on May 31. Becker was sentenced to death by hanging for her involvement in selections and her sadistic abuse of prisoners.
She cried when the verdict was announced. She sent several letters to the Polish president requesting a commutation of her sentence.
The court had recommended that her sentence be reduced to 15 years, noting that her actions were not as severe as those of other defendants and that she had served at the camp for a shorter time. No pardon was issued.
Her execution was public and was recorded by official press photographers. After World War II, only three public executions of war criminals were carried out in Poland.
One took place at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk. On July 4, 1946, 11 Nazi criminals from Stutthof, including 22-year-old Elisabeth Becker, were hanged.
Around 200,000 people watched. Newspapers had announced the execution date three days earlier, and workplaces gave employees the day off and provided transport.
Security forces feared a lynching. The militia and army struggled to control the crowd.
The day was warm and sunny. At 5 PM, 11 open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground. Their hands and legs were tied with cords.
Each truck carried one convict, six men and five women. The trucks were backed under the gallows, and the condemned stood on the tailboards or chairs.
Four prisoners dressed in striped uniforms served as executioners. They placed simple rope nooses around the convicts’ necks.
The execution was planned so that when each truck moved forward, the convicts would be left suspended. The drop was short, so the nooses did not break their necks.
This method caused death by strangulation, lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes.
When the first truck moved forward, the former commandant of the guards managed to shout “Heil Hitler” before falling off the platform. The crowd responded with insults.
As each truck moved forward, the other convicts watched what awaited them. One truck driver failed to start the engine several times, and a prisoner pushed the convict off the platform.
The crowd shouted, “For our husbands, for our children.”
After the last convict died, security forces allowed the crowd to approach the gallows. People ripped off buttons, cut pieces of fabric, and kicked and smashed the corpses.
The bodies were later removed and taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk to be used as teaching aids in anatomy classes.