On February 3, 1947, a British military tribunal in Hamburg, Germany, delivered its verdicts in the first Ravensbrück trial. The proceedings, which lasted nearly two months, exposed the brutal mistreatment and torture carried out by the camp’s male and female personnel. Of the 16 defendants, 11 were sentenced to death by hanging. One of them was Vera Salvequart.
Vera Salvequart was born on November 26, 1919, in Ohníč, then part of Czechoslovakia. Her mother was Czech, and her adopted father was a Sudeten German. Shortly after her birth, the family emigrated to Germany.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, turning Germany into a dictatorship. The regime quickly began restricting the civil and human rights of Jewish people. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became chancellor.
On September 15, 1935, the Nazi regime introduced the Nuremberg Laws. These included the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only Aryans could be citizens, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which forbade marriages and extramarital relations between Germans and Jews. Over the next eight years, thirteen additional decrees were added, including the official definition of who was considered Jewish.
During this period, Salvequart completed her training as a nurse and studied medicine for two semesters. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland.
In May 1941, Salvequart was arrested by the Gestapo for having a relationship with a Jewish man, which was punishable under the Nuremberg Race Laws. She also refused to disclose his whereabouts. As punishment, she served ten months in Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Flossenbürg originally exploited prisoner labor for granite production. By 1943, the camp became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts.
In May 1942, Salvequart was arrested again for another relationship with a Jewish man. This time, she received a two-year prison sentence. After a short period of freedom, she was arrested for a third time in November 1944, together with her Jewish lover and his sister.
After a brief detention in Theresienstadt, Salvequart was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis.
Starting in the summer of 1942, SS doctors subjected nearly 80 Polish female prisoners to unethical medical experiments. These included testing chemical substances on wounds, bone setting and transplant methods, amputations, forced abortions, and sterilization experiments on women and children.
In total, some 132,000 women from across Europe passed through Ravensbrück, including Poles, Russians, Jews, and Roma. Over 92,000 of them perished.
The camp was staffed by SS men and 150 female supervisors. Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for female SS guards. The SS controlled the large prisoner population with the help of kapos, prisoners selected to supervise others. Kapos received better food and housing and were often brutal.
Vera Salvequart served as a kapo and also worked as a nurse. In that role, she participated in the gassing of women and children, removed gold teeth from murdered victims, and completed death certificates.
From February 1945, she took a direct part in the extermination of prisoners in the camp hospital. Together with SS men, she gave prisoners poisonous white powder. Victims were told it would give them strength before transport, but they soon fell into a heavy sleep and stopped breathing.
While Salvequart murdered, she also saved some prisoners. She gave hot tea and food to others and released them from roll calls that could last for hours. She also saved some women and children by substituting their camp identification numbers with those of dead prisoners.
After the war, Salvequart lived briefly in an American camp and then in Hofheim am Taunus under the false name Anna Markova. She worked there as a manager in an office for racially persecuted people. After allegations of embezzlement, she fled to Cologne, where she was arrested by the British army.
She was brought to a civil internment camp in Paderborn-Staumühle and then tried at the first Ravensbrück trial, which began on December 5, 1946.
During the proceedings, Salvequart claimed her activity had been limited to filling out death certificates. She described how she had saved women and children by substituting their identification numbers. She also claimed to have hidden an infant and had male prisoners bring him food and milk.
According to her testimony, when a guard named Ruth Neudeck discovered the child, she took it away and threw it onto a food wagon, saying, “A little Jew will be a very big Jew one day.” The child was later killed.
Salvequart claimed she later tried to poison Neudeck with white powder when the guard came to her with a headache, but Neudeck took too little to die. She also said the SS had threatened to send her to the gas chambers, but male prisoners disguised her as a male inmate to save her life.
Numerous witnesses questioned the credibility of her statements. On February 3, 1947, the British military tribunal sentenced Vera Salvequart to death by hanging.
Salvequart asked for a pardon, claiming she had stolen schematics for V2 missiles produced at Ravensbrück and smuggled them to the British. Her execution was temporarily postponed while the claim was considered. The other defendants sentenced to death were hanged on May 2 and 3, 1947.
Her request for pardon was rejected. Vera Salvequart was 27 years old when British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on June 26, 1947. Her body was buried with the other executed war criminals at Wehl Cemetery in Hameln.