Three young women who helped run the Nazi killing machine at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz were hanged at Hameln Prison on December 13, 1945, bringing to a close one of the most 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 war crimes trials of the postwar era and confronting a stunned world with the reality that some of the Holocaust’s most sadistic perpetrators were female.
The executions of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann followed the Belsen Trials, a 54-day legal proceeding that ran from September 17 to November 17, 1945, in which 45 SS guards and former camp workers were brought before a British military court to answer for the atrocities committed at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and other killing sites across Nazi-occupied Europe.
What set the trial apart from the more famous Nuremberg proceedings was the composition of the dock. Many of the defendants were young women, guards and staff members who had been radicalized by the Nazi regime and who now stood accused of murdering, beating and starving thousands of inmates under their control.
Bergen-Belsen, established in 1940 in northern Germany as a prisoner-of-war camp, was taken over in part by the SS in 1943 and converted into a concentration camp complex with three main sections: the prisoner-of-war camp, the resident camp and the prisoner camp. It held Jews, political prisoners and other groups targeted by the Nazi regime, divided into subsections including the Hungarian camp, the special camp for Polish Jews and the Star camp for Dutch Jews.
Between 1943 and 1944 thousands of prisoners were transported to Belsen, where inmates were forced into work commandos, recovering pieces of leather from shoes for recycling. The camp later became a so-called recovery camp for sick prisoners arriving from other sites, but most were put to work and died of disease, starvation and inadequate medical care.
In August 1944 a women’s camp was established at Belsen, and large numbers of female prisoners were brought in, most staying only briefly before being moved to other locations for slave labor. Among those transported there were Margot and Anne Frank, both of whom died inside the camp’s barbed wire fences.
By late 1944, with Joseph Kramer, known as the Beast of Belsen, in command, the camp swelled far beyond its capacity. Roughly 85,000 people were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and within a year the prisoner population had risen tenfold, producing catastrophic overcrowding, acute food shortages and outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid and dysentery. The camp was designed to hold 10,000 prisoners.
More than 120,000 passed through its gates during its operation. There were no gas chambers at Belsen, but the vast majority of prisoners died from the conditions created by the overcrowding.
On April 11, 1945, Heinrich Himmler agreed to hand over the camp without a fight, and SS guards ordered prisoners to bury some of the dead in an attempt to conceal the crimes. Days later the British established a neutral zone around Belsen. What British and Canadian troops found when they entered was almost beyond comprehension: more than 13,000 unburied bodies and 60,000 prisoners in a desperate state, many dying of starvation and disease, abandoned without food or water for days.
Around 500 people were dying each day.
The scenes were broadcast by the BBC. A report described how, over more than an acre of ground, dead and dying people lay together, the living resting their heads on corpses, surrounded by emaciated, aimless survivors with no hope of life. Babies had been born in the camp, tiny things that could not live.
One mother, driven mad, screamed at a British soldier to give her milk for her child, thrust a tiny bundle into his arms and ran off crying. He opened the bundle and found a baby that had been dead for days.
The British began providing care and support, but revenge killings took place after liberation, and SS guards shot and killed prisoners who tried to take food from storehouses. Survivors were deloused and moved to a different camp, and the British forced many SS staff to bury the dead in mass graves. The camp was then burned to the ground by flame-throwing tanks because of a typhus epidemic.
Almost 500 people had worked at Belsen during its operation. Of the 45 defendants brought to justice in the Belsen Trials, several women became notorious for their cruelty. Irma Grese, dubbed the Beautiful Beast and the Hyena of Auschwitz, was only 22 when she faced the court and became the youngest person to die under British law in the 20th century.
Her own father had thrown her out of the family home in disgust at her decision to become a concentration camp guard.
Grese worked at several camps and was known for taking part in selections at Auschwitz, choosing women and children to be sent to the gas chambers, effectively playing god with other people’s lives. She murdered prisoners with her own hands and weapons and was known for setting dogs on inmates, encouraging the animals to tear them apart.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was also young when she stood before the judges. She worked as an overseer inside Auschwitz and was noted for selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. She was well regarded within the Auschwitz command and oversaw all camp sections for female prisoners, effectively running the women’s prison.
A prolific murderer, she often beat prisoners unconscious with a truncheon, once pushed an elderly prisoner down stairs to her death and was known for shooting prisoners at will.
Johanna Bormann, known as the woman with the dogs, was older than Grese and Volkenrath and worked in a number of camps. Selected for service at Auschwitz, she abused prisoners terribly, set her dogs on inmates to murder them and also took part in selections.
These three women were sentenced to death alongside a number of men after being found guilty of multiple offences. Hertha Bothe, Ilse Forster, Irene Haschke, Gertrude Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrude Feist, Frieda Walter and Hilda Lobauer were sentenced to varying prison terms after being convicted of single offences. The condemned had been found guilty of more than one.
The hangings were carried out by Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most experienced executioner, who used the long-drop method. He met each condemned prisoner beforehand to calculate height, weight and the drop needed to snap the neck. Pierrepoint was brought to Hameln Prison because he was considered reliable and trusted, and he was expected to complete the task efficiently.
In his biography, Pierrepoint recalled meeting Grese. He wrote that after the details of the men had been noted, the order was given to bring out Irma Grese. She walked out of her cell and came towards them laughing.
She seemed as bony a girl as anyone could ever meet. When asked her age she paused and smiled, and he found himself smiling with her, as if both recognized the conventional embarrassment of a woman revealing her age. Eventually she said 21, which they knew to be correct.
Asked to step on the scales, she said schnell, the German word for quick.
Grese stood five feet five and a quarter inches tall and weighed 150 pounds. She was given a drop of seven feet four inches. She was chosen to be the first of the condemned to die because of her age, though there is some debate over whether she or Volkenrath was executed first.
Pierrepoint described the morning of the executions. He and his assistant climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were waiting. A German officer at the door flung it open, and they passed a row of faces into the execution chamber.
Officers stood at attention, and Brigadier Paton-Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised. He gave the signal, and a sigh of released breath was audible in the chamber.
Pierrepoint walked into the corridor. Grese’s eye called the German guards, who quickly closed the grills on all 12 inspection holes and opened one door. Grese stepped out.
The cell was far too small for him to enter, so he had to pinion her in the corridor. Follow me, he said in English, and his assistant repeated the order in German. At 9:34 a.
m. she walked into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing around it, then walked to the center of the trap where a chalk mark had been made. She stood on the mark very firmly, and as the white cap was placed over her head she said in her own voice, schnell.
The drop crashed down. The doctor followed into the pit and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes her body was taken down and placed in a coffin ready for burial.
Elisabeth Volkenrath continued to deny her involvement in the Holocaust after her death sentence, stating that she did not know where the prisoners she selected were going and claiming never to have heard of the gas chambers. At around 10:04 a. m.
she was brought from her cell in the same manner as Grese, her identity confirmed, and handed over to Pierrepoint, who performed the execution with ruthless efficiency, the drop snapping her neck. She was only 26 when she was executed, and even younger when she committed her horrific crimes.
Johanna Bormann was the outlier among the three women. Much older than the other two, she had nonetheless displayed the same sadistic tendencies as the staff who worked inside the concentration camps. When Pierrepoint met her, he stated that she limped down the corridor looking old and haggard.
She was 52, standing only a little over five feet, and she was trembling as she was put on the scale. In German she said, I have my feelings. Like the two women who went before her, Bormann was executed with efficiency, her drop meticulously calculated at eight feet eight inches.
Her execution was performed at 10:38 a. m. , very swiftly, and she was the final woman executed following the Belsen Trials.
The men were then fetched from their cells to face their sentences, and Pierrepoint performed 11 executions that day inside Hameln Prison on the gallows.
The executions of the female guards of Belsen showed the world how evil these three women in particular had been. The Belsen Trials brought to global attention how terrible humans can be to one another, with the suffering inside the camp shown in front of the world’s media. The suffering of those responsible for the horrific conditions at Belsen was short-lived and was no match for what they inflicted on innocent people.
Belsen was the place where Anne Frank and tens of thousands of others died because of a regime that sought to exterminate so many people from the face of the earth. The executions of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann were justified, but for so much suffering only a few were put to death. Much interest fell on those who were simply sentenced to time in prison, and there was considerable debate over whether more people could have been sentenced to death for the crimes of Bergen-Belsen.