Eva Paradies, a 25-year-old former SS overseer at the Stutthof concentration camp whose name became synonymous with cruelty for the thousands of women she brutalized, was hanged in public before a crowd estimated at 20,000 people on July 4, 1946, on the Biskupia Górka hill overlooking Gdańsk, bringing one of the most notorious chapters of Nazi atrocity to a close in a spectacle of retributive justice that stunned postwar Poland.
The execution of Paradies, alongside fellow guard Jenny-Wanda Barkmann and other condemned camp personnel, marked the culmination of the first Stutthof trial, a proceeding in which 16 defendants faced accusations of involvement in the horrors committed behind the camp’s wire. The court handed down multiple death sentences, and the women who had once strutted through the barracks wielding whips and clubs were reduced to prisoners awaiting the noose.
Paradies was born on December 17, 1920, in Łobżenica, then part of the Weimar Republic, and little is definitively known about her early years. What is clear is that by the time she arrived at Stutthof in August 1944 for training as an Aufseherin, or female overseer, she had already embraced the ideology of the Nazi state with fervor. She completed her training and took up duties supervising the women’s camp, where her reputation for savagery spread rapidly among the prisoner population.
Witness accounts describe a young woman who seemed to take pleasure in inflicting pain. One testimony recalled how Paradies ordered a group of female prisoners to undress in the freezing cold of winter and then doused them with ice-cold water; when the women moved, she beat them. Such punishments were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern of systematic brutality that she inflicted on a near-daily basis, often using her whip and other weapons on women already weakened by starvation, disease, and forced labor.
Stutthof concentration camp had opened almost immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War, initially holding a relatively small prisoner population that was forced to build the camp’s infrastructure. But in 1944, the number of inmates swelled dramatically, with most of the newcomers being Jewish prisoners transferred from other camps, including approximately 24,000 sent from Auschwitz as the Soviet advance forced the evacuation of facilities further east.
To handle the influx, a large number of new guards were recruited, many of them young women from the surrounding region who were drafted or volunteered to serve at Stutthof. The conditions inside the camp were appalling. Thousands of prisoners succumbed to starvation and disease, and epidemics such as typhus brought the camp to its knees.
Executions were carried out daily, with prisoners shot at the firing range or killed in the gas chambers. Some inmates drowned in mud or were clubbed to death by guards. In total, around 65,000 people perished at Stutthof, many of them worked to death in forced labor details.
Paradies was transferred briefly to the Bromberg subcamp before returning to the main Stutthof facility. Then, in April 1945, as Allied and Soviet forces closed in, she became part of the mass transports of prisoners evacuated from the camp. She was assigned to a transport of women prisoners bound for the Lauenburg concentration camp, but during the death march that followed, she fled, apparently aware that the end of the war would bring accountability for her crimes.
She attempted to hide, but her efforts to evade justice ultimately failed. She was captured, imprisoned, and interrogated before being transferred to the Stutthof trials, where she stood among 16 defendants accused of participating in the atrocities committed at the camp. The proceedings laid bare the machinery of cruelty that had operated within the camp, and the court imposed death sentences on several of the women who had served there.
Paradies was condemned to death. On July 4, 1946, at the age of just 25, she was taken to Biskupia Górka, a large hill in Gdańsk where an enormous set of gallows had been constructed to execute the guards who had worked at Stutthof. The former guards were brought out before a crowd of around 20,000 spectators who had gathered to witness the executions, a public spectacle intended to demonstrate that justice had been served.
On a large central triple gallows, Johann Pauls, the former commandant, and another female guard, Gerda Steinhoff, were hanged. But on separate gallows to the side, Paradies and Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, two young women notorious for their brutality, were brought out on a truck. The pair had been seated on stools on the truck bed as the executioners came forward.
One of them placed a noose around Paradies’s neck, and final preparations were made.
With the noose secured, Paradies was stood on the stool, and then the truck slowly drove away, leaving her hanging from the gallows. It took several minutes for her to be pronounced dead. She strangled slowly as the crowds looked on, a death that was itself a grim mirror of the suffering she had inflicted on so many.
She was 25 years old when she was executed by the short-drop method.
The public executions at Biskupia Górka that day were part of a broader reckoning with the crimes committed at Stutthof and its subcamps. Along with Paradies and Barkmann, other women including Elisabeth Becker and Irma Grese—though Grese was executed at Belsen—became symbols of the young women who had turned to brutality inside the concentration camp system. Many female guards who had inflicted misery, death, and suffering on a daily basis never faced trial and escaped justice entirely at the end of the Second World War, but Paradies was not among them.
Her name had struck fear into the hearts of the prisoners of Stutthof, and her actions contributed to the staggering death toll at the site. The image of her hanging from the gallows, a young woman who had devoted herself to an ideology of hatred and had personally tormented the helpless, became one of the defining scenes of postwar accountability in Poland.
The Stutthof trials themselves represented one of the earliest efforts to bring Nazi perpetrators to justice, predating the more famous Nuremberg proceedings in some respects and focusing specifically on the crimes committed at a single camp. The defendants included guards, kapos, and administrative personnel, and the testimony presented painted a picture of a camp where cruelty was routine and where the line between life and death was crossed daily by those charged with overseeing the prisoners.
For the survivors of Stutthof, the executions offered a measure of closure, though nothing could undo the suffering they had endured. The public nature of the hangings, witnessed by tens of thousands, was intended to send an unmistakable message that the crimes of the Nazi regime would not go unpunished. Yet the fact that so many perpetrators escaped accountability remains a painful legacy of the postwar period, when the scale of the atrocities overwhelmed the capacity of judicial systems to pursue every offender.
Eva Paradies, who was just 25 when she died, remains a haunting example of how ordinary young people could be transformed into instruments of terror by ideology and circumstance. Her story, and the stories of the women like her who served in the concentration camps, continue to be studied as historians seek to understand how such brutality became possible and how justice, however imperfect and delayed, was ultimately delivered on a hill overlooking Gdańsk in the summer of 1946.