The gallows at Biskupia Górka Hill rose against the gray dawn of Gdansk on July 4th, 1946, and before the eyes of 200,000 witnesses, the women who had terrorized the Stutthof concentration camp met the fate they had so mercilessly dealt to others. The execution of five former SS supervisors—Gerta Steinhoff, Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, Wanda Klaff, Elizabeth Becker, and Eva Paradies—was not a quiet 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 conducted behind prison walls. It was a public spectacle of reckoning, a brutal and deliberate display of post-war justice that shocked the world and sent a chilling message to every Nazi who believed they could escape accountability.
The crowd that gathered on that hill in northern Poland was not there out of morbid curiosity alone. Thousands had lost husbands, children, and parents to the gas chambers of Stutthof, where an estimated 65,000 of the 110,000 prisoners held within its barbed wire never walked free. They came to witness the moment when the guards who had beaten, tortured, and selected victims for death would face the rope themselves.
And what they saw was a study in contrasts: some of the condemned women went silently to their deaths, while others struggled in agony, their faces uncovered for all to see.
Gerta Steinhoff, the former tram driver who had become one of Stutthof’s most feared block leaders, was bound hand and foot and placed on the bed of a truck beneath a triple gallows. When the vehicle lurched forward, she fell into the void without a hood covering her face. Witnesses reported that she struggled in her final moments, her body thrashing in agony, even losing one of her slippers as she dangled before the crowd.
It was a far cry from the woman who had once forced prisoners to stand for hours in freezing temperatures and who had participated in selections for the gas chambers with cold efficiency.
Steinhoff’s fall from ordinary life to war criminal had been disturbingly swift. Born in January 1922, she had worked on a farm, in a bakery, and as a tram driver before financial need drove her to answer the SS call for female guards in late 1944. Within weeks of joining the staff at Stutthof, she was promoted to block leader.
By the time of her trial, witnesses described her as a sadist who assaulted and abused inmates on an hourly basis. The judges were stunned that this 24-year-old mother had accumulated as many charges of brutality in one year as other guards had in three. She was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death.
Alongside Steinhoff on that July morning stood Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, the woman the prisoners had called “the beautiful spectre.” Barkmann had been a model, posing for German magazines in the early years of the war, her striking beauty captured by photographers while the world burned. But when she arrived at Stutthof in 1944, she revealed a monstrous interior that disturbed even her fellow guards.
She beat inmates almost to death, sent them to the gas chambers, and tortured prisoners in ways so cruel that those who served alongside her confessed to being afraid of her.
During her trial, Barkmann seemed more concerned with her appearance than with her crimes. She spent much of the proceedings flirting with guards and adjusting her hair. When she was sentenced to death, she listened calmly, showing no tears.
Her final words echoed with a chilling detachment: “Life is really one great pleasure, and pleasure, as a rule, does not last long.” On that July morning, the beautiful spectre of Stutthof dangled for several minutes before the eyes of thousands, her beauty unable to save her from the noose.
Not all the condemned women met their end with defiance. Elizabeth Becker, who had personally selected women and children for the gas chambers at the Stutthof women’s camp, sent letters to Polish President Bolesław Bierut begging for a pardon. She claimed her actions had not been as severe as those of Steinhoff or Barkmann.
Her pleas went unanswered. When the trapdoor opened, Becker’s neck broke cleanly, and she lost consciousness immediately—the quickest death among the five women hanged that day.
Wanda Klaff, the 24-year-old who had applied for an SS position because she and her husband needed money, was perhaps the most bizarre case. During her trial, she admitted her crimes with what appeared to be pride. She boasted, “I am very intelligent and very dedicated to my work in the camps.
I beat at least two prisoners every day.” She used a metal-tipped whip on the inmates at the Praust subcamp and participated in brutal beatings at Russoschin. The judges, confronted with her inexplicable satisfaction, had no difficulty sentencing her to death.
She was hanged at Biskupia Górka with the others.
Eva Paradies, the last of the five executed that day, had a reputation so terrible that prisoners spoke of her in whispers. She was known for her love of the whip and for an incident in which she ordered female prisoners to strip naked in the freezing winter and then drenched them with ice-cold water, beating any woman who shivered. She participated in the brutal death marches from Stutthof in April 1945, then fled and tried to hide near Gdansk.
She was captured, made no attempt to defend herself at trial, and was hanged with a lump in her throat, pulled from a moving truck. Her body hung for several minutes before death was officially declared.
The executions at Biskupia Górka were not the only reckonings taking place in the aftermath of the war. In December 1945, at Hamelin Prison in Germany, the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the death sentences against some of the most infamous female war criminals. Among them was Irma Grese, the 22-year-old “Beast of Belsen,” the youngest woman hanged in the 20th century.
Grese had been known for letting her dogs attack prisoners, shooting inmates in cold blood, torturing children, and beating victims with braided whips. Survivors described her as utterly lacking in spirit, a woman who smiled at the contortions of pain she inflicted.
There was a confrontation on the gallows that morning. When Pierrepoint attempted to place a dark hood over Grese’s head, she violently refused. The executioner slapped her repeatedly until he managed to overpower her.
Grese spat insults at him and shouted, “Quickly,” before the noose was placed around her neck. It is believed that the rope was improperly positioned, and she died by slow strangulation rather than a quick break—an agonizing, painful death. Afterward, her body was cremated and her ashes thrown into a drainage river.
Elizabeth Volkenrath, executed at Hamelin on the same day as Grese, had also risen to infamy at Auschwitz and Belsen. She had joined the League of German Girls as a 13-year-old and was recruited by the SS in 1941. At Ravensbrück, she participated in gruesome medical experiments conducted by SS doctors on prisoners—experiments that involved breaking victims’ limbs, infecting wounds with bacteria, and testing bone transplantation without anesthesia.
At Auschwitz, she gained a reputation for merciless beatings and for forcing prisoners to stand for hours with their arms raised. Her favorite task was separating families, inflicting tremendous psychological damage with perverse phrases that terrified her victims.
During her trial, Volkenrath claimed that the guards were as punished as the prisoners and that she had been forced by her superiors to show no empathy toward Jews. The judges found no sympathy for her unrepentant behavior. At the age of 26, she became the first Nazi female guard to be hanged by the neck.
The public did not shed a tear.
The hangings sent a clear message that the Allied forces were determined to pursue justice for the crimes of the Holocaust. But not all female SS guards faced the gallows. Some escaped the ultimate penalty through cunning, luck, or the passage of time.
Herta Ehlert, who had served at Ravensbrück, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Belsen, refused to confess to the charges against her, admitting only to slapping prisoners with her bare hand. She was sentenced to 15 years but released in the early 1950s. She changed her name to Herta Neumann and lived as a free woman until her death in April 1997 at the age of 92.
Alice Orlowski, known as “the Wolfwoman of the SS,” faced a different trajectory. At Majdanek, she was regarded as the most brutal supervisor, throwing children onto trucks bound for the gas chambers like luggage in what she called “space-saving operations.” Yet during the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945, her behavior inexplicably changed—she comforted inmates and brought water to the thirsty, perhaps sensing that the war was ending.
She was sentenced to 15 years in Poland, released in 1957, and arrested again in 1973 for publicly stating that the Holocaust was “only half done.” She was charged a third time in 1975 for crimes at Majdanek but died of natural causes during the proceedings on May 21st, 1976, at the age of 72.
Maria Mandl, the “Beast of Auschwitz,” faced the harshest fate among those who were caught. She had whipped a prisoner 75 times, resulting in the woman’s death, and had proudly instilled terror in the camp. She participated in selections and sent tens of thousands to the gas chambers.
At her trial, she sat with her head bowed as victims testified to her cruelty. But in the imminent hours before her hanging on January 28th, 1948, the beast broke. She begged for forgiveness.
At 7:09 a. m. , she was made to stand on a stool, the noose placed around her neck.
She hung for 15 minutes in an execution that lasted an eternity.
Therese Brandl, who showed a particular hatred for Polish prisoners and forced children to stand in the snow from 1 a. m. until noon as punishment, was also sentenced to death by the Polish National Supreme Court.
In a macabre twist, she shared a cell with Mandl, and days before their verdict, both women approached a Polish survivor named Stanisława Rakłowa in the prison showers, naked and kneeling, begging for forgiveness. Rakłowa took their hands and said, “I forgive you on behalf of the prisoners.” It did not save them.
Brandl was hanged on January 24th, 1948, just days before her 46th birthday.
Some escaped justice entirely. Johanna Langefeld, the commandant of the women’s camp at Auschwitz, was considered too compassionate by Rudolph Höss and was replaced by the far more brutal Mandl. She was arrested by the Gestapo for her excessive sympathy for Polish prisoners.
After the war, she was extradited to Poland, but on December 23rd, 1946, she escaped from prison—with the help of Polish prisoners who had survived Ravensbrück and respected her. She hid in a monastery and worked as a caretaker, later returning illegally to Germany. She died in freedom at the age of 73, one of the few Nazi guards fondly remembered by her prisoners.
Hildegard Lächert, known as “Bloody Bridget,” was accused of atrocities that turned the stomachs of seasoned prosecutors—including throwing women into latrines and setting her dog on a pregnant prisoner. She was sentenced to 15 years at the Auschwitz trials, released in 1957, and later charged again in the Third Majdanek Trial. But her earlier time served was counted as valid, and she died in freedom in 1995 at the age of 75.
The stories of these women raise disturbing questions that historians continue to grapple with today. How could ordinary women—tram drivers, models, bakers, nurses—transform into the monsters described in such horrifying detail? The answer lies in the toxic combination of Nazi ideology, institutional pressure, and the corrupting influence of absolute power.
Many of these women came from modest backgrounds and joined the SS for financial reasons, but within the camps, they discovered a capacity for cruelty that shocked even their male counterparts.
The executions at Biskupia Górka and Hamelin were meant to close a chapter, to provide closure for the victims and a warning for the future. But as the fates of Ehlert, Orlowski, and Lächert demonstrate, justice was far from complete. Many former guards simply vanished, changing their names and living out their lives in obscurity, their crimes never fully accounted for.
Margarete Gallinat, the supervisor at Ravensbrück who was pardoned by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1950, is the only guard on the list whose death remains unknown to this day. She disappeared into the obscurity of post-war Germany, and no record exists of her fate.
The brutality of the revenge exacted on the SS women reflected the enormity of the crimes they had committed. The public hangings, the uncovered faces, the crowds of 200,000 witnesses—these were not merely punishments but rituals of collective catharsis for a broken nation. For the Polish people, who had suffered some of the worst atrocities of the Nazi occupation, the sight of five women dangling from the gallows on Biskupia Górka Hill was a moment of bitter satisfaction.
For the British, the methodical executions at Hamelin represented the triumph of rule of law over savagery.
And yet, the question that lingers is whether justice was truly served. The women who were hanged died in minutes, while their victims had suffered for years. Some, like Barkmann and Klaff, went to their deaths without showing remorse.
Others, like Mandl and Brandl, begged for forgiveness in their final hours—forgiveness that was granted by some survivors, but at a terrible cost. The double gallows and the trucks used as trapdoors were crude instruments of justice, but they were instruments nonetheless. They ensured that those who had sent tens of thousands to the gas chambers would face a reckoning of their own.
Today, more than seven decades later, the names of these women remain etched in the annals of Holocaust history as cautionary tales of human depravity. The “beautiful spectre” who flirted with guards during her trial. The tram driver who beat prisoners hourly.
The model who tortured inmates and disturbed even her fellow SS staff. The young mother who boasted of beating two prisoners a day. The woman who froze her victims in ice-cold water.
And the 22-year-old “Beast of Belsen” who faced the gallows with defiance and died in agony.
Their executions were brutal, but not as brutal as the crimes that condemned them. Their deaths were public, but not as public as the suffering they inflicted. And their names will forever be remembered, but not with the reverence they craved—with the horror they earned.
The revenge of the Allies in the aftermath of the Second World War was exacted with the cold precision of the law, but it was also a reflection of the darkest corners of human nature, where the line between victim and executioner blurred beneath the shadow of the gallows.
