The 22nd of December 1947, Krakow, Poland. The Polish Supreme National Tribunal tries the
former staff of Auschwitz - the deadliest German Nazi concentration camp. Out of 41 defendants,
36 are men and 5 are women. After a month of gruesome testimonies, it is revealed that female
guards were often even more sadistic than their male colleagues. One such guard is Luise Danz.
Luise Danz was born on the 11th of December 1917 in the village of Walldorf, then
part of the German Empire. After she completed elementary school, Danz worked as a housemaid
in a bakery in Brandenburg. After the Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939,
Luise Danz moved back to her parents’ home and in 1940 began an apprenticeship at the post office
where she worked until 1943. During that time while she was on a holiday,
she met a concentration camp doctor with whom she started a relationship.
It is believed that this was the reason why Luise Danz began her criminal career as a concentration
camp guard. Another reason might have been the money - for mistreating poor prisoners
some guards were earning almost 10 times as much as they did in their previous civil service jobs.
On the 1st of March 1943 she started a three-week course at Ravensbrück concentration camp in order
to become a guard. After she completed her training, she served in various concentration
camps during the war such as Majdanek, Krakow-Płaszów, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Malchow.
She was described as tall and slender, with a gaunt, boyish face and not popular with men.
This could be the reason why she found such a pleasure in torturing young and pretty women.
At Auschwtiz, Danz supervised a work brigade of female inmates consisting of French and Greek
Jewesses who worked at night shift in the tailor’s workshop. When the female prisoners were coming
back to the camp, Luise Danz beat and tortured them sometimes to the utmost degree until they
were covered with blood. Danz did not allow the prisoners neither to rest even for a moment,
nor to leave the worksite even if they only wanted to get a drink of water. On the other
hand, she was partial to those prisoners who rendered her services or who brought her gifts.
After the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945,
she was transferred to the Malchow concentration camp, which was a subcamp of Ravensbrück. Luise
Danz became the camp’s commandant. At Malchow, 900 female prisoners had to do different types of
forced labor such as work in the local explosives factory, produce mines, or build canals.
After the prisoners arrived in the camp, Danz took their warm clothes away and did not give them any
blankets. As a result, during their first days in the camp the poor women had to sleep in the cold
without anything to cover themselves with and the inmates had to huddle together for warmth.
The daily food ration consisted only of a single slice of bread and some watery soup
made of potato peelings, without any salt. Even though the prisoners were dying of starvation,
after the camp’s liberation it turned out that the food storerooms were filled to abundance.
Although the prisoners lived in such horrible conditions,
whenever Luise Danz saw prisoners searching for some leftovers, she would beat them immediately.
When some of the prisoners stole raw potatoes, she would sentence them to having their heads shaved.
On one occasion during the scabies epidemic, Danz punished the prisoner
in the same manner after she had found skin ointment among the prisoner ‘s possessions
and the prisoner refused to say who had given it to her.
Even though the townspeople were not allowed to have any contact with the inmates,
some of them did provide the prisoners with food. When they were discovered by the SS,
they too were imprisoned in in the camp.
Danz used to torment the prisoners at Malchow, beating them with her whip and
kicking them without any reason especially during the roll call.
One holocaust survivor testified how during one such roll call she suffered a heart
attack and passed out upon seeing Luise Danz torturing one of the women in a brutal manner.
Her specialty was punishing the female prisoners by having them stand for hours in the sun or frost
until they died from exposure or exhaustion. Danz was also a specialist in punching the prisoners in
the jaw with her fist and at the same time bringing up her knee into their stomach.
In addition, Luise Danz was said to have aided in the hanging of Russian female prisoners.
In order to survive, it was extremely important to preserve social circles.
Quite often these were relatives, sisters or cousins. But sometimes this was a “surrogate
family” such as groups formed by inmates who had lived in the same city or ghetto, or in some
cases a relationship between two good friends. It often happened that older/mature women “adopted”
teenagers who had been separated from their families or lost their mothers who had been gassed
in gas chambers. These women had to do everything in their power to enable them to remain alive
As one Holocaust survive later explained “ Lonely women were a rarity in the camp,
because being alone meant near certain death. Everyone without a close relative,
or a good friend, had to have a Lagerschwester – meaning a camp sister. Having a sister,
a cousin, or a friend in the camp with them was sometimes the only
thing that gave them the courage to go on. Each lived solely for the other “
When most of the death marches were taking place across Europe, Malchow served as a transit camp
for additional prisoners arriving from other concentration camps. During one such death march,
one Holocaust survivor later testified that even though the transport by train
took some three days, they didn’t receive anything to eat or drink,
even though there were food supplies for both the SS personnel and the prisoners stored in
one of the cars. On the order of Luise Danz the distribution of food among the prisoners before
the transport set off from Malchow was prohibited. It is believed that Malchow concentration camp
existed from the winter of 1943. When it was liberated by the Red Army on the 2nd of May
1945, most of the prisoners were malnourished and many weighed not more than 40 kg or 88 lbs.
After the end of the war, Luise Danz was able to go into hiding for a short time. However,
she was later captured and arrested on the 1st of June 1945. She was tried at the Auschwitz trial
where she finally faced justice for inhuman crimes committed while on
duty in various German Nazi concentration camps. According to various statements made by surviving
inmates from these camps, Luise Danz evolved from a relatively affable guard to a sadist.
On the 22nd of December 1947 the Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Luise Danz to life
imprisonment. However, her life imprisonment only lasted 9 years as she was released in 1956.
She started a new life hoping her crimes would be forgotten. However, she was wrong.
She lived undisturbed in seclusion for many decades until 1996 when she was tried again
before a German court. The reason was that new evidence emerged accusing Luise Danz of a murder.
When one teenage girl of the Malchow concentration camp begged Danz to be
allowed to stay with her mother during the death march, instead of answering,
Luise Danz kicked the poor girl to death on the spot.
Because German doctors said the defendant Danz was too old to be able to withstand court proceedings,
the charges against her were dropped one year later in 1997. She was 91 years old
when she died in Walldorf on the 21st of June 2009. There were no tears shed for Luise Danz.
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