The 6th of June 1944. Allied infantry and armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast
in France. This largest seaborne invasion in history marks a turning point in World War 2
and becomes the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. On the following month in July 1944,
the Soviet forces liberate Majdanek - the first major Nazi camp located in German-occupied Poland.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi horrors is
finally exposed to the world. Because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food,
only a small percentage of concentration camp inmates survive. Compounded by months
and years of mistreatment and torture, they resemble skeletons and many of them are so
weak that they can hardly move at all. One of the most infamous perpetrators
of this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Elisabeth Becker.
Elisabeth Becker was born on the 20 July 1923 in Neuteich,
then part of a city state named “The Free City of Danzig” which was created following World
War I. In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the victorious powers - the United States,
Great Britain, France, and other allied states imposed punitive territorial, military,
and economic treaty terms on the defeated Germany. One provision required Germany to cede
West Prussia including Danzig, today’s Gdańsk, to the newly reconstructed state of Poland.
However, Germany resented the loss of this largely German city and after
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933,
he was determined to overturn the military and territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty.
After the Nazi Party became the leading power in Danzig in May 1933, anti-Polish
sentiment increased and both Germanisation and segregation policies intensified.
Political opposition to the Nazis was repressed with several politicians
being imprisoned and murdered. The rights of local Poles were
commonly violated and limited by the local administration. As a result,
Polish children were refused admission to public Polish-language schools and premises
were not allowed to be rented to Polish schools and preschools.
From 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited,
and already employed Poles were fired. The use of Polish in public places was banned
and the Poles were not allowed to enter several restaurants, in particular those owned by Germans.
From 1936, Elisabeth was a member of the League of German Girls which was
the female section of the Hitler Youth. These organizations, led by Baldur von Schirach,
were the primary tools that the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology,
thus shaping the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth.
Boys and girls were taught to be both racially conscious and physically fit in order to build
a new future for Germany and were often present at Nazi Party rallies and marches.
Since the Hitler Youth and its female section the League of German Girls were considered
fully Aryan organizations by Nazi officials, premarital sex was encouraged in their ranks.
At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, where there were some 100,000 participants of youth
organizations present, 900 girls between fifteen and eighteen years of age returned home pregnant.
Schools too played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth.
From their first days at school, German children were imbued with the cult of Adolf Hitler and
his portrait was a standard fixture in all classrooms. While censors removed some books
from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for
Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism.
In 1938, Elisabeth Becker became a tramway conductor in Danzig.
She was 16 years old when the Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939.
The same month, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof,
a town about 22 miles east of Danzig. The original camp, known as the old camp, was
surrounded by barbed-wire fences and 8 barracks for the inmates built by prisoners in 1940.
The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that
included the liquidation of Polish elites such as
members of the intelligentsia as well as religious and political leaders.
Even before the war, the Germans had created lists of people to be arrested, and the Nazi authorities
were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in their area.
Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief, before its
subsequent massive expansion. In November 1941, it became a "labor education" camp for political
prisoners and persons accused of violating labor discipline, administered by the SD - the
German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration
camp under the jurisdiction of the SS. In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new
camp was constructed alongside the earlier one. It contained 30 new barracks and was
surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences. A crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943,
just in time to start mass executions when Stutthof was included in the "Final Solution"
in June 1944. The maximum capacity of the gas chamber was 150 people per execution.
Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network of forced-labor camps. 105
Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland.
Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported to the Stutthof
camp. The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles. Conditions in the camp were brutal.
Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winter of 1942
and again in 1944. Those whom the SS guards judged too weak or sick to work were gassed
in the gas chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in June 1944. 4,000 prisoners, including
Jewish women and children, were killed in a gas chamber before the evacuation of the camp.
Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections of phenol.
More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps.
Until 1942, nearly all of the prisoners were Polish.
The number of inmates increased considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant proportion
of the newcomers. The first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July
1944. In total, 23,566 Jews including 21,817 women were transferred to Stutthof from Auschwitz.
The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries.
The SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities in June 1944,
to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's subcamp
of Stutthof called Bromberg-Ost was set up in the city of Bydgoszcz.
One such woman became Elisabeth Becker who at the time worked as an agriculture assistant in Danzig.
On the 5 September 1944 she became a guard in Stutthof "SK-III " women’s camp.
In the camp, Becker, then 21 year old woman indoctrinated with the Nazi ideology,
was devoted to her job and become known as a ruthless overseer.
She brutalized prisoners and was known for beating inmates, some to death,
either with her bare hands or with her whip. When she was in a particularly bad mood, she
would drown the female inmates in mud or club them to death. Among her victims were also children.
She would not only beat them but together with their mothers she would select them
and then send them to the gas chamber to be killed without any remorse.
The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland began in January 1945.
When the final evacuation began, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners in the Stutthof camp system,
the overwhelming majority of them Jews. About 5,000 prisoners from the Stutthof subcamps
were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine gunned. The rest
of the prisoners were marched in the direction of Lauenburg in East Germany but after they were cut
off by advancing Soviet forces, the Germans forced the surviving prisoners back to Stutthof. Marching
in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by the SS guards, thousands died during the march.
In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof was
completely encircled by Soviet forces. Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea
and shot. It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation
from Stutthof and its subcamps. When Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on the 9th of May 1945, they
found only about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.
Elisabeth Becker had escaped from the camp in January 1945 when she returned home to Neuteich.
After contracting typhus, she was hospitalized in Danzig,
where she was arrested on April 13, 1945 and placed in prison to await trial.
Becker was tried at the First Stutthof trial which began on the 25th of April 1946.
She confessed to selecting at least 30 female prisoners to be gassed,
but later retracted her confession claiming that she only admitted to it because had been beaten.
In the end, she and her female Nazi comrades all pleaded "not guilty" to the general charge
of war crimes and Becker and the other accused women did not seem to take the trial seriously.
They were said to have behaved insolently, giggling and joking during the proceedings.
The trial ended on the 31st of May. Elisabeth Becker, for her involvement in the selections
and her sadistic abuse of prisoners, was sentenced to death by hanging. She cried as the verdict was
announced and then sent several letters to Polish president Bolesław Bierut requesting
that her sentence be commuted. The court had recommended that Becker's sentence be commuted
to 15 years on the grounds that her actions had not been as severe as those of co-defendants
Gerda Steinhoff or Jenny-Wanda Barkmann and she had been at the camp for the shortest amount of
time. However, in light of the evidence of the crimes committed, no pardon was issued.
Her execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror which was recorded by official
press photographers. After World War II, only three public executions of war criminals were
carried out in Poland. One of them took place at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk, former Danzig.
When on the 4th of July 1946, 11 Nazi Criminals from the Stutthof concentration camp including 22
year old Elisabeth Becker were hanged from the gallows, 200,000 people were watching.
On that day Biskupia Górka Hill experienced a real siege.
Three days earlier, the newspapers had reported the date of the execution and
workplaces announced a day off and provided the employees with transport to the event.
Everyone could come to witness the execution. The security forces feared that a lynching
might occur at any moment and the militia and army had difficulty controlling the huge crowd.
The 4th of July was very warm, the sun was shining.
Punctually at 5 PM, eleven open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground,
their hands and legs tied with cords. On the platform of each of the eleven trucks stood
a convict, six men and five women in total. The trucks were backed under the gallows and
the condemned made to stand on the tailboards or on the chairs on which they had been sitting.
Former Stutthof prisoners, dressed in striped uniforms,
volunteered to serve as executioners and put a simple cord noose around the convicts’ necks.
The execution was planned in such a way that after each truck would be driven forward,
the 11 convicts would be left suspended, and their bodies would not fall from too great
a height. As a result, the nooses did not break their necks and did not cause
an instant death. This short-drop method of hanging resulted in a torturous death
by strangulation of each of the criminals lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 long minutes.
When the driver of the first truck carrying Johann Pauls,
former commandant of the guards in Stutthof, started the engine and moved slowly forward,
Pauls, before sliding off the platform and hanging on the rope, managed to shout "Heil
Hitler!". He was answered by the insults of the crowd. As Pauls' body went still, another truck
started moving and another criminal began what those present at the execution described as a
"rope dance". As each truck moved forward, the other convicts had the opportunity to take a
good look at what awaited them in the next few moments. When one truck driver failed to start
the engine several times, the former Stutthof prisoner pushed the convict off the platform.
The crowd waved and the people shouted "For our husbands, for our children".
When the last convict died, the security forces allowed the crowd to the gallows.
People ripped off buttons, cut off pieces of fabric and kicked and smashed the corpses.
The gathered people were then chased away, and the bodies were removed from the gallows. They were
then taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk to be used as a teaching aid in anatomy classes.
There were no tears shed for Elisabeth Becker.
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