The 2nd of February 1943, Stalingrad, the Soviet Union.
The German 6th army, after 5 months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, having exhausted
their ammunition and food, finally capitulates, making it the first of Hitler's field armies
to surrender during World War II. The battle for the city proves a decisive psychological turning
point, ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat
westward. The Soviet army remains on the offensive and in July 1944 liberates Majdanek - the first
major Nazi camp to be liberated which is located in German-occupied Poland. Soviet officials invite
journalists to inspect the camp and to see the evidence of the horrors that have occurred there.
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 the
criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Ewa Paradies.
Ewa Paradies was born on the 17 December 1920 in Lauenburg, then part of the Weimar
Republic which was the name given to the German government from 1918 to 1933.
Ewa, a daughter of protestant parents, was only 12 when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi
Party came into power in January 1933. Soon after their assumption of power,
Nazi leaders began to make good on their pledge to persecute German Jews. During
the first six years of Hitler's dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939,
Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of
their public and private lives. Many of those laws were national ones that had been issued by
the German administration and affected all Jews. But state, regional, and municipal officials, on
their own initiative, also promulgated a barrage of exclusionary decrees in their own communities.
Thus, hundreds of individuals in all levels of government throughout the country were involved
in the persecution of Jews as they conceived, discussed, drafted, adopted, enforced, and
supported anti-Jewish legislation. No corner of Germany was left untouched. Nazi propaganda played
an integral role in advancing the persecution and ultimately the destruction of Europe’s Jews.
It created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews and also encouraged passivity and
acceptance of the impending measures against them, as these appeared to depict the Nazi
government as stepping in and “restoring order.” Schools too played an important role in spreading
Nazi ideas to German youth. From their first days at school, German children, such as Ewa Paradies,
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. Ewa Paradies was 14 when she left school.
As Nazi leaders prepared for war in Europe, antisemitic legislation
in Germany and Austria paved the way for more radical persecution of Jews.
When the Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939,
Ewa Paradies was working as a tram conductor.
The same month, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof,
a town about 22 miles east of Danzig, today’s Gdańsk.
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, the Stutthof camp 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 and 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.
In June 1944, the SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the
surrounding cities 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 Ewa Paradies who at the time worked as a tram conductor.
From August 1944, Paradies was trained as an SS concentration
camp guard at the Stutthof concentration camp. In October 1944 she was ordered to
the Bromberg-Ost subcamp and in January 1945 back to the main Stutthof camp.
In both camps Paradies became infamous for her brutal treatment of prisoners. One
Stutthof survivor later testified: “In the freezing cold winter,
Ewa Paradies often ordered a group of female prisoners to undress and stand in the snow.
Then she poured cold water on the naked women and when they moved, she would beat them.”
Another prisoner testified that when she was in particularly bad mood,
Paradies would club the female prisoners to death.
She would also beat and kick the women without any reason at all until they lay still.
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,
Stutthof’s subcamp 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 death march.
In April 1945, Ewa Paradies accompanied one of the last transports of female prisoners from
Stutthof to its subcamp Lauenburg. After the war, witnesses testified that those women who
could not march anymore, Paradies murdered. 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.
Altogether, some 100,000 prisoners passed through Stutthof; 60,000 of them perished,
while another 22,000 were transferred to other concentration camps.
Though towards the end of the war Paradies fled,
she was discovered and captured by Polish officers in Lauenburg in May 1945.
Paradies was then tried at the First Stutthof trial which began on the 25th of April 1946.
Several Holocaust survivors testified about her cruelty and the murders she
had committed in Stutthof during the war.
She and her female Nazi comrades all pleaded "not guilty" to the general charge of war crimes
and Paradies 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. Ewa Paradies, for her her sadistic abuse and
killing of prisoners, was sentenced to death by hanging. She cried as the verdict was announced.
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 25 year old Ewa Paradies 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".
Ewa Paradies was the last convict to die. The security forces then 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 Ewa Paradies.
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