The 22nd of December 1947, Krakow, Poland. The former staff of Auschwitz - the deadliest German
Nazi concentration camp – hears their sentences read. After a month of gruesome testimonies,
it is revealed that many SS guards were involved in the acts of inhumane torture
and the mass murder of prisoners often for pleasure, and that their cruelty went
far beyond what their superiors ordered them to do. One such guard is Hildegard Lächert.
Hildegard Martha Lächert was born on the 19th of March 1920 in Berlin then
part of the Weimar Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933.
After leaving school, Lächert began an apprenticeship as a tailor,
which she broke off and was then trained as a nurse.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in Germany in January 1933.
Women, such as Hildegard, were central to his plan to create an ideal “Aryan” community.
Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as
generators of the race. In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would
enhance Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in
Eastern Europe. The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure”
women to bear as many children as possible. Nazi population policy took a radical turn in
1936 when SS leaders created the state-directed program known as Lebensborn meaning Fount of
Life. Lebensborn ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children,
in or out of wedlock. Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with their children,
provided birth documents and financial support, and recruited adoptive parents for the children.
However, German women played a vital role in the Nazi movement,
which by far exceeded the Nazi Party’s propaganda that a woman’s place was strictly
in the home as mothers and child-bearers. Of the estimated forty million German women in the Reich,
some thirteen million were active in Nazi Party organizations serving as welfare
workers, teachers, secretaries, nurses, auxiliaries in the armed forces and police,
and in many other occupations including as guards in concentration camps.
In August 1939, shortly before the start of the WW2, Lächert bore a son out of
wedlock. When the war broke out on the 1st of September 1939, she was assigned to take
up work in a munitions factory. Her second child, a daughter, was born in April 1941.
In April of the following year, Lächert was deployed in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Opened in May 1939, Ravensbrück was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
Ravensbrück was staffed both by SS men, who served as guards and administrators,
and by 150 women, who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS
volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good pay and working conditions.
Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for female SS guards who were instructed how to handle the
prisoners that they were going to supervise. These prisoners would have to work until they
died and the task of their supervisors was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they
were still alive. Ravensbrück thus also became a training center or “a school of violence “ for
about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
One such guard was Hildegard Lächert who in October 1942, after completing her training,
was relocated to Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi occupied Poland.
During the entire period of its existence, the Majdanek camp was under construction.
It also contained storage facilities for clothing and personal items stolen
from the Jews before their deaths in the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II killing
centers. In these storage facilities, Majdanek female prisoners sorted and repaired clothes.
In the winter of 1941-1942, camp authorities began to use Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners
too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber. Mass murder operations using poison gas began
at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943. There appear to have
been three gas chambers at Majdanek; at least two were shower rooms reconfigured
for use of Zyklon B gas. At least one of these was used to kill human beings.
The SS killed tens of thousands of Jews at Majdanek. The majority of them arrived in
the camp as forced laborers and either died as a result of the brutally inhumane living conditions
or were killed in the gas chambers after the Germans determined that they could no longer
work. Hildegard Lächert also participated in these selections and thus became the master
of life and death of the Majdanek prisoners. Lächert paid special attention to children;
she offered them candy to lure them into trucks which then took them to the gas chambers.
With her pistol and whip always ready, she was infamous for beating the prisoners for
no reason. In the camp, Lächert stood out from the rest of guards for her sadism and owing to
her cruelty and brutality she became known as the “Krwawa Brygida”, Polish for “Bloody Brigitte”.
She was also an alcoholic. And the more she drank, the more sadistic she became.
On one occasion she set her German shepherd on a young woman whom the dog tore apart. This happened
in front of other female prisoners who all saw at this time how Lächert had smile on her face.
After the war, Polish Holocaust survivor Bogna Jaworska remembered:
”I was detained in Majdanek along with my mother. One day, as we were being issued soup,
I realized that I had forgotten to take spoons for my mother and myself. I ran to get the spoons,
having given my bowl to my mother. When Lächert saw my mother holding two bowls,
she started to beat her in the face and kick her. At that point, I returned and tried to
explain the situation to her. In response, I was punched several times in the face.
At that time my mother was forty years old. She died during the liquidation of the camp.”
She continued: “On another occasion Lächert beat a colleague of mine because of the cigarette she
had found in her pocket. I saw her after she returned from Lächert’s room - she was covered
in bruises and her whole head was swollen. I also saw Lächert knock down a Jewish
woman in the garden. Searching for the hidden valuables, Lächert knocked her down to the ground,
lifted her dress with a stick, and began to carry out a gynaecologic examination: searching her for
valuables, Lächert, a trained nurse, put a stick in the woman’s vagina. The woman groaned and
screamed so horribly that we ran away because we couldn’t stand watching this. Lächert did
this in full view of the prisoners working in the garden. The woman was a Polish Jew brought
to Majdanek after the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Later, I saw the woman lying covered
in blood. I don’t know her name, she might have been taken to the gas chamber or simply died.”
Jaworska continued: “ In June 1943 a Jewish woman was being hanged and we were herded
near the gallows. We averted our eyes to avoid watching the hanging. Standing next to our block,
Lächert turned our heads in the direction of the gallows, laughing all the time. I haven’t
heard of any prisoner whom Lächert helped in any way. Once Lächert hit my friend Kunze so
hard on the head that Kunze had to spend a long period of time in the sick room.
The blow she received left a permanent scar, and her hair didn’t grow back there.”
In the camp, Lächert constantly harrased prisoners and made their life miserable at
every turn. Towards the end of March 1943, when it was freezing cold, Lächert deprived prisoners
working in the garden, that is, in the open field, of their sweaters. She did so even though
the sweaters had been officially issued, and the camp authorities allowed prisoners to wear them.
Sweaters were however taken away only from the women who worked in the garden;
women who worked under the roof were not deprived of their sweaters.
Another survivor recalled that at the time, when the gassing was carried out on
a large scale and the crematorium was falling behind with the incineration of dead bodies,
a great pit was dug up in the garden where the bodies were dumped and burnt.
Hildegard Lächert was frequently seen walking up to the pit wearing
a gleeful expression on her face, inhaling the smoke with relish.
At Majdanek, Lächert often showed prisoners into the bathhouse where male staff were working.
After bathing, the women had hairy skin areas disinfected and many of them tried to avoid
this procedure. Lächert beat those women she caught trying to evade this fumigation and she
laughed as a kapo, before whom they were put, doused them with a decontaminating substance.
On one occasion, when Lächert saw two young Greek women cleaning toilets,
she threw them inside and laughed as they drowned in feces as they swallowed it.
Another Holocaust survivor testified how during the day, Jewish women gathered bread or bought it
from other prisoners saving it for later. Lächert would then take their bread away.
She even mistreated the male inmates. On one occasion Lächert was seen beating a
camp inmate using her whip with an iron ball in the end and kicking him with
her steel-studded jackboots until the man was covered with blood and no longer looked human.
Due to pregnancy Lächert left the camp in August or September 1943
and her third child, who died shortly after birth, was born in April 1944.
During interrogations after the war, she refused to name the father of her child,
saying only that he was an SS man in Lublin, which was only 25 km from the camp.
After giving birth to her son, in April 1944, she ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Rajsko – a
subcamp of Auschwitz where women were assigned to two Kommandos—gardening and plant-growing.
At Rajsko, Lächert was known for receiving SS men in her house and due to these visits,
she neglected her essential professional duties and disrupted the order of the day
for the prisoners, as they often had to wait for two or three hours for the
roll call. Her mistreatment of the prisoners continued also here but she was less cruel.
Lächert left Auschwitz in January 1945 when Soviet forces approached
the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as the death marches.
The prisoners had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
From January 1945, Lächert worked in the Bolzano
transit camp in Italy and stayed there until the camp was closed in April 1945.
After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Lächert when she was tried
at the Auschwitz trial which began on the 24th of November 1947 and lasted one month.
On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced
Hildegard Lächert, a mother of 2 children, to 15 years in prison. However, under an amnesty,
Lächert was released from prison in December 1956. She even received 6,000 Deutschmarks from the West
German government as an alleged prisoner of war. After her release, Lächert briefly worked with
the CIA and BND – German intelligence service - which at the time was routinely interviewing
Nazi war criminals who had been released from prisons in Eastern Europe but because she was
quickly deemed useless, Lächert's work with the agencies ended after only a few months.
In August 1973, her dark past caught up with her once again when due to the upcoming third Majdanek
Trial she was arrested by West German officials and questioned about her past in Majdanek.
Lächert was released, but then rearrested as a suspect in June 1979 and put on trial.
The same year Lächert was put up as a candidate for the European Parliament by a right-wing group.
One of her lawyers, Ludwig Bock even raised arguments that there was no proof that more
than 100,000 Jews ever died in the Nazi period and he suggested that Hitler did not have a policy of
Jewish extermination, and that gas chambers found in the camps could have been simple laundries,
or possibly even built by occupation forces after the German surrender.
He even called for the arrest of one witness because she testified that she had carried a
cannister of poison gas at Majdanek when ordered to do so by the Nazis.
Though prosecutors requested a life sentence for Lächert, in the end, for her participation
in selections to the gas chamber, abuse of prisoners and for her complicity to the
murder of 1196 people, the court sentenced her to only 12 years imprisonment. However,
Lächert never had to serve this time, since her imprisonment in Poland and
the time she spent in custody awaiting the trial were allowed as time served.
She lived the reminder of her life as a free woman
and died on the 14th of April 1995 in Berlin at the age of 75.
There were no tears shed for Hildegard Lächert.
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