On April 15, 1945 the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen – one of
the worst Nazi concentration camps which epitomized the true bestiality and horrors
of the Nazi regime and its death camps. The British forces found 13,000 unburied death bodies
and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. Other thousands of inmates died of
various diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation.
The British forces managed to capture male and female Nazi guards responsible for these horrors
and forced them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves.
One of these SS guards was Johanna Bormann, one of the most sadistic Nazi guards.
Johanna Bormann was born on 10 September 1893 and she did not receive any education because she
never went to a formal school. Before she started her criminal career in concentration camps,
she was looking after the sick in a lunatic asylum where she was earning no more than
20 marks a month. She took a job as a guard in concentration camps because of the money – for
mistreating poor female prisoners she was earning almost 10 times as much as she did in the asylum.
In 1939 she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration
camp where she remained until March 1942 when she was sent to Auschwitz.
Bromann’s nickname was " "the woman with the dogs" because she tortured her prisoners with her dog
which she used as a murder weapon. She used to call her German Shepard “ the
Big Bad Wolfhound” and one of the orders she would give the dog was “bite the throat “.
Her dog was very obedient, something that Bormann strictly demanded from all the prisoners,
and when it attacked poor women, it was never without Bormann’s order.
Johanna Bormann used to be in charge of women working outside the camp. When some of them
became weak and unable to work properly, she used to set her large dog on them. Many of them died
of blood poisoning or were sent to Block 25, which always meant going to the gas chamber.
On one occasion Bormann approached a female prisoner and took something out of her pocket.
Then Bormann threw the inmate to the ground, and while the prisoner was lying on the ground
Bormann let the dog go and bite the poor woman so severely that she was a mass of blood.
On another occasion she set her dog on a different female prisoner
and the dog bit her so brutally that the poor woman had to be in hospital for six weeks.
Once Bormann was not satisfied with the work of a group of about ten girls.
She set her dog on them and one girl was so badly bitten that she
had to be taken to hospital where, after about a fortnight, she died.
On another occasion one female prisoner came to Bormann saying that her fellow prisoner felt very
sick and could not walk to the working site. Bormann’s reaction was hitting the face of
the woman who came to her knocking out two of her teeth. Then Bormann went to
the sick prisoner and ordered her dog to attack the girl. The poor girl died.
On one occasion when Bormann’s dog attacked a poor victim,
she boasted to a passing S.S. man of what she and her dog had done.
Johanna Bormann had also other specialties. She stripped women prisoners and beat them with a
rubber truncheon or enjoyed submitting them to punitive physical exercises in
which the poor women would have to march, run or do frog jumps until exhaustion.
When she arrived in Bergen Belsen concentration camp in the middle of February 1945,
it was already apparent that Germany had lost the war.
At Bergen Belsen, her job was overseeing a pig-sty of 52 pigs.
While the thousands of prisoners were dying of starvation, her pigs were well fed with potatoes
and turnips. And when starving women prisoners stole some vegetables, she beat them immediately.
After Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Johanna Bormann was captured by the British forces together
with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues such as Elisabeth Volkenrath – her former
supervisor at Auschwitz or Josef Kramer, the last commandant of Bergen Belsen concentration camp.
At the Belsen Trial, Bormann claimed she did not know the reason why there were so many
gruesome testimonies brought against her. She refused to confess to any of the charges
brought against her and when asked about her cruelty, she only admitted to having
hit prisoners’ faces or boxed their ears when they did not obey. Regarding her bestial dog, she even
claimed that the prisoners used to play about with it. She also said she had neither participated
in nor seen any selections for gas chambers. However, her lies did not help her escape justice.
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