The 3rd of February 1947, Hamburg, Germany. The former staff of Ravensbrück, the largest
concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany, hears their sentences read. After almost 2
months of gruesome testimonies, the world finally learns the truth about the inhumane mistreatment
and torture conducted by the camp’s male and female personnel during its 6-year existence.
Out of 16 defendants, 11 are sentenced to death by hanging. One of them is Elisabeth Marschall.
Elisabeth Marschall was born on the 27th of May 1886 in Meiningen, then part of the German
Empire. Marschall was trained as a nurse and she started to work in her profession in 1909.
It was Germany’s economic collapse during the Great Depression,
beginning in 1929 that most contributed to the Nazi Party’s success. The crisis resulted
in widespread unemployment and poverty and also led to an increase in crime.
The resulting anger and fear left the Germans vulnerable to arguments from both the extreme
right and left. One such German was Elisabeth Marschall who joined the Nazi Party in 1931.
After Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933, Nazi
propaganda became inescapable in Germany. Joseph Goebbels, head of the new Propaganda Ministry,
created a cult of personality that glorified Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior. Nazi
propaganda dominated the press, film, radio, and public spaces. Portraits or statues of
Hitler appeared everywhere, and every city and town renamed a street or public space
to honor him. In public, ordinary Germans were expected to praise Hitler and give the
so-called German greeting "Heil Hitler!". Propaganda permeated school curricula as
well and children learned odes praising Hitler’s leadership in public schools.
The first concentration camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than 2 months
after Hitler became the chancellor. In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought
radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.
Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's
Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life.
Following the Kristallnacht which was a series of coordinated violent riots against
the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories which occurred on the
9th – 10th of November 1938, thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps and by
early 1939, only about 16 percent of the Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind.
While in January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany,
approximately 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
Before Elisabeth Marschall was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp as a
head nurse in April 1943, she worked in the same position at a Reichswerke Hermann Göring
hospital near Braunschweig. Reichswerke Hermann Göring was an industrial conglomerate in Nazi
Germany from 1937 until 1945. In November 1937, Reichsminister of Aviation Hermann
Göring obtained unchecked access to state financing and launched a chain of mergers,
diversifying into military industries with the absorption of Rheinmetall – a German automotive
and arms manufacturer. Göring himself supervised the Reichswerke but did not own it in any sense.
This industrial conglomerate provided one-eighth of German steel output during the Second World War
and created a Nazi-controlled military complex that was independent of private interests.
By the end of 1941 the Reichswerke Hermann Göring became the largest company in Europe and probably
in the whole world, with a capital of 2.4 billion reichs marks and about half a million workers.
At times Hermann Göring withdrew cash from this conglomerate for his personal expenses.
At Ravensbrück Marschall was in her position,
responsible for numerous crimes committed against female prisoners.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the
Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles,
Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
Ravensbrück camp 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 taught by Dorothea Binz - the sadistically
cruel German Nazi officer and supervisor - who instructed her trainees on 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.
Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück
to unethical medical experiments. The main coordinator of these experiments
was Karl Gebhardt and his assistants became doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer.
They often used a hammer to break legs of female prisoners, then infected open wounds
with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with and without various chemical substances such
as sulfanilamide, which was an early antibiotic, to prevent infections. Believing it could help
in treating amputee soldiers, they also tested various methods of setting and transplanting
bones. Such experiments included amputations and were often performed without any anesthesia.
The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. Many of the women died
as a result and those who survived often suffered permanent physical damage. SS doctors also carried
out sterilization experiments on women and children, many of them Roma and Sinti people,
in an attempt to develop an efficient method of sterilization. They were also involved in
forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months pregnant. In addition
to these forced abortions, they were also known for the beating of pregnant women to
cause miscarriages and the killing of newborns. Those female prisoners who were lucky enough to
survive these experiments later testified that Elisabeth Marschall, the head nurse at
Ravensbrück concentration camp, never helped any of them, neither the sick nor the pregnant women.
Marschall’s duties at Ravensbrück also included overseeing these
medical experiments and selecting prisoners for execution. Every night before the executions,
she went to the infirmary camp hospital and selected the names of the women to be
liquidated from the sick files. Subsequently, Marshall also compiled lists of those murdered.
Together with the SS doctor Percival Treite, Marschall participated in the
random selection of 800 female prisoners who were then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Many of them died during the transport and in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp itself.
She also participated in these selections together with doctor Adolf Winkelmann who
later testified how these selections were carried out: “The searches took place on
one of the camp streets or in a barracks, but very rarely. The inmates marched in a row to
Doctor Richard Trommer and past me. Of course, we could only do a very superficial examination,
and the people who were obviously sick, unable to work, or unable to march were searched. The
inmates had to bare their legs so that we could see if they were capable of walking.”
After the war both doctor Winkelmann and Elisabeth Marschall claimed they
had not known that the selection could mean death in gas chambers for the prisoners.
After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Marschall when she was tried at the first
Ravensbrück trial which began on the 5th of December 1946. Unlike her, Percival Treite,
a half-British medical doctor at Ravensbrück with whom Elisabeth Marschall selected 800 female
prisoners for to be sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, was defended by a dozen former female prisoners,
including Special Operations Executive agent, Yvonne Baseden, who wrote letters to the
court that were favorable to him. Another ex-prisoner Mary Lindell, an English woman
born to a wealthy family who became a member of the French Resistance during the World War II,
testified in favor of Treite at the trial saying that Treite "was the only man who was human,
the only man who looked after the sick people as a doctor should look after them."
Lindell also criticized the judge advocate who as she claimed was partial and objectionable
and had taken on the cross examination of witnesses himself and prevented other
questions from being put which might have been answered in favor of the accused. Nevertheless,
on the 3rd of February 1947 the British military tribunal sentenced both Percival Treite and
Elisabeth Marschall to death by hanging. However, before the sentence could be
carried out, Triete, then 35 years old, committed suicide with poison on the 8th of April 1947.
Elisabeth Marschall did not fare any better. She was 60 years old when the British executioner
Albert Pierrepoint carried out the death sentence on the 3rd of May 1947. Marschall
became the oldest female Nazi war criminal to be executed by the British occupation authorities.
There were no tears shed for Elisabeth Marschall.
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