The 15th of April, 1945, southwest of Bergen, Nazi Germany. The British 11th Armored Division
liberates Bergen-Belsen – one of the worst Nazi concentration camps
which would epitomize the true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime and its death camps.
The British forces find 13,000 unburied death bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners
who are sick and starved. Thousands of other inmates will die of various diseases
such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation.
The British forces capture male and female Nazi personnel responsible for these horrors
and force them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. One of them is Hilde Lisiewitz.
Hilde Lisiewitz was born on the 31st of January 1922 in Bavarian Grünwald, then part of the Weimar
Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933.. She was one day short from her
11th birthday when Adolf Hitler was appointed the Chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933.
Soon after she became 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.
While in January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, by the end of the
year this figure had increased to over 2 million. Jews were not allowed to join these organizations.
Belonging to the organization was a significant time commitment
which interfered with other priorities, such as church and school.
During these meetings, the members were encouraged to abandon their individuality,
wore the same uniforms, sang the same Nazi songs and participated in similar activities.
This time commitment and regular exposure to the Nazi ideology weakened the influence of parents,
teachers, religious figures, and other voices of authority.
In fact, the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls even encouraged their members to report
to their leaders about what was happening in their schools or churches as well as if their parents or
neighbors were not acting in line with the regime. While boys participated in military training to
be trained as future fighters and soldiers for war, girls prepared for their futures as wives
and mothers. The League of German Girls emphasized collective athletics, such as rhythmic gymnastics,
which German health authorities deemed less strenuous to the female body and better geared
to preparing them for motherhood. These activities also served to demonstrate the value of working
together. The League trained girls to care for the home and family and girls learned skills such as
sewing, nursing, cooking, and household chores. In 1936, membership in Nazi youth groups
became mandatory for all boys and girls between the ages of ten and seventeen.
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. When the Second World War started on the 1st of
September 1939, Hilde Lisiewitz was working as a gardener. From October 1940 to March 1941 she did
her 6 months with German national labor service which was the official state labor service,
divided into separate sections for men and women. After the start of the war, it was compulsory
also for young women and its objective was to provide support for the Wehrmacht armed forces.
Then she worked at home and at a railway buffet. From February 1943 until November 1944
she worked at a munition factory in Grünberg then in Lower Silesia, and in late 1944 she was
conscripted to SS. She was sent to Langenbielau for training until the 29th of December when she
returned to the factory in Grünberg. Grünberg was a sub camp of the larger concentration camp system
known as Gross-Rosen. The camp was used for forced labor and the female prisoners
worked in the textile and munitions factories. The textile factory would produce material that could
be used for uniforms, army coats, parachutes, and blankets that the German military needed.
Because in early 1945 the bombing from the Allied powers was getting closer, the female
inmates of Grünberg were taken on a death march on the 29th of January. In the freezing cold,
the poor women had to march without shoes, having their feet wrapped in rags. Their possessions
consisted of a thin blanket, a tin bowl and a spoon. Each received a hunk of bread to eat.
Lisiewitz is believed to have participated in guarding the death march from Grünberg to
a labor camp in Guben, located 60 kilometers away, where she and marching female prisoners
arrived on the 3rd of February. 1,400 of the 2,000 women died during this particular death march.
The Germans began to frantically move the prisoners out of the camps near the front
and take them to be used as forced laborers in camps inside Germany.
Many perished or were murdered along the way. The exact number of victims is unknown
Part of these death marches was in unheated freight trains.
From Guben, Lisiewiz was ordered to Bergen-Belsen where she arrived on the 3rd of March 1945
and became a supervisor in one of the cookhouses. According to the inmates,
who were lucky enough to survive the war, the daily portion of food consisted of watery soup
made from a variety of turnips cooked in water and 3 and half centimeters of bread a day. The
camp was so overcrowded that during winter months when it was freezing cold, the prisoners had to
sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a
camp of tens of thousands of prisoners. In March 1945, due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak
of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of the prisoners was between 250 and 300.
At Belsen, Lisiewitz became known as a deprived vicious sadist. One Russian inmate, Alexandra
Siwidowa, then a 21-year-old, how Hilde had treated other prisoners who were dying of hunger
and tried to get some food. Hilde Lisiewitz was seen beating prisoners with a rubber truncheon
for trying to steal extra food. Then after beating them, Lisiewitz would report such incidents to the
Block Leaders, who were in charge of the blocks to which the victims belonged, and they would beat
the prisoners again. Lisiewitz would also strike the prisoners on the head with a rubber truncheon,
knocking them down and then kicking them on the floor. Many of the prisoners had
to be taken to hospital after this treatment and some of them even died.
Another witness named Dora Almaleh, then 21 years old, also described details of Lisiewitz’s sadist
behavior. One day in April, 1945, whilst at Belsen, Dora belonged to a working party detail
responsible for carrying vegetables from the store to the kitchen by means of a hand-cart.
Lisiewitz was in charge of this working party. While Dora was on this job she allowed two male
prisoners to take two turnips off the cart. Lisiewitz saw Dora do this, and pushed the men,
who were very weak, to the ground, and then beat them on their heads with a thick stick
which she always carried. She then stamped on their chests with her jack-boots directly
over their hearts. The men lay still clutching the turnips. Lisiewitz then got hold of Dora
and shook her until she started to cry. She then said, "Don't cry or I'll kill you too." She then
went away and after 15 minutes Dora went up to the men and touched them to see if they were still
alive. She formed the opinion that they were dead. She felt their hearts and could feel nothing. They
were cold to the touch like dead men. She then went away, leaving the bodies where they were.
Lisiewitz’s reign of terror ended on the 15th of April when the British 11th Armored Division
liberated Bergen-Belsen and she was arrested. The prisoners finally got food and clothes. Due
to the typhus epidemic and lice infestation, the camp was then burned to the ground.
Lisiewitz was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17th of September 1945 and was
sentenced to one year imprisonment. She was released from prison on the 16th of November 1946
and soon after she married and took the name of Michnia. The former SS guard had 3 children,
settled in Hamburg and became a devout Catholic and a regular attender of mass.
But in 2015 her dark past caught up with her once again.
On one occasion she had confided to an Irish neighbor about her past and her nightmares
about her time working in Bergen-Belsen. In the meantime, Slovak-born Tomi Reichental,
a Bergen-Belsen survivor living in Ireland and active in Holocaust education work, gave a radio
appearance in 2012 and soon after he was contacted by a woman who said that she had lived in Hamburg,
where a neighbor admitted she was a former guard in the camp where Tomi was once imprisoned.
Tomi then travelled to Hamburg and tried to contact Lisiewitz
in order to reconcile with the former camp guard and offer her a chance to repudiate her past. But
Lisiewitz declined. Tomi’s unsuccessful trip to Hamburg attracted the attention of media, partly
because he created a documentary name ‘Close to Evil’ about his intention to meet Lisiewitz.
In addition, in 2015 state prosecutors through an informant were looking into whether Michnia
participated in guarding the death march from Gross-Rosen to the labor camp in Guben,
during which 1,400 of the 2,000 women died as she could face charges as an accessory to murder.
To this day, Hilde Lisiewitz, today known as Michnia, insists that she was not involved in
any atrocities, she never saw any corpses lying around Bergen Belsen camp while working there
and prosecutors should leave small ‘fry’ like her alone. When a former SS guard,
a convicted war criminal and nowadays regular church-goer was asked about her feelings towards
Tomi Reichental and his documentary, which displayed her dark past to general public
as well as to the prosecutors she answered in a split second: ‘he should be ashamed of himself’!
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