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.
As Allied and Soviet troops move across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945,
they encounter concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes.
The unspeakable conditions the liberators confront shed
light on the full scope of Nazi horrors. One of the most infamous perpetrators of
this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Elsa Ehrich.
Elsa Ehrich was born on the 8th of March 1914 in Bredereiche then part of the German Empire.
Her parents – a skipper Albert Ehrich and his wife Anna, baptized Elsa as a Protestant
on the 1st of June 1914. After finishing school, she worked in a slaughterhouse.
The Nazi Party, founded in 1919 and led by Adolf Hitler, gave political expression to
theories of racism in Germany. In part, the Nazi Party gained popularity by disseminating
anti-Jewish propaganda and millions bought Hitler's book Mein Kampf meaning My Struggle,
which called for the removal of Jews from Germany.
With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the party ordered anti-Jewish economic boycotts,
staged book burnings, and enacted discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws racially defined Jews by “blood” and ordered the total separation of
so-called "Aryans" and "non-Aryans,” thereby legalizing racist hierarchy.
On the night of the 9th of November 1938, the Nazis destroyed synagogues
and the shop windows of Jewish-owned stores throughout Germany and Austria. This event,
which became known as the Kristallnacht pogrom or Night of Broken Glass, marked a transition
to an era of destruction, in which genocide would become the singular focus of Nazi antisemitism.
The Nazis murdered Jewish people in mass killings, by shooting,
administering poison gas, exhaustion and overwork,
and in specifically constructed killing centers which were part of the Nazi camp system.
The Nazi camp system began as a system of repression directed against political
opponents of the Nazi state. In the early years of the Third Reich,
the Nazis imprisoned primarily Communists and Socialists. In about 1935, the regime also began
to imprison those whom it designated as racially or biologically inferior, especially the Jews.
During World War II, the organization and scale of the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly and the
purpose of the camps evolved beyond imprisonment toward forced labor and outright murder.
Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Germans arrested those who resisted their domination
and those they judged to be racially inferior or politically unacceptable.
People arrested for resisting German rule were mostly sent to forced-labor or concentration
camps. The Second World War, which began on the 1st of September 1939, brought unprecedented
growth in both the number of camps and the number of prisoners. Within three years the
number of prisoners quadrupled, from about 25,000 before the war to about 100,000 in March 1942.
The camp population came to include prisoners from almost every European nation. Prisoners in
all the concentration camps were literally worked to death. According to SS reports,
there were more than 700,000 prisoners registered in the concentration camps in January 1945.
The Germans deported Jews from all over occupied Europe to extermination camps
in Poland, where they were systematically killed, and also to concentration camps,
where they were drafted for forced labor which was "extermination through work." Several hundred
thousand Roma people and Soviet prisoners of war were also systematically murdered.
Part of the Nazi camp system also became Elsa Ehrich.
On the 15th of August 1940, she volunteered
for service in the concentration camp Ravensbrück as an SS guard.
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 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 trained here 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,
such as Elsa Ehrich, was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they were
still alive. Ravensbrück thus also became a training center or school of violence for
about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
At Ravensbrück, Ehrich initially worked as a supervisor of block 13,
but through the eager performance of her responsibilities, she rose rapidly in the
overseer hierarchy and from 1941, she worked as a SS-Rapportführerin – a Rapport Leader.
The primary duty of a Rapport Leader was to conduct daily and evening camp roll call,
which was usually a long and grueling process involving prisoners sometimes
standing for hours on end in all types of weather conditions. The Rapport Leader also
oversaw camp discipline of the prisoners as well as training for junior SS personnel.
Most Rapport Leaders in the SS were known for their brutality and Elsa Ehrich was no exception.
In October 1942, she was transferred to Majdanek near Lublin.
During the entire period of its existence, the Majdanek camp was under construction.
Between the 29th of April 1942, and the 3rd of November 1943,
Jewish prisoners were the overwhelming majority of prisoners registered at Majdanek.
Majdanek 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
such 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 two 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.
At Majdanek, Ehrich served first as a guard but after some time was promoted
to SS-Oberaufseherin or Chief Senior Overseer.
She was not only involved in "selections" of the women and children to be sent to the gas
chambers but she was almost always present when the gas executions were taking place.
Majdanek’s gas chambers were also used to kill prisoners from the other camps
in Lublin who were no longer able to work. Some Jewish victims were killed in the gas
chambers upon arrival. Many, however, were killed in shooting operations
and many others died of disease, starvation, exposure and overwork.
Though it served primarily as a vast forced-labor camp for Polish Jews, Majdanek also served as a
detention center for real and suspected members of the Polish underground resistance in German
occupied Poland and for Poles suspected of violating the harsh provisions issued by the
German occupation authorities that governed the labor discipline. Next to the Jews, Poles
represented the largest minority in the camp. Other prisoners at Majdanek included Germans,
Austrians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians, and a handful of others.
At Majdanek, Elsa Ehrich had other SS female guards under her command. One such guard was
Hermine Braunsteiner, Ehrich’s assistant, who became infamous for her wild rages and tantrums.
The women at the camp described Braunsteiner as: inhuman, cruel,
brutal, sadistic and causing frantic fear. Not only did she beat them, but she also
killed them by stomping on them with her steel-studded jackboots which
earned her the nickname ‘The Stomping Mare”. Another Braunsteiner’s specialty at Majdanek
was whipping. She would whip several women, including those who were pregnant, to death.
She was particularly notable for her cruel treatment of children,
whom she saw as "useless eaters." She would whip the children and,
on a few occasions, she was seen grabbing children by their hair and throwing them
on trucks heading to the gas chambers. She would pull the children’s hair so
hard that whole tufts would remain in her hands. She punished the children with beatings and lashes
even if they rushed towards the food bucket or if they did not sew on their inmate number correctly.
Elsa Ehrich, with her revolver and whip always ready, made sure her deputy would
not overshadow her in terms of cruelty. Ehrich, once a butcher’s shop assistant
was depicted as “primitive” by her former female inmates. However, at Majdanek she
had the power to decide about matters of life and death. In the camp, Ehrich would become
infamous for slapping and kicking the prisoners for no reason and enjoyed brutally harassing as
well as beating up especially weak, emaciated and old women, without sparing the children.
On one occasion, when Dr Perzanowska asked Elsa Ehrich for an allowance of milk for her patients’
babies, Ehrich slapped her face, yelling: “This is not a sanatorium, but a death camp!”
In her position, she was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of
women and children who died in gas chambers and by shootings.
In early 1943 Ehrich made an attempt to launch a Nazi brothel in the camp, but the project was
abandoned before fruition after one of her slave sex-workers was diagnosed with typhus.
Ehrich herself became ill due to typhoid in February 1943.
After the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which started on the 19th of April 1943,
a large part of the surviving Jews were transported to the concentration camp at
Majdanek. SS female supervisors, including Ehrich, Braunsteiner and other SS personnel, prevented
the children from escaping, beat them and hit them with a whip, and then captured them again.
During the spring of 1944 the SS evacuated most of the prisoners to the concentration
camps further west. In late July 1944, as Soviet forces approached Lublin, the remaining camp
staff hastily abandoned Majdanek. However, in their urgency to flee the camp they neglected
to destroy most of the prisoners' barracks and the gas chambers. When the Soviet army
liberated the camp on the 24th of July 1944, it was virtually intact and only a few hundred
Jewish prisoners remained alive. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and see
evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. Between 80,000 – 120,000 people perished in
Majdanek between October 1941 and July 1944 when the camp was operational.
When the Soviet army liberated Majdanek, Ehrich was the Oberaufseherin - Chief Senior Overseer in
the Płaszów concentration camp where she had been sent on the 5th of April 1944.
The Płaszów camp was established in 1942 under the authority of the SS and police leaders in
Krakow. It was initially a forced-labor camp for Jews. The original site of the camp included two
Jewish cemeteries. From time to time the SS enlarged the camp and it reached its
maximum size in 1944, the same year that it became a concentration camp. Until that time,
most of the camp guards were Ukrainian police auxiliaries chosen from among the Soviet soldiers
in German prisoner-of-war camps and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Lublin.
Płaszów camp was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wired fence and was divided into several
sections. The camp had barracks for German personnel, factories, warehouses, a men's camp
and a women's camp, and a "labor education camp" for Polish workers who violated labor discipline.
Poles and Jews were segregated within the camp and the largest number of people confined in Płaszów
at any one time was over 20,000. Thousands were killed there, mostly by shooting.
The German industrialist Oskar Schindler established an enamelware factory in Krakow,
adjacent to Płaszów. He attempted to protect his Jewish workers, some 900 people, from abuse
in Płaszów and from deportation to killing centers. When he moved this factory and his
Jewish work force to the Sudetenland, located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,
in 1944, he prevented the deportation of more than 1,000 Jews, thus saving their lives.
As the Soviet army approached in the summer of 1944, the Germans prepared to dismantle the
Płaszów camp. The SS transferred prisoners to the other concentration camps in Germany and Austria.
Others were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center and murdered there. The Germans
also attempted to remove all traces of the crimes that had been committed in the camp. They
ordered that mass graves at Płaszów be opened and the bodies exhumed and burned. In January 1945,
the last prisoners from Płaszów were sent to Auschwitz for evacuation further west.
In June 1944 Elsa Ehrich was deployed in the Neuengamme concentration camp.
At the end of 1944, approximately 10,000-12,000 prisoners remained incarcerated in the Neuengamme
concentration camp, with another 37,000 - 39,000 in the subcamps. This figure included almost
10,000 women. The demand for prisoner labor from both within and outside induced the
camp authorities at Neuengamme to establish approximately 80 subcamps at various locations
in northern and central Germany between 1942 and 1945, with more than 20 camps in Hamburg alone.
The Neuengamme concentration camp was run under the SS practice of "extermination
through labour". Prisoners worked for 10–12 hours per day and were killed both due to the
inhumane conditions in the camp as well as active violence from the guards. Thousands of prisoners
died from difficult slave labour combined with insufficient nutrition, extremely unhygienic
conditions contributing to widespread disease, and arbitrary brutal punishments from the guards.
Especially toward the end of the war, the Neuengamme prisoners were also exposed to
constant air raids. Almost every night there were 2 or 3 air raids and the prisoners had to descend
into the cellars which were full of rats. The prisoners had to get up at 5 in the morning,
stand in formation for roll call and then walk to their assigned places to perform demanding work
in various locations outside the camp. This could be collecting bricks from the bombed
houses and stacking them to be reused, digging trenches, or shoveling snow from the streets.
Sometimes, the local German people, who themselves were suffering from bombings,
left the starving prisoners some food to eat.
Toward the end of the war, the death rate among prisoners in the Neuengamme system,
which had been steadily climbing, reached catastrophic proportions. In the winter
of 1944-1945, 1,700 prisoners died each month; in February 1945 alone, nearly 2,500 prisoners died.
The death register at Neuengamme indicates that about 40,000 prisoners died in the camp
by the 10th of April 1945. Perhaps as many as 15,000 more died in the camp in the following
week and during the course of the evacuation. In all, more than 50,000 prisoners, almost half
of all those imprisoned in the camp during its existence, died in Neuengamme concentration camp.
In May 1945, shortly after the end of the war, Elsa Ehrich was arrested by the British occupation
authorities in Hamburg and transferred to U.S. custody in the camp for war criminals in Dachau.
Before being transferred to Poland, Ehrich shared her cell in Dachau with Maria Mandl,
her former sadistic Nazi comrade from Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In 1948 justice finally caught up with Elsa Ehrich when she stood before the District Court of Lublin
at the second Majdanek Trial. She was accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ehrich was found guilty of all charges and on the 10th of June 1948, was sentenced to death by
hanging. After the announcement of the judgment, she asked Polish President Bolesław Bierut for
clemency, on the grounds that she had a small son and wanted to atone for her guilt. However,
President Bierut rejected the request. Elsa Ehrich was 34 years old when she was
executed in the Lublin prison on the 26th of October 1948.
There were no tears shed for Elsa Ehrich.
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