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. While some of them are forced to help bury the dead bodies
in mass graves, there are guards who are in the camp’s hospital recovering from typhus themselves.
One of them is a German Nazi guard Anna Hempel.
Anna Hempel was born on the 22nd of June 1900, in Grünberg, then part of the German Empire.
Hempel was married with a son when the Second World War started on the 1st of September
1939. In May 1944, when she joined the SS, she was working in a textile factory. The same month
she started a three-week course at Ravensbrück concentration camp in order to become a 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 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 work 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 Anna Hempel, would be to get a maximum amount of
work out of them whilst they were still alive. About 3,500 women were trained at Ravensbrück
and went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
From Ravensbrück Anna Hempel was sent to Grünberg which 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 the early 1945 the bombing from the Allied powers was getting closer, the
female inmates of Grünberg were taken on a death march on the 28th of January. In 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.
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 this death march was in unheated freight trains.
After more than 3 weeks, on the 17th of February 1945, Anna Hempel together with prisoners from
Grünberg arrived in Bergen Belsen which was a camp for sick people. Sanitary conditions were terrible
and there was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January
and March 1945 when the prisoners were sent on death marches from the other concentration camps,
about one-third of the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost 80
percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station as they were too
week and sick to walk. On one occasion out of a transport of 1,900 inmates over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners received almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when
they arrived at the camp either. 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 Bergen Belsen, Hempel had two days off duty. Then for two days she worked in the bath-house.
The bath houses were designed to disinfect 400 prisoners and their clothing every day.
Steam flowing out of the floor killed lice to protect the prisoners from typhus and other
diseases. Because disinfecting clothing took longer than disinfecting prisoners,
the poor prisoners had to wait outside, wet and naked in the cold weather.
After working in bath house, Hempel then worked in Kitchen No. 2 in the men’s compound.
According to her trial testimony, for a few weeks she was the only supervisor of 34 women and 18
men who worked 14-16 hours a day. Their daily job was to cook food for starving prisoners.
17000 rations they cooked every day consisted of one litre of soup at mid-day,
and three-quarters of a litre at night. The prisoners recevied no breat at all.
At Bergen Belsen, Anna Hempel was known as a cruel and sadistic guard.
When it seemed to her that the prisoners were slacking, she woud beat them terribly.
On a few occasions she was seen beating young starving girls simply for stealing turnips.
In order to make them suffer even more, she beat them wirh her special riding-whip.
Another special tool with which she used to beat the prisoners was a rubber truncheon.
Once she was seen hiting a very sick man who collapsed in a heap on the ground.
The reason was that the starving prisoner had stolen a little food from the kitchen.
When it seemed to her that her fellow Nazi colleagues did not beat the
prisoners „ properly“ , she went to the camp’s commandat Josef Kramer to complain about it.
Herta Ehlert, another female Nazi guard who served at Bergen Belsen together with Anna Hempel
was so horrified when she saw how cruerly Hempel was treating the prisoners that she went to Kramer
to complain about Hempel beating prisoners to such an extent that it was disgusting.
Hempel‘s reign of terror ended on the 8th of April 1945 shen she was taken
ill with typhus and went to the hospital in the Wehrmacht Barracks Area at Belsen.
7 days later on the 15th of April, the British 11th Armored Division
liberated Bergen-Belsen and Anna Hempel was arrested.
She was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17th of September 1945.
Hempel refused to confess to any of the charges brought against her and when asked about her
cruelty, she only admitted to having beaten the starving prisoner over his back with a stick
because, as she testified, she had caught him when he filled his pockets with turnips
and could not bring herself to slap his face. However, the reason why she could not bring
herself to slap his face was because she knew that he as well as other prisoners had typhus
and she did not want to touch them with her hands. Instead, Hempel beat them with a stick, truncheon,
whip or whatever she could get hold of. She claimed that she had beaten the
prisoner this way only once. However, her lies did not help her escape justice.
The British Military tribunal found Anna Hempel guilty of the crimes she had committed
at Bergen Belsen and sentenced her to 10 years imprisonment. Unlike Irma Grese, she avoided the
death sentence and, at the end, spent only 6 years in prison until she was released in April, 1951.
Nothing more is known either about her remaining life or of how she died.
There were no tears shed for Anna Hempel.
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