The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany and aims to lead the German “master race” to victory
in the "racial struggle" against those deemed as “inferior” peoples, especially the Jews. The Nazi
regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and gradually
excludes them from professions, businesses, and public spaces. The first concentration
camp – Dachau – is established less than 2 months after Hitler became the chancellor.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies would establish more than
44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. The perpetrators would
use these locations for forced labor, detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state,"
and the mass murder of millions. One such perpetrator is a German Nazi guard Emma Zimmer.
Emma Anna Maria Zimmer, the eldest child of the pharmacist Oscar Mezel and his wife
Maria was born on the 14th of August 1888 in Haßmersheim, then part of the German Empire.
Zimmer was 44 years old when in 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in
Germany. Women, such as Emma, were central to Adolf Hitler’s plan to create an ideal “Aryan”
community. Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological
power as generators of the race. In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance
Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in eastern Europe.
The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure” women
to bear as many children as possible. Nazi population policy took a radical turn
in 1936 when SS leaders created the state-directed program known as Lebensborn meaning Fount of Life.
Lebensborn ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children,
in or out of wedlock. Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with their children,
provided birth documents and financial support, and recruited adoptive parents for the children.
In the end, however, the Lebensborn program was never promoted aggressively and only around
7,000 children were born into the Lebensborn homes during the program’s nine-year-long existence.
Instead, Nazi population policy concentrated on the family and marriage. The state encouraged
matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child,
publicly honored "child-rich" families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German
Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion.
However, German women played a vital role in the Nazi movement, which by far exceeded the
Nazi Party’s propaganda that a woman’s place was strictly in the home as mothers and child-bearers.
Of the estimated forty million German women in the Reich, some thirteen million were
active in Nazi Party organizations serving as welfare workers, teachers, secretaries,
nurses, auxiliaries in the armed forces and police, and in many other occupations
including as guards in concentration camps. A minority of German women who resisted the
regime’s policies or were branded biologically inferior were persecuted. Hundreds of thousands
were forcibly sterilized and tens of thousands more were incarcerated in the camp system.
Part of that camp system was Lichtenburg concentration camp where Emma Zimmer
became a guard in 1937. One year later she was appointed assistant to the female superintendent
of this camp Johanna Langefeld. Housed in a Renaissance castle,
Lichtenburg was among the first concentration camps to be built by the Nazis and was operated
by the SS from 1933 to 1939. From 1937 to 1939, it held only female prisoners.
One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners was Olga Benário Prestes – a German Communist
activist. In February 1938, after the birth of her child, she was first
sent to the Lichtenburg concentration camp and, later when it was closed in May 1939,
Benario Prestes as well as Emma Zimmer and the remaining Lichtenburg Nazi staff
and prisoners were sent to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp. At Ravensbrück,
which replaced Lichtenburg as the main camp for female prisoners, Benário Prestes was whipped,
tortured, and placed in a punishment bunker while working as slave labor in a Siemens factory.
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, Roma and Sinti people, 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 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 Emma Zimmer, 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, Zimmer became a guard in the Bunker – the punishment block – dealing with
prisoner punishment and was known in the camp for being brutal and sadistic in her guard duties.
After the war, Maria Wiedmaier, a Holocaust survivor, recalled how at Ravensbrück Zimmer
became infamous for brutal treatment of prisoners whom she would beat with
everything that was at hand without any reason until they lay still. According to Wiedmaier,
on one occasion Zimmer grabbed a young Polish woman who was having hysterical fits one winter
morning during roll call, and ‘threw her into the water repeatedly’. The Polish
woman was then expected to work outside the camp without changing and died shortly after.
For her brutal treatment of the female prisoners, in mid-1940 Zimmer was promoted to deputy head
warden and in October 1942 a head warden. One of her new duties in these positions was selection
of internees to be killed at the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre which was one of the six gassing
installations for adults established as part of the Nazi "euthanasia" campaign code-named T4. As a
part of Action 14f13, seriously ill concentration camp inmates or those who, for other reasons,
were unable to work were murdered at Bernburg as well. They were referred to as "ballast".
Action 14f13 also dealt with Jewish prisoners, regardless of their actual state of health.
By the spring of 1942, 1,400 women from Ravensbrück had been killed in Bernburg. One such
prisoner was previously mentioned Benário Prestes who was gassed alongside hundreds of other female
political prisoners at Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942. A total of 9,384 sick and handicapped
people from 33 welfare institutions and nursing homes as well as around 5,000 prisoners from six
concentration camps were killed there in a gas chamber using carbon monoxide gas.
From October 1942 Emma Zimmer was deployed in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
which was located in German occupied Poland.
Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex.
It was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire
fences. It was patrolled by SS guards, including—after 1942—SS dog handlers.
During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in
October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a
branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination
of Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated
before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.
At Auschwitz, Zimmer was notorious for her brutal and sadistic behavior towards the prisoners. After
the war, one Holocaust Survivor remembered Emma Zimmer as follows: "Our supervisor was an old and
mean SS-woman called Emma Zimmer. She was vicious and dangerous and frightening us constantly with
threats, proclaiming in a sadistic voice, "I will report you and then you will go away,
you know where? Just one way-up the chimney." We hated her and were scared of her." From May 1943
Zimmer headed the postal censorship office in the women's camp of the Auschwitz concentration
camp and in September 1943 she was awarded the War Merit Cross II Class without swords.
However, at the end of 1943 she was released from concentration camp service. Whether due
to old age or because of alcohol consumption is not known. From June 1944 Zimmer lived
in Schlüchtern where after the end of the Second World War she was arrested.
Justice finally caught up with Zimmer when she was tried at the Seventh Ravensbrück
trial which started on the 2nd of July 1948. The charges against her and 5 other female camp
wardens were mistreatment of inmates of Allied nationality and participation in the selection
of inmates for the gas chamber. On 21st of July 1948 the military tribunal sentenced
Emma Zimmer to death by hanging. She was 60 years old when she was
hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows at Hamelin Prison on the 20th of September 1948.
There were no tears shed for Emma Zimmer.
Thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe
and click the Bell notification icon so you don't miss our next
episodes we thank you and we'll see you next time on the channel.