Stutthof Concentration Camp was a place of huge suffering and evil during the Second
World War.
It was a camp found to the east of Danzig, and 110,000 inmates would pass through the
gates but it’s believed that half of the prisoners never made it out alive.
The SS guards there were notorious for their brutality and horrific treatment of the inmates,
and the conditions were truly shocking.
Disease swept through the camp, and those who were too weak to work were sent to the
gas chamber at the site.
Inside of Stutthof were a number of female guards who were in control of overseeing female
prisoners, and a total of 295 women worked as staff at Stutthof.
Many of these women became know and associated with their evils of Stutthof, but very few
were actually executed after the war for their crimes.
Join us today as we look at the evil female guards of stutthof concentration camp, and
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Stutthof was established following the occupation and invasion of Poland, and it was used to
begin with to imprison Polish people.
Lists had been drawn up of people to be arrested, but in 1941 Stutthof became a Labour education
camp like Dachau and then a year later it became a concentration camp.
The staff there consisted of German SS guards and also Ukranian auxiliaries who were brought
in after 1943 to help control the inmates.
But in 1942, the first German SS aufseherinnen guards arrived at Stutthof along with female
prisoners.
Almost 300 women guards would work there, and they were also responsible for the conditions.
As mentioned they were very harsh, and tens of thousands died from starvation and disease,
but executions were also carried out there with prisoners being shot in firing ranges.
There was also a gas chamber, but SS doctors and nurses would also kill using phenol injections.
The mud around the site also acted as an execution device for some guards who drowned prisoners
in the mud.
It was truly hell on earth, and the extremely hard labour the prisoners were forced to conduct
also led to deaths as they were literally exterminated through work.
Women were transferred en mass from other sites such as Auschwitz and other camps.
But these women needed watching over, and many notable female guards were based there.
Some of these guards would be brought to trial at the end of the war, but they were accused
of camps working at sites such as Bergen-Belsen.
One of these was Herta Bothe, a 6 foot 4 brute of a woman who was known for brutalising inmates
and women, and she was accused of killing with her bare hands.
But at the Stutthof Trials, there were a number of women who were condemned for their treatment
of other women.
34 of the female guards were identified as having committed crimes against humanity,
and the SS in Stutthof began to conscript women from Danzig to of and work in the camp
and to train as a camp guard.
This was due to a severe shortage of women to work there inside the camp.
But as mentioned a small number of were executed for their evil at Stutthof.
One of these was Jenny Wanda Barkmann who became known as the Beautiful Spectre.
She was a woman who selected others including children to go to the gas chambers inside
of Stutthof’s women’s camp.
Barkmann was also known for beating prisoners to death, and she was merciless towards them.
She at the end of the war tried to flee the site, but was arrested at a train station
in Gdansk.
She was brought to the Stuthof Trial, and it was said at her trial that she did not
take it seriously.
Barkmann was more bothered to flirt with the guards inside the courtroom, and she was more
concerned with her hair than the court proceedings.
After she was condemned to death she said, ‘Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures
are usually short.’
At the age of 24 she was executed on a huge gallows on Biskupia Gorka Hill near Gdansk.
Elisabeth Becker also worked at the camp, and she was also known for selecting women
and children to go to the gas chambers.
Following working at the camp for a period of just four months, she fled and returned
home.
But Becker was arrested and she was then sentenced to death for her crimes despite her brief
time working at Stutthof.
She petitioned to be spared, but this did not go anywhere.
The court believed she should have been imprisoned for 15 years, but no pardon was issued following
the passing of the original death sentence and she was too hanged.
Wanda Klaff was also executed for her crimes at the camp, and she was known for beating
and assaulting prisoners on a daily basis.
She was said to have been very intelligent, and devoted to her work, and she admitted
her crimes.
Klaff stated she had hit at least two prisoners a day, but she tried to flee the camp at the
end of the war, but justice would also catch up with her.
Ewa Paradies worked at the women camp as an overseer and she then became a wardress.
She was swapped around different sub camps at Stutthof, and she later accompanied transports
of women but she tried to flee.
One witness testified at the trial and said of her, ‘She ordered a group of female prisoners
to undress in the freezing cold of winter, and then doused them with ice cold water.
When the women moved, Paradies beat them.’
She was another woman who was executed on the huge gallows in Gdansk for her crimes,
being the last of the women to be hanged.
Gerda Steinhoff was a baker and a tram conductor, before she came to Stutthof answering the
Nazi call for women to work there.
She became a block leader, and regularly took part in the selections of prisoners to be
sent to their deaths.
She was a woman who was very devoted to the Nazi cause, and she was a ruthless overseer,
despite the fact she was condemned to die at the young age of 24.
Erna Beilhardt also worked there, and during the war she was an auxillery guard.
She became an overseer and her time at Stutthof compared to other guards was strange.
She was not known to have beaten or killed any prisoners, and she allegedly became very
disturbed by watching the fellow prisoners being beaten by the guards.
She saw other women kill with their bare hands, and she then resigned and went to help as
a nurse tending to German soldiers.
She said regarding her work at Stutthof, ‘I did not like this work very much, because
they tormented people too much, which I couldn’t look at.’
She was later sentenced to five years in prison, and she did complete this sentence.
These were the female guards who were condemned in the Stutthof trials, and they were taken
to a hill in Gdansk.
There were around 20,000 people looking on that day as the women along with other condemned
men were loaded onto trucks.
They were driven up to the huge gallows, and then the noose was secured around there necks.
The trucks then drove off and the women were left hanging in front of the crowd.
Interestingly there was a former woman that worked at Stutthof named Irmgard Furchner,
who in December 2022 was given a suspended jail sentence for her crimes at Stutthof.
She was 97 when she received this, and it was said that she had committed a number of
crimes at the camp when she was only 18.
There were many other women who served at the camp, but many more would escape justice
and they would never be brought to trial.
Out of all the men and women that worked at Stutthof concentration camp, only 72 SS officers
and six female overseers were ever brought to justice.
This is a shocking statistic, and the accounts of women who worked there and their treatment
of prisoners was shocking.
Their names became etched in the dark history of evil committed at the concentration camps.
They were women who were not afraid to strike and hit, and even kill with their bare hands,
and many of them condemned others to death by sending them to the gas chambers following
selections.
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