The 3rd of February 1947, Hamburg, Germany.
The former staff of Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany,
hears their sentences read. After almost 2 months of gruesome testimonies,
the world finally learns the truth about the inhumane mistreatment and torture conducted by
the camp’s male and female personnel during its 6-year existence. Out of 16 defendants,
11 are sentenced to death by hanging. One of them is former deputy chief overseer Dorothea Binz.
Dorothea Binz, the second daughter of a forest worker,
was born on the 16th of March 1920 in Dusterlake, a town near Ravensbrück,
then part of the Weimar Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933.
Dorothea attended elementary and high school and she was 14 years old when Adolf Hitler and his
Nazi Party came into power in January 1933. Nazi propaganda became inescapable in Germany. Joseph
Goebbels, head of the new Propaganda Ministry, created a cult of personality that glorified
Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior. Nazi propaganda dominated the press, film, radio,
and public spaces. Portraits or statues of Hitler appeared everywhere, and every city and
town renamed a street or public space to honor him. In public, ordinary Germans were expected
to praise Hitler and give the so-called German greeting "Heil Hitler!". Propaganda permeated
school curricula as well and children learned odes praising Hitler’s leadership in public schools.
The first concentration camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than 2 months
after Hitler became the chancellor. In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought
radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.
Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's
Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life.
Following the Kristallnacht pogrom which was a series of coordinated violent riots
against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories which occurred
on the 9th – 10th of November 1938, thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps and
by early 1939, only about 16 percent of the Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of
any kind. While in January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany,
approximately 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
In August 1939, when Dorothea Binz was only 19 years old, allegedly in order to avoid being
forced to work in a factory, she applied for a position as kitchen manager in the Ravensbrück
concentration camp. However, since this position had already been taken, she was hired as a guard.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
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.
In November Binz was already guarding ten female prisoners who were sawing and driving
wood. Until May 1940, she also supervised prisoners carrying coke, unloading bricks,
driving rubble, unloading straw sacks, cleaning the floor, working in construction management,
gardening and personnel development. In August or September 1940,
she was promoted to deputy head of the cell block. In this so called “bunker”
the prisoners who violated the camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death. Binz
together with her superior Maria Mandl, was responsible for carrying out the caning there.
In April 1941 Binz joined the Nazi Party. When Mandl was promoted to Oberaufseherin –
a chief senior overseer - in April 1942, Binz became head of the cell block.
In addition, Binz assisted Mandl in selecting women for human experiments.
In July 1943, Binz was unofficially promoted to Deputy Chief Overseeer. The promotion was
made official in February 1944. As a member of the command staff between 1943 and 1945,
she directed training and assigned duties to over 100 female guards at one time.
Binz trained some of the cruelest female guards in the Nazi concentration
camp system such as Irma Grese. She used indoctrination techniques
to brainwash the new recruits and turned them into ruthless psychopaths like her.
Also thanks to Dorothea Binz, Ravensbrück become a training center or “a school of violence “ for
about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
At Ravensbrück, Binz’ behavior towards female prisoners became increasingly sadistic. She
targeted the weakest and most fearful inmates and without any reason, she would beat, slap,
kick, shoot, whip, or stomp and abuse the women. The Holocaust survivors later testified that
she aroused such terror that when she appeared at roll call, “silence fell”.
She ordered the female inmates to stand at roll calls for hours and sometimes she either
set a dog on them or would kick the women to death without any sign of mercy. During
interrogations she slapped the prisoners and participated in almost all executions.
Binz also made sure that the prisoners suffered from hunger and cold, and that
the female SS guards that she supervised, treated the prisoners with similar brutality.
On one occasion, Binz observed a woman in a work detail who, she felt, was not working hard enough.
She walked over to the woman, knocked her down to the ground, and then took a pickaxe and proceeded
to chop the prisoner with it until the lifeless body was little more than a bloody lump. Once she
finished, Binz cleaned her shiny boots with the dry portion of the corpses’ skirt, then mounted
her bicycle and leisurely peddled her way back to Ravensbrück, all as if nothing had happened.
In 1944, when gas chambers were built in Ravensbrück,
she made numerous selections among the prisoners. Those who could no longer work, were murdered.
Binz was also a sexual deviant. In addition to forcing the female
prisoners to have sex with her, she had sexual relations with the male guards at Ravensbrück.
One of them, SS man Edmund Bräuning, an adjutant to the camp’s commandant Fritz Suhren, became her
boyfriend. Binz, who became sexually aroused when observing whippings at Ravensbrück, often walked
around the camp together with her boyfriend and the two were either seen laughing or engaged in
heavy petting while female prisoners were tortured in front of them. The couple lived together in a
house outside the camp until December 1944, when Bräuning was transferred to Buchenwald.
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.
When the camp was liberated by the Red Army on the 30th of April 1945,
there were about 3,500 sick women, men and children in the camp.
After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Binz when she was tried at
the first Ravensbrück trial which began on the 5th of December 1946.
Together with 15 other defendants, she was accused of joint responsibility for and participation in
the crimes committed at Ravensbrück. On the 3rd of February 1947 the British military
tribunal sentenced Binz, who admitted to having mistreated prisoners, to death by hanging. A
plea for clemency by her lawyer was rejected and the verdict was confirmed on the 31st of
March of the same year. To avoid the execution, desperate Binz even tried to commit suicide by
slashing her wrists, but the prisoner officials intervened before she could bleed to death.
Dorothea Binz was 27 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint
carried out the sentence on the 2nd of May 1947 at 9:01 AM in the Hamelin prison.
There were no tears shed for Dorothea Binz.
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