On April 15, 1945 the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen – one of
the worst Nazi concentration camps which epitomized the true bestiality and horrors
of the Nazi regime and its death camps. The British forces found 13,000 unburied death bodies
and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved.
Other thousands of inmates died of various diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis
during the months following the camp’s liberation. The British forces managed to capture male and
female Nazi guards responsible for these horrors and forced them to help bury the dead bodies in
mass graves. One of these SS guards was Elisabeth Volkenrath, one of the most sadistic Nazi guards.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was born on 5th September 1919.
She was a poor student growing up and before the war Volkenrath worked in a hairdressing saloon.
Her infamous career in concentration camps began in 1941 when she became a guard at Ravensbrück
concentration camp. She supervised the women working outside the camp and had do take care
that these female prisoners did not escape and did their work. She was also taught to keep
prisoners in order by beating and ill-treating them until they were frightened to death.
In March 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
According to her testimony, at first, she worked in a sort of tailoring shop where
the prisoners mended the uniforms of their fellow inmates. Majority of the inmates
employed in this workshop were elderly women and Volkenrath used to strike them with her fists.
Then Volkenrath worked in a parcel store where she supervised a group of 25 prisoners who had to open
and distribute all the parcels that came either from Red Cross or relatives of the prisoners.
At Auschwitz, Elisabeth Volkenrath was known for her exceptional brutality
due to which she became the most hated woman in the camp.
She also became a head warden and was in charge of all the SS women.
She also used to make selections from prisoners as they returned to camp from outside work.
Then she helped to load them onto lorries which took them to the gas chambers.
Picking out victims for gas chambers was one of her favorite activities and on one occasion
out of 1,400 prisoners only 300 were left alive after such selection had been made.
Another of her specialties was beating women prisoners.
On one occasion Volkenrath ordered a female prisoner to undress
and beat her so brutally that the poor victim was in hospital for 3 weeks.
One inmate testified that on 80 occasions Volkenrath beat the prisoners, often with a
rubber truncheon, until they were unconscious and many of them were carried away dead.
Once when a female prisoner was accused of wearing a stolen ring and a locket,
Volkenrath and her colleagues striped the woman naked and beat her with a rubber truncheon.
Then, they closed the inmate in a cellar with food and water for only 3 days.
The inmate managed to survive a stay in the cellar and brutal interrogations for 3 weeks
thanks to her sister who smuggled her the food and water. After surviving this horrible torture, the
inmate was sent to clean the latrines when weak and exhausted, she contracted typhus and died.
On another occasion Volkenrath threw an old woman, who came to ask for work,
down the stairs. The woman died immediately. Volkenrath even took away food and water from
the starving prisoners. Her explanation was that they had too much of it.
During the roll calls, she made prisoners hold their hands above their heads.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was also present when one Nazi female camp guard named Buchhalter
was punished with twenty-five lashes with a whip. This punishment was ordered by the
head of the SS Heinrich Himmler himself because Buchhalter had sent letters written by prisoners
to their relatives in an unofficial way and had a love affair with a male
prisoner. Those who had to be administer this punishment were other female guards.
In January 1945, as the end of the war was approaching, Volkenrath moved from
Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she came on February 5, 1945.
When one female inmate tried to escape and was caught, both Elisabeth Volkenrath and
Josef Kramer, the camp’s commandant, started to hit the poor woman with a
stick on her head, face and all over her body. When she saw a sick girl taking some vegetables,
Volkenrath made her kneel down and hold the vegetables above her head for 4 hours. After
4 hours, when this girl could no longer hold her arms up, Volkenrath beat her on the head,
back and legs with her rubber truncheon. The girl was unconscious
and because nobody was allowed to assist her, she was left laying there until the evening.
Up until her very last moment in camp, she took pleasure in abusing the prisoners. One day
after the British forces arrived to liberate the camp, she was witnessed beating the prisoner
with her fist so violently that innocent person collapsed and did not move again.
After Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Elisabeth Volkenrath was captured
by the British forces together with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues such as Johanna Bormann
who used to set dogs on the prisoners and Josef Kramer, the last commandant of Bergen Belsen.
She was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17 of September 1945.
At her trial she refused to confess to any of the charges brought against her
claiming only to have slapped a few prisoners with her hand,
never with a rubber truncheon. However, her lies did not help her to escape justice.
The British Military tribunal found Elisabeth Volkenrath guilty and sentenced her to death by
hanging. She was 26 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the
sentence on the 13 of December,1945. There were no tears shed for Elisabeth Volkenrath
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