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. Thousands of other 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 Irene Haschke, another sadistic Nazi criminal.
Irene Haschke was born on 16th February 1921 in Friedeberg, then part of the German Empire.
She became a member of The League of German Girls which was the female section of Hitler
Youth. This official youth organization of the Nazi Party in Germany indoctrinated
young people with Nazi racial ideology and managed to turn a generation of German kids,
such as Irene Haschke, into Nazis. When they grew up, they were willing to commit
horrific crimes in the name of what they believed to be the Aryan master race.
Haschke worked in a textile factory until August 1944 when she joined the
SS. She was trained to become a guard and on February 28 1945 she arrived in Bergen Belsen.
Here, she supervised a wood Kommando working outside the camp and then she started to work in
the kitchen. She was accused of numerous crimes and was infamous for beating the poor inmates
without any reason. Any sight, word, or even silence could make her angry
and with her rubber truncheon she would beat everyone around.
When they fell, she started to kick them until they were unconscious.
Once she saw a starving female prisoner getting a few drops of soup. Haschke knocked the soup
over and pour it on the ground. Then she hit the poor inmate with her rubber truncheon.
On other occasion she saw a female inmate trying to take potato peelings.
Haschke picked her up and threw her into the water cistern. The poor prisoner was drowned.
The situation in Bergen-Belsen was so desperate that there was even a shortage of water.
The inmates could not drink water from the cisterns because it was dirty. Even though
the SS had access to drinking water from an iron water-pump behind the kitchen, the prisoners were
dying of thirst. When Haschke was asked why she did not tell anyone about it, she responded that
the water was only for the kitchen and added that 2 guards were protecting it from being
used by the prisoners. Rather than share this water source with the inmates, they let them die.
After Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Irene Haschke
was captured by the British forces together with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues
such as Irma Grese who used to kick the prisoners with her heavy boots and beat them with her woven
leather whip which was covered in cellophane so that human blood could be easily washed from it.
She was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17 of September 1945.
Haschke refused to confess to any of the charges brought against her
and when asked about her cruelty, she only admitted to having hit the
starving prisoners with a stick when she saw them round the cookhouse trying to steal.
The British Military tribunal found Irene Haschke guilty and sentenced her to 10 years imprisonment.
Unlike Irma Grese, she avoided the death sentence and, at the end, spent only 5
years in prison until she was released in December, 1951. Nothing more is known about
her later life but we can be sure that when Irene Haschke died, there were no tears shed for her.
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