April 15th, 1945. 9:00 in the morning. A British soldier named Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Gonin, among the very first Allied troops to enter Bergen-Belsen. He later wrote in his diary, and these are his actual words, that the site was beyond imagination. Gonin had fought across North Africa and Europe.
He had seen men die in every way war allows, but nothing, nothing had prepared him for what was behind those gates. 40,000 living prisoners, 13,000 unburied corpses. Bodies piled like firewood in the open air. And the smell, survivors and liberating soldiers both described it as something that never fully left them.
Something that followed them home and into their dreams for the rest of their lives. But here is the detail that history books rarely linger on. Somewhere inside that horror, in a clean hospital bed in the Wehrmacht barracks, a woman was resting comfortably. Not a prisoner, a guard. Her name was Anna Hampel. She was there recovering from typhus, the same disease that was killing the prisoners she had been beating with a riding whip just 1 week earlier.
Fate, it turned out, had a very dark sense of irony. And in exactly 7 days, she would be arrested, tried, and forced to answer for every single thing she had done inside that camp. This is her story, and it is not a comfortable one. You’re watching Nazi History, the channel that documents the full unfiltered truth of the Third Reich. The perpetrators, the victims, the trials, the justice, and the injustice.
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June 22nd, 1900. A baby girl named Anna is born in Grünberg, a quiet provincial town in what was then the German Empire, known primarily for its textile industry and its green Silesian hills. Nothing about Anna Hemple’s early life would suggest what she would become. She grew up, married, had a son.
By the time Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, she was a working-class woman in her early 30s, putting in long hours at a textile factory, living the kind of life that rarely makes it into history books. And then in May 1944, she made a decision that would define her forever. She joined the SS voluntarily, willingly, with full knowledge of what the SS was and what it did.
By May 1944, the Holocaust was not a secret inside Germany. The deportations, the camps, the mass murders, these were things that ordinary Germans knew about in varying degrees of detail. The extermination of Jewish people and other groups was an open regime policy. The SS was its primary instrument. And Anna Hemple, a 43-year-old factory worker from a textile town, decided she wanted in.
Here is where the historical record becomes particularly chilling. Within weeks of joining, she was sent to Ravensbrück, 90 km north of Berlin, for a 3-week training course. Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp built exclusively for women. Opened in May 1939, it held over 132,000 women from across occupied Europe.
Polish women, Soviet women, Jewish women, Romani women, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political resisters, and others labeled as enemies of the Reich. Of those 132,000 women, more than 92,000 died inside its fences. But Ravensbrück had a second function that made it uniquely sinister. It was a factory for guards.
Approximately 3,500 women were trained at Ravensbrück to become concentration camp supervisors, Aufseherin in German. The curriculum was not complicated. Prisoners existed to work. The guards’ job was to prevent rest, punish resistance, and extract maximum labor from each prisoner before their body failed completely. The training institutionalized cruelty.
It rewarded harshness. It created women who understood that empathy inside a camp was not just discouraged, it was grounds for punishment. Anna Hempel graduated from that system and was transferred to Grünberg, a subcamp of the vast There, Jewish women and other prisoners worked inside the same kind of textile factories Hempel had once worked in as a free woman, same machinery, same fabric, same labor.
The only difference was that these women were slaves and Anna Hempel stood over them. By January 1945, the Nazi empire was crumbling at its edges. Soviet forces under Marshal Georgy Zhukov had crossed the Vistula River and were pushing west with terrifying momentum. Allied bombers were hitting German industrial targets with increasing precision and frequency.
The Nazi regime, facing total military collapse, made a decision that revealed, perhaps more than any other, the true nature of its worldview. Rather than surrender their slave laborers to liberation, they marched them deeper into Germany. On January 28th, 1945, in the middle of one of the coldest winters Central Europe had seen in years, the female prisoners of Grünberg were forced onto the road.
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They had no shoes. Their feet were bound in rags. Each woman was given one thin blanket, one tin bowl, one spoon, and a single portion of bread. Then they walked in temperatures that dropped below freezing at night, through snow and wind, with no shelter and almost no food. The historical record shows that many died on that march.
Others were shot by guards when they could no longer keep pace. The exact death toll was never established because the Nazis considered these women too disposable to document properly. Part of the journey was completed in unheated freight cars, prisoners locked inside freezing metal containers for days, unable to stand, unable to lie down, dying in the dark beside strangers.
After more than 3 weeks, on February 17th, 1945, Anna Hempel arrived at Bergen-Belsen with the surviving remnants of the Grünberg prisoner column. What she found there should have shocked anyone with a conscience. Bergen-Belsen was, by February 1945, in a state of total catastrophic collapse. The camp had originally been established in 1943 as a holding camp, designed for a prisoner population of roughly 10,000.
By early 1945, it held more than 60,000. Disease was rampant. Typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery. The water supply had largely failed. Food was almost nonexistent. Between January and April 1945, transports were arriving from other camps across the collapsing Reich. Historical records from the Belsen trial document that roughly 1/3 of prisoners in each arriving transport were dead on arrival.
Nearly 80% of survivors were too weak to walk from the station. One transport carrying one 900 prisoners arrived with more than 500 corpses aboard. In March 1945, the month before liberation, between 250 and 300 people died inside Bergen-Belsen every single day. Anna Hempel looked at all of this and got to work. At Bergen-Belsen, Hempel was first assigned to the bathhouse, a facility designed to disinfect 400 prisoners per day using steam treatments to kill lice and prevent typhus spread.
The process required prisoners to strip, be processed, and then wait outside, naked, wet, in winter temperatures, while their clothing went through the steam cycle, which took considerably longer. Prisoners died during that wait. They froze. They collapsed from illness and exposure. The bathhouse was not a mercy.
It was another mechanism of suffering. After her bathhouse assignment, Hempel was moved to kitchen number two in the men’s compound. And this is where her reputation was truly built. Kitchen number two served 17,000 rations daily. Each ration consisted of 1 L of thin soup at midday and 3/4 of a liter at night. No bread, nothing else.
For men who were starving, literally starving, their bodies consuming themselves for fuel, this was all that stood between them and death. Hempel supervised 34 women and 18 men who worked 14 to 16 consecutive hours every day preparing this food. When she judged that any of them was slowing down, that exhaustion or illness was affecting their pace, she did not warn them.
She did not report them through any official process. She beat them. She carried a riding whip, a personal one, not a standard issue tool. She also kept a rubber truncheon. These were her chosen instruments. Survivor testimony from the Belsen trial, testimony given under oath, corroborated by multiple witnesses, describes Hempel beating young female prisoners who were caught stealing turnips.
Not loaves of bread, not hoarded supplies, turnips. Raw, bitter, half-rotten turnips, the kind of thing that in any other context would be thrown away. These girls, already emaciated, already sick, already dying by degrees, grabbed turnips to survive. Hempel beat them with her riding whip. One male prisoner who collapsed on the ground, too sick and too hungry to remain upright, was beaten with a stick when she discovered he had taken food from the kitchen.
He was already in the late stages of starvation. The beating, witnesses testified, was severe. Her reasoning, later revealed at trial, was almost more disturbing than the act itself. She did not beat prisoners with her hands, she explained, because she knew they had typhus and she did not want to contract it herself.
She used a stick or a whip or a truncheon to protect her own health. She wasn’t restraining her cruelty. She was being efficient about it. When she felt that fellow guards around her were not sufficiently brutal, that they were allowing prisoners too much ease, she walked directly to camp commandant Josef Kramer and formally complained.
She advocated for more punishment. She pushed for more violence. Josef Kramer, the man known to British liberating forces as the Beast of Belsen, later convicted and executed for war crimes, was the person Hempel reported to when she wanted more cruelty inflicted. And then came the moment that defines her legacy in the historical record more than anything else.
Another female guard, Herta Ehlert, watched Hempel work. Ehlert was no innocent woman. She would later be convicted of war crimes at the same Belsen trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But watching Anna Hempel beat prisoners, Ehlert was so disturbed by what she saw that she went to Commandant Kramer and complained about Hempel.
A convicted Nazi war criminal reported Anna Hempel’s behavior to the camp commandant as being beyond acceptable limits. That is the documented historical record. On April 8th, 1945, 7 days before British forces arrived, Anna Hempel collapsed with typhus. She was transferred to the hospital in the Wehrmacht barracks area of the camp.
The disease she had so carefully tried to avoid by never touching prisoners with her bare hands had found her anyway. She was in that hospital bed on April 15th when Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Gonin and the men of the British 11th Armoured Division walked through Bergen-Belsen’s gates. She was arrested. The Belsen trial opened on September 17th, 1945 in a converted gymnasium in Luneburg, Germany.
45 former SS personnel sat in the dock. It was one of the first war crimes trials of the post-war period and one of the most significant, setting legal precedents that would echo through international law for decades. Anna Hempel sat before the tribunal and denied nearly all of it. She admitted to one beating, one prisoner, one stick. And she offered her now infamous hygienic explanation.
She couldn’t touch them with her hands because of typhus risk. She struck them with objects instead. She presented this not as an admission of guilt, but as evidence of her reasonableness. The tribunal was unmoved. Multiple witnesses, including former prisoners and fellow guards, testified against her. The picture they painted was consistent, detailed, and damning.
The British military tribunal found Anna Hempel guilty of war crimes. She was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. She served six. Released in April 1951, she walked back into German civilian society. No subsequent criminal proceedings, no public accounting, no documented record of where she went or how she lived or whether she ever faced what she had done in any private interior way.
History simply loses her, swallowed back into the ordinary world she had once left voluntarily to join the SS. Anna Hempel died in obscurity, and nobody looked for her. Here is what the historical record forces us to sit with. Anna Hempel was not a fanatic in the mold of the regime’s ideological architects.
She was not Himmler. She was not Eichmann. She was a middle-aged factory worker who chose at 43 years old, with full awareness of what the SS was, to join it. She completed her training. She showed up every day. She brought her own riding whip. The Belsen trial and its documentation, archived by the British National Archives and extensively studied by Holocaust historians, including Nikolaus Wachsmann, whose landmark 2015 history of the Nazi concentration camp system drew on thousands of pages of trial testimony, make clear that
Bergen-Belsen’s horrors were not the work of a few uniquely evil individuals. They were the work of ordinary people. People who made choices every day. That is the lesson of Anna Hempel. Not that monsters exist, but that ordinary people, given power, given permission, given a uniform and a riding whip, can become them.
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