When British soldiers liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, most people assumed the monsters responsible would simply vanish into the chaos of a collapsing Germany. But many of the guards were actually still there, standing among thousands of corpses. And among them were women who would soon face something nobody had seen before.
Bergen-Belsen was opened in 1940 in Lower Saxony, near the town of Bergen, about 60 km north of Hanover. At first, it was a prisoner of war camp holding French and Belgian soldiers captured earlier in the war. The SS were not even running it yet. For the first few years, it stayed on the edge of the Nazi camp system.
It existed, it functioned, but it hadn’t fully become part of the machine. That changed in April 1943. The SS took control and turned it into what they called an Aufenthaltslager, or residence camp. Officially, it was meant to hold Jewish prisoners with foreign passports or dual citizenship who could possibly be exchanged for German nationals held overseas or traded for money.
It was a cold business deal hidden behind official language. The prisoners were treated like bargaining chips, not human beings. But the exchange program mostly failed, and Bergen-Belsen kept filling up anyway. By 1944, the Eastern Front was collapsing. Soviet forces were pushing west, and the Nazis started emptying camps in Poland like Auschwitz, Chełmno, and Sobibór.
Prisoners were forced onto death marches and packed into overcrowded trains heading west into Germany. Thousands were sent to Bergen-Belsen through late 1944 and early ’45. The camp could not handle the numbers. Food deliveries almost stopped. Water became scarce. The only water pump serving thousands of prisoners broke down and stayed broken for weeks.
By January ’45, around 22,000 people were inside the camp. By March, the number had exploded to more than 60,000. Barracks built for 200 people were crammed with a thousand. Typhus spread without anything stopping it. Corpses piled up faster than they could be buried. The people responsible for this did not accidentally wander into it.
Most histories of Bergen-Belsen focus on Josef Kramer, the camp commandant. He became the public face of the camp after liberation. But the daily control of female prisoners, who made up a huge part of the camp population, was mostly handled by women. SS women, known as Aufseherinnen. The word means female overseers.
The SS created the role in 1939 and expanded it heavily after 1942 as Germany started running out of manpower. Most of the women were trained at Ravensbrück concentration camp, about 90 km north of Berlin. Women arrived there as civilians and left a few weeks later in SS uniforms.
Training usually lasted 3 to 6 weeks and included prisoner control, punishment procedures, roll calls, and physical violence. It wasn’t classroom theory. They practiced on real prisoners. Most of these women were volunteers. The [snorts] SS advertised the jobs in factories and labor offices. The work paid around 185 Reichsmarks a month, >> >> which was considered decent money for working-class women at the time.
It also came with food, housing, and a uniform. >> >> For many poor young women with few opportunities, it looked attractive. By 1945, around 3,500 women had served in the SS camp system. >> >> Bergen-Belsen had around 45 female guards by the time the British arrived. Three of them would later become infamous for their cruelty.
One of them was Elizabeth Volkenrath. She was born on September 5th, 1919 in Schönau an der Katzbach, Silesia. She joined the SS Auxiliary in 1941 and trained at Ravensbrück before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she worked for 3 years. By the time she arrived at Bergen-Belsen in late 1944, she had become Oberaufseherin, the chief female guard.
She assigned work duties, enforced discipline among female guards, and managed the female prisoner blocks. Survivors describe her carrying out random beatings during roll calls, sometimes using her fists, and sometimes a stick. She was calm when doing it. She simply decided when someone would be beaten.
Another female guard was Irma Grese. She was born on October 7th, 1923 in Wrechen, Mecklenburg. Her mother died by suicide in 1936 when Irma was 13. She left school at 15 and worked several low-paying jobs, including in a dairy shop. In 1942, after failing to get a nursing position, she volunteered for the SS Auxiliary at 19.
She trained at Ravensbrück and arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1943. There she became a Rapportführerin, supervising around 30,000 female prisoners. Survivors described her carrying a braided leather whip, a pistol, and a trained dog. She beat prisoners for moving too slowly. She beat prisoners for looking at her.
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At least one survivor later testified that they watched her beat a woman to death. She also took part in the Selektionen, the process for choosing prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers. Even beyond her official duties, she arrived at Bergen-Belsen in February 1945 after evacuating west with the Auschwitz staff.
Johanna Bormann was another one of them, born on February 10th, 1893 in Blumenthal, Prussia. She was much older than the other two, already 52 when the camp was liberated. She’d served in the SS Auxiliary since 1938, making her one of the longest-serving female guards in the entire camp system. She worked at several camps, including Lichtenburg, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz, >> >> and Mittelbau-Dora before arriving at Bergen-Belsen.
She kept a dog and used it against prisoners. Multiple survivors later testified that she ordered the dog to attack inmates, sometimes killing them. Prisoners even gave her a nickname, >> >> Die Frau mit den Hunden, meaning the woman with the dogs. These women were not unusual inside the camp system.
They were trusted, promoted, and given responsibility. The only reason they became famous was that they were still standing inside Bergen-Belsen when the British arrived on April 15th, 1945. The British Army didn’t fight its way into Bergen-Belsen. The Germans actually asked them to take control of it. In early April 1945, with Allied forces closing in, German commanders contacted the British and proposed a local ceasefire.
Their main concern was typhus. The epidemic inside the camp had become so severe that they feared it would spread into nearby towns if the transfer turned chaotic. They wanted an organized handover. The British agreed, and on April 12th, the formal deal created a neutral zone around the camp. Three days later, on April 15th, soldiers from the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery entered Bergen-Belsen.
What they found barely looked like a functioning camp anymore. Around 60,000 prisoners were trapped inside, many starving, sick, or dying, surrounded by an estimated 10,000 unburied corpses. Soldiers later said they could smell the camp from more than a kilometer away before even seeing the fences. The water supply had already been cut off.
Survivors too weak to move were lying beside dead bodies inside the barracks. British medical teams immediately tried to save whoever they could. But many prisoners were already beyond help. Around 13,000 more died in the weeks after liberation despite receiving treatment. Richard Dimbleby broadcast a report from inside the camp on April 15th for the BBC.
The report was so horrifying that BBC editors at first refused to air it because they thought listeners would never believe it was real. Dimbleby threatened to resign if it was blocked. The report finally aired on April 19th. And people across Britain listened in stunned silence. Josef Kramer was arrested the same day the camp was liberated.
British soldiers found him sitting in his office. The female guards were arrested over the next several hours and days. Some were identified by survivors pointing them out to British troops. Others were found during searches of the campgrounds. Irma Grese was arrested on April 17th, two days after liberation.
Elizabeth Volkenrath was taken into custody the same day. Johanna Bormann was also arrested on April 17th. The British Army film and photographic unit recorded everything. Their footage showed guards being marched through the same camp paths where prisoners had once walked under their control. British forces also ordered SS personnel, both male and female, to carry the unburied corpses to mass graves by hand.
Within weeks, footage of guards handling the bodies they’d allowed to pile up was shown in cinemas across Britain and America. Audiences watched in complete silence. Even before the cameras stopped rolling, the British were already deciding what would happen to the 45 captured SS personnel. The Belsen trial, officially called the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others, began on September 17th, 1945 at the courthouse in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, around 70 km from Bergen-Belsen itself.
This was only 5 months after the camp was liberated. The famous Nuremberg trials against top Nazi leaders would not even begin until November 1945. Lüneburg happened first. The trial was held under a royal warrant issued by the British Crown on June 14th, 1945. It allowed British military courts to prosecute violations of the laws of war.
The system was designed to make prosecution easier. Prosecutors didn’t have to prove the defendants were part of some giant conspiracy or personally involved in Nazi policy decisions. They only needed evidence that the accused had committed or taken part in crimes that broke the laws of war. And the survivors could identify exactly who had done what.
Out of the 45 defendants in the courtroom, 16 were women. The main judge was Major-General H. M. L. Berney Ficklin. While the prosecution was led by Colonel T. M. Backhouse. Every defendant was given a defense lawyer by the British military. Throughout the trial, the defense mainly relied on two arguments.
First, they claimed the guards were simply following orders inside a military system and were not personally responsible for the camp conditions. Second, they argued that the starvation, disease, and overcrowding at Bergen-Belsen were caused by Allied bombing and wartime shortages, not by deliberate Nazi policy. Josef Kramer defended himself this way as well.
He claimed he had repeatedly asked Berlin for more food and medicine, but received no help. The prosecution called 89 witnesses. Survivors from Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and other camps testified for days. Their stories were detailed. They named guards, described specific incidents, gave dates when possible, explained where events happened inside the camps, and described what happened to victims afterwards.
Against that much direct testimony, it became very difficult for the defense to argue that the suffering was simply caused by war conditions. Witnesses described Elisabeth Volkenrath beating prisoners across the face and body during roll calls for no reason at all. The testimony against Irma Grese was long and consistent.
Witnesses described her cruelty as something constant, not a single moment of losing control. For Johanna Bormann, multiple survivors identified her as the guard who ordered her dog to attack prisoners. Bormann admitted she owned and used the dog, but claimed she never meant to seriously hurt anyone. Closing arguments were heard in mid-November 1945.
Then on November 17th, after 7 weeks of testimony and evidence, the court delivered its verdicts. Out of the 45 defendants, 30 [snorts] were found guilty. 15 were acquitted. The acquittals angered many survivors and journalists who believed anyone involved in running Bergen-Belsen was already part of a criminal system.
11 defendants were sentenced to death. Three of them were women, including Elisabeth Volkenrath, Irma Grese, and Johanna Bormann. Some other female guards, including Hertha Ehlert, who had served at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and faced major accusations of abuse and beatings, received a life sentence, although that would be later reduced.
Ilse Lothe received 10 years in prison. Anna Hempel received 15 years. Other female guards received sentences ranging from 1 to 10 years, while some were completely acquitted. The death sentences against the three women quickly sparked public debate. The argument was not really about whether they were guilty.
It was about whether Britain would actually execute women. In 1945, executions of women by the state were already rare in Britain. And executing female war criminals had almost no modern example. Some people in Parliament and in legal circles argued that the sentences should be reduced. The debate centered mostly on gender.
British military authorities rejected the requests for mercy without much delay. The Judge Advocate General’s office reviewed the sentences in early December 1945 and confirmed them. The British government made it clear that being women would not save them. The crimes had been proven and the sentences would stand.
The execution date was set for December 13th, 1945 and would take place at Hameln prison, known in English as Hamelin. The same town tied to the Pied Piper legend. It sat along the Weser River in Lower Saxony, about 50 km south of Hanover. After the war, the British military chose it as the main prison for executing convicted war criminals in their occupation zone.
Between 1945 and 1948, around 200 people were executed there. It wasn’t treated like a public event. It was simply a working prison carrying out sentences. The man chosen to perform the executions was Albert Pierrepoint. Pierrepoint was 35 years old in December 1945. He’d been Britain’s official executioner since the late 1930s.
Following both his father, Henry Pierrepoint, and his uncle Tom Pierrepoint into the same job. When he wasn’t carrying out executions, he ran a pub in Lancashire called Help the Poor Struggler. Before the war, he had already executed hundreds of people in Britain and Ireland. And after the war, he would execute hundreds more.
By his own estimate, he carried out between 430 and 450 executions during his career, including around 200 war criminals in Germany and Austria after World War II. Pierrepoint used the long drop method. It was carefully calculated based on the prisoner’s body weight and build, so the neck would break instantly instead of causing a slow strangulation.
He treated the calculations seriously and paid close attention to every detail. In his view, speed and precision were the only form of dignity left at that stage. He arrived at Hameln on December 12th, 1945. 13 people were scheduled to die the next morning. 11 came from the Belsen trial, while two others had been convicted in a separate case connected to the Neuengamme concentration camp.
It became the largest mass execution carried out by British military authorities in the modern era. The gallows at Hameln was a permanent structure inside the prison. It had a trapdoor, a wooden beam, and a lever. The rope was the standard British execution rope made from white hemp with a brass eyelet attached.
Pierrepoint had already received the prisoners’ measurements before arriving and completed all the calculations ahead of time. The executions began on the morning of December 13th. Josef Kramer went first. Since receiving his sentence, he’d been held inside Hameln prison, refusing visits from a Lutheran chaplain while writing letters to his wife and lawyer.
He continued claiming he’d only done his duty. He walked to the gallows without help. Albert Pierrepoint executed him at 9:00 a.m. The male prisoners followed one after another. Each execution took less than two minutes from the moment the condemned man entered the room. Then came the women. Johanna Bormann was the first of the three.
She was 52 years old and had spent seven years inside the SS camp system. The night before, she received the Catholic last rites. Witnesses later described her as frightened but calm. Nothing she said was officially recorded. Pierrepoint calculated her drop at 6 ft 11 in because of her small build. She died at around 10:38 a.m.
Elizabeth Volkenrath was next. She was 26 years old. During the trial and during her weeks in prison, she had stayed controlled and emotionless. Witnesses said she walked to the gallows without assistance. She did not say anything. Her drop was measured at 7 ft 2 in. She died at around She died at around 10:52 a.m.
Irma Grese was the last. She was only 22 years old making her the youngest person executed for war crimes by British military authorities after World War II. She’d been 21 when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. Years later in his 1974 memoir, Executioner Pierrepoint, Albert Pierrepoint described Grese walking into the execution room without hesitation.
She looked at the rope. Then she looked at Pierrepoint and said one word, “Schnell.” Which meant quickly. Nobody present ever explained whether it sounded like a request, an order, or simply a reflex. Pierrepoint didn’t hesitate. He placed the white hood over her head, tightened the noose, stepped back, and pulled the lever.
Her drop had been calculated at 7 ft 4 in. She died at around She died at around 11:05 a.m. All 13 executions were finished before noon. Afterward, prison doctors examined the bodies and officially declared them dead. The prisoners were buried inside the grounds of Hameln prison in unmarked graves alongside other executed war criminals from the following years.
Later prison renovations covered the graves with concrete. No headstones were added and the exact burial spots are not publicly marked. For the survivors of Bergen-Belsen, December 13th brought a sense of justice but not a complete one. Three of the people responsible for the suffering inside the camp were dead, but many others were not.
Some defendants received prison sentences instead of execution. Several were acquitted completely, >> >> and many SS staff members had escaped before the British arrived in April 1945. Most of the women sentenced at Luneburg to less than 15 years were out of prison by the mid-1950s. This happened during a wider period in West Germany when former Nazis were increasingly reintegrated into society under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government.
This was not limited to Bergen-Belsen guards. Across many Nazi war crimes cases, sentences handed down in 1945 and 1946 were gradually reduced during the late 1940s and 50s. Between 1950 and 1955, the Allied High Commission granted clemency to hundreds of convicted war criminals. The political reason was clear.
West Germany was becoming an important NATO ally against the Soviet Union, and continuing large-scale prosecutions of former Nazis was increasingly seen as politically inconvenient. For survivors, watching this happen was deeply painful. Many had testified at the Luneburg trial at enormous emotional cost. >> >> They had relived traumatic memories in public courtrooms, faced defense lawyers, and stood only meters away from the people they accused.
They believed they were helping create a permanent record of meaningful punishment. Then many of those punishments slowly disappeared. Ada Bimko Rosensoft, then known as Khadassa Bimko, had survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and testified at the Luneburg trial. She identified guards and described crimes in precise detail.
After liberation, she stayed in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, where tens of thousands of Jewish survivors waited for somewhere to rebuild their lives. Over the following decades, she became one of the strongest voices documenting what had happened and arguing that post-war justice had never truly been enough.
