The Horrors of Captured Female Guards Executions

[00:00:00]In the summer and autumn of 1945, [music] in courtrooms across Germany and Poland, women were being tried for war crimes. Not symbolically, not as a peripheral feature of broader trials.

[00:00:13]Women were sitting in docks, hearing charges read against them in the languages of countries they had helped destroy, [music] facing witnesses who had survived what they had done, and receiving death sentences. And then in the months and years that followed, those death sentences were carried out. Women [music] were walked to gallows. Women were hanged by the neck until dead.

[00:00:38]Women's bodies were buried in unmarked graves in prison courtyards so that no one would ever be able to erect a shrine.

[00:00:47]This was new, not because women had never committed crimes before, because the scale and the systematic nature of what these women had participated in was something the postwar legal system had never encountered and had no established framework for processing. The Neuremberg trials dealt with the architects of the Third Reich, the men at the top of the hierarchy. But the Holocaust was not carried out only at the top. It was carried out at every level of a vast machine, in every camp, in every guard tower, in every selection line, in every roll call yard where a woman in an SS uniform walked with a whip or a dog lead and decided what happened to the people in front of her. Approximately third and 700 women served as officer Herinan, female overseers in the Nazi concentration camp system. Out of the 55,000 total guards who served across the camp network, women constituted roughly 7%.

[00:01:48]7%.

[00:01:50]A small fraction. [music] And yet the testimony that survivor after survivor gave about female guards, the specific quality of terror they described, the particular forms of cruelty they documented, suggests that those 7% left marks on the memories of survivors that were disproportionate to their numbers and their formal [music] rank. Of the 3,700 women who served, approximately 60 stood trial for war crimes after the war ended. Of those 60, only 21 were executed. 21 women convicted by courts in Germany, Britain, and Poland hanged for what they did inside the wire. The other 3,679 went home. They changed their names or they didn't. They moved to new towns or they didn't. [music] They had children.

[00:02:43]They grew old. They died in their beds.

[00:02:46]The 21 who were executed were not the worst of the 3,700.

[00:02:51]They were the ones who were caught, identified, and tried before [music] courts that had assembled enough evidence to convict them. The worst were not necessarily caught. The ones with the longest records, the most victims, the most documented cruelty, might be working in a bakery in Bavaria right now, buried under a normal name, unreachable by the justice that reached the 21. And if you believe that the 21 who were brought to account deserve to be named, that their crimes and their last words and the specific manner of their deaths need to exist in the historical record with the same precision as the crimes themselves.

[00:03:31]Subscribe right now because that is what this video is. A complete account, a naming 21 women who served in the most murderous system in modern history and who faced at the end of it a court that said you did this and you are responsible and here is the consequence and the thousands who did not face that court. and why both facts, the accountability and the escape need to be held in the same hand when we talk about what the postwar reckoning with the Holocaust actually was. This is the story of the captured female guards and what happened to them. to understand why the executions looked the way they did.

[00:04:13]Why the behavior of these women at trial, their last words, their defiance, or their collapse is worth examining in forensic detail. You need to understand where they came from and what they did before anyone arrested them. The female guard system began in 1938 [music] when the Nazi concentration camp network was expanding faster than its supply of male guards could accommodate. The solution was to recruit women, specifically to oversee female prisoners in the women's sections of camps that were rapidly filling with Jewish women, political prisoners, Roma [music] women, Jehovah's Witnesses, women the regime had identified as enemies for every reason the regime identified enemies.

[00:05:00]Female guards were recruited primarily through word of mouth, through the League of German Girls, through advertisements, and through the simple economic reality that a guard's salary was better than most of the alternatives available to workingclass German women in the late 1930s.

[00:05:18]Ravensbrook, the only major allfemale concentration camp in the system, became the training center for all female guards. Every woman who would eventually serve at Avitz, at Stutoff, at Bergen Bellson passed through Ravensbrook first. What Ravensbrook [music] trained them to do was not complicated.

[00:05:39]It trained them to see the prisoners as a category, not as individuals. It trained them to administer physical punishment according to a prescribed system of offenses and penalties. It trained them to conduct roll calls to supervise labor details to maintain the documentary records that the camp bureaucracy required. And it trained them through immersion in an institutional culture that treated [music] prisoner suffering as a management problem rather than a human tragedy to become comfortable with violence in a way that the women's previous lives had given them no preparation for. The process of that desensitization is documented in survivor testimony from Ravensbrook.

[00:06:20]itself. Women who arrived at the camp as new recruits were observed by the prisoners. [music] The prisoners watched the new guards carefully, cataloging which ones seemed uncertain, which ones seemed curious, which one seemed to take to the role with an elacrity that went beyond what the job required. Some guards maintained a kind of minimal humanity. They followed the rules. They administered the prescribed punishments.

[00:06:47]They did not volunteer for the extra cruelties that were always available in a system where absolute power over other human beings was the basic condition.

[00:06:56]Others found something in the role that suited them. [music] Something the role made possible that they had not had access to before. The ability to hurt people without consequence.

[00:07:08]The ability to choose every minute of every day what happened to the people around them. the absolute certainty that no one would stop them, no one would intervene, no one would even record what they were doing in any form that would ever be seen outside the wire. Most female guards used their authority to maintain their position and perform their duties.

[00:07:34]A significant minority used it for something else. And it is that minority that the postwar courts were dealing with because it was that minority whose crimes were extreme enough and specific enough and documented enough by survivors to support criminal charges.

[00:07:52]The first major trial of female guards came in September 1945.

[00:07:57]It was not the most famous, it was the most immediate. The British army had liberated Bergen Bellson in April and [music] had arrested the entire surviving SS staff on site. By September 17th, 1945, barely 5 months after liberation, 45 men and women from the Bellson and Awitz camp systems were sitting in a courtroom at number 30 Lindenstrass in Neberg, Germany under British military jurisdiction.

[00:08:27]Among the women in the dock were three who would be sentenced to death. Irma Grees, Elizabeth Vulcanrath, Johanna Borman Graes was 22 years old at the time of her arrest. She had been born on October 7th, 1923 in Rean, a small village in the Meckllinburgg region of northern Germany. Her mother had committed suicide in 1936 [music] when was 12 years old. Her father was a dairy worker. She had left school at 14, worked on a farm, worked briefly in a hospital, and then at 18 been recruited as a guard at Ravensbrook. She was transferred to Avitz in March 1943.

[00:09:11]She was 19 years old. By the time she was 20, she had been promoted to the second highest rank available to a female SS guard. She was in charge of a section of the women's camp at Ashvitz Burkanau that held 30,000 women. She was 20 years old and she had absolute authority over 30,000 human beings whose lives the system had determined were expendable. What she did with that authority is documented in testimony from dozens of survivors who faced her in the Liberg courtroom and described it in detail. She wore heavy jack boots.

[00:09:47]She carried a pistol and a whip, a distinctive whip she had made herself from plated cellophane and wire. She kept two large German shepherds that she trained to attack on command and deliberately kept hungry to maintain their aggression. She used the dogs the way Johanna Borman used hers [music] as extensions of her will, releasing them on women who moved too slowly, [music] women who caught her attention, women she had decided in a given moment to punish for reasons that were entirely her own. She beat women with the whip.

[00:10:20]She shot women in what witnesses described as casual, arbitrary acts.

[00:10:26]women she selected from the population of 30,000 based on criteria that no one could predict or [music] protect against. She also attended the selections at the ramp standing beside Ysef Mangel or other SS doctors as transports arrived at Avitz Burkanau participating in the process of deciding which human beings lived for another day and which were sent directly from the train to the gas chamber. She was 20 years old. She was standing next to Ysef Mangel. She was helping point people toward death. When the British arrested her at Bergen Bellson in April 1945, she reportedly pulled out her silver revolver and attempted to shoot the arresting officer. She was disarmed and detained. At the Lunberg trial, she sat in the dock with a cold stare and did not apologize. When an English journalist had interviewed her in the immediate aftermath of her arrest [music] and asked her why she had committed the crime she was accused of, she had answered directly. [music] It was our duty, she said, to exterminate antisocial elements so that Germany's future would be assured. She said this without flinching. She believed it. When the death sentence was pronounced, Mre was the only defendant who remained visibly defiant. As the verdict was read, she appealed to Field Marshall Montgomery. Montgomery rejected the appeal on December 7th, 1945.

[00:11:54]6 days later, she was scheduled to die.

[00:11:57]The night before her execution, she and Johanna Borman and Elizabeth Vulcanrath sang Nazi songs in their cells until the early hours of the morning. Not prayers, not folk songs, not anything that might indicate regret or reflection or reckoning with what they had done. Nazi songs, the music of the movement that had given them their authority and their victims simultaneously. On December 13th, 1945, Albert Pierre point came to Hamilton prison. He hanged three women that morning individually at halfhour intervals. Elizabeth Vulcanrath at 9:34, Yerma Gre at 10:03, Johanna Borman at 10:38. The men [music] followed in pairs. 13 people died at Hamlin that day. When Pierre Point entered Grey's cell, she looked at him and said one word. Schnel quickly. [music] She was 22 years old and she had been the second highest ranking female SS guard at Awitz. And she went to the gallows asking for speed.

[00:13:04]Not mercy, not more time. Speed as if the execution were an inconvenience she wanted to get through efficiently.

[00:13:13]The drop was 7 ft 4 in calculated [music] to break the neck cleanly. She died at 10:03 in the morning. The youngest woman to be executed under British jurisdiction in the 20th century. Pierre Point described his encounter with Johanna Borman 35 minutes later in his autobiography.

[00:13:34]Borman was different from Gree in almost every respect. Where Gre had been young and defiant, Borman was 52 years old and had been diminished by something. She limped down the corridor toward him looking old and haggarded. She was 5t tall and weighed 101 lb. She trembled on the scale as she was weighed. And she said in German, "Ehabl, I have my feelings." Then she was walked to the gallows and her neck was [music] broken at 10:38.

[00:14:07]Three women, one morning, one building, one executioner. 7 months later on the other side of postwar Europe at a hill near Gdansk that the Poles called Biscupia Gorka Bishop's Hill another set of executions took place. A different country, a different court, a different method.

[00:14:31]The Stutth concentration camp located east of Danzig in what is now Poland had operated from 1939 and had processed approximately 110,000 prisoners, killing an estimated 65,000 through murder, starvation, disease, and systematic gassing. Its liberation by the Soviets in May 1945 had produced the immediate arrest of surviving staff. The first start of trial was conducted by the Polish special law court in Gdansk between April 25th and May 31st 1946.

[00:15:06]13 defendants, the camp commandant, male kappos and five female guards were sentenced to death. The five female guards sentenced to death at the Stutto trial were Jenny Wonder Bachmann, Ewa Parades, Wonderclaf, Elizabeth Becka, and Gerder Steinhoff. Each of them had participated in the systematic murder of Stutoff's prisoners. Each had helped select prisoners for the gas chambers.

[00:15:34]Each had beaten and brutalized women and children under their authority. And each of them in the weeks between sentencing and execution exhibited behavior that became one of the most commented upon aspects of the entire Stutoff proceeding. Jenny Wonder Bachmann was 24 years old. She had grown up in Hamburg.

[00:15:55][music] She was by the accounts of people who saw her during the trial physically striking. The prisoners at Stutoth had given her the nickname Dishnespens, a beautiful spectre. They called her beautiful and a spectre simultaneously because that is what she was. Something that appeared in the camp with the outward appearance of an ordinary attractive woman. and the capacity to select you for death with the same expression on her face that she wore when she arranged her hair and she did arrange her hair. During the stut trial, observers noted that Bachmann appeared not to be taking the proceedings seriously. She wore a different hairstyle each day. She giggled during the testimony. She flirted with the male guards who escorted her between the prison and the courtroom. She was treating her war crimes trial as a social occasion. When the verdict was announced, when the sentence of death was declared, Bachmann made a remark that has followed her name ever since.

[00:16:56]She said, "Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short." That is a complete sentence about a death sentence delivered by a woman [music] who had selected women and children for gas chambers and beaten prisoners to death, and who was now being told she would hang in front of thousands of people on a hill near Gdansk. and her response was a witism, a play on the word pleasure. Pleasure in life, pleasure in the sentence being short.

[00:17:24]She said it with apparent satisfaction, as if she had landed a good line at a dinner party rather than just being told when she would die. On July 4th, 1946, the condemned from the Stuto trial were taken to Biscupia Gorka Hill. A row of wooden gallows had been constructed in an open field. Four double gallows and one triple gallows in the center. 11 nooes in total. The execution method was the short drop, which means no trap door, no calculation of a precise fall designed to break the neck. The condemned were placed on the tailboards of military trucks with nooes around their necks. The trucks drove forward.

[00:18:07]The drop was short. Death came by strangulation, not by the instant neck breaking of the long drop. It was slower. It was visible. It was witnessed by thousands of people who had come to the hill to watch, including survivors of Sto who had been living with what these women had done to them since the camp was liberated. Historical photographs of the Biscupia Gawker executions have survived. They show the moment the trucks drove away and the condemned dropped. They show the bodies suspended, some still moving, some already still.

[00:18:44]Bachman's neck did not break cleanly.

[00:18:47]Photographs taken in the seconds after the drop show her still alive, her body twisting, her face distorted by the effort of struggling against the rope.

[00:18:57]She strangled. It took longer than it would have at the end of a properly calculated long drop. The thousands of people watching on the hill saw it happen. The 11 sentenced at the first staff trial all died on that hill on July 4th, 1946.

[00:19:14]They were taken down after death was confirmed and the executions were completed. It was the largest single public execution in postwar Poland. 5 months before the Stut executions in December 1946, a British military court had convened in Hamburg to try 16 defendants from Ravensbrook, the women's camp that had served as the training ground for the entire female guard system. Between December 1946 and February 1947, the court heard testimony from over a 100 witnesses, women from Poland, France, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and more, who had survived Ravensburg and had come to Hamburg to describe what they had experienced. [music] The Hamburg Ravensburg trial produced convictions on a scale that reflected the severity of what had happened at Ravensburg, a camp that had processed approximately 90,000 women and girls between 1939 and 1945.

[00:20:16]An estimated 30,000 of whom died there.

[00:20:19]Of the 16 defendants, 11 were sentenced to death. Five of those were women.

[00:20:26]Doraththa Bins, Greta Bipsel, Elizabeth Marshall, Carmon Mory, Vera Salvacort.

[00:20:34]Dorothia Bins was 27 years old at the time of her execution. She had been born in 1920 and had gone to work at Ravensbrook in 1939 at the age of 19 after working as a maid. She had risen through the female guard hierarchy to become Aubberov Seahharin, the head female overseer at Ravensbrook, [music] which meant that she was responsible for the conduct of every female guard in the camp. She trained the women who would go on to serve at Ashvitz, Stutoff, Bergen, Bellson, and every other camp in the system. Her influence over the character of the female guard corps was enormous and direct. The women she trained were the women who stood in other docks in other courtrooms in those years. She had shaped them. The prisoners at Ravensbrook described bins with a consistency that is its own kind of testimony. They said that when she appeared at the Appel Plats, the roll call ground, silence fell. Instant total silence. Not because they had been ordered to be silent because they knew that Bins's presence meant something was about to happen. She walked through the camp with a whip and a dog, and she used both with what survivors described as an enthusiasm that exceeded anything the job required. She beat women with the whip, and then when they fell, she placed her boot on them and moved her weight back and forth. She kicked women to death. She selected women for the gas chambers. She beat others past the prescribed limits of the punishment system, [music] delivering 5075 blows, where the official protocol called for a maximum of 25, continuing the beating past the point where her victims lost consciousness. The anthropologist Germaine Tillian, a French prisoner at Ravensbrook, described a specific incident involving Bins in the bunker, the camp's punishment block. After completing an excessive whipping, [music] Bins placed her boot on the bloodied body of her unconscious victim, who may already have been dead, and swayed back and forth, coating her footwear in blood. She appeared, by every account of those who witnessed it, to find satisfaction in the act, not duty, [music] not professional compliance with a systems requirements. satisfaction, personal satisfaction, [music] the way a person enjoys something that they have chosen to do for its own sake.

[00:23:03]At the Hamburg trial, Bin sat in the courtroom with a closed expression.

[00:23:08]Unlike Barkman at Stutoth, who had been openly contemptuous of the proceedings, Bin seemed tired. Withdrawn, she offered no apology. She said she had been following orders. The defense was dismissed. The evidence from over a 100 witnesses was too specific, too consistent, too precisely documented for the following orders argument to carry any weight against it. She was found guilty. [music] She was sentenced to death. When the sentence was confirmed in April 1947, she went back to her cell and slashed her wrists. Prison officials intervened before she could bleed to death. Her wounds were treated. She was kept alive for the purpose of being executed. On May 2nd, 1947, Dorothia Bins was walked to the gallows at Hamlin Prison. Albert Pierre Point was there again. He had been here before for the Bellson executions in December 1945.

[00:24:06]He was here again. She walked to the gallows in silence. According to those present, some accounts say she gave Pierre Point a small necklace as she approached the gallows. All accounts agree on her last words. She said, "I hope you will not think we are all evil people."

[00:24:26]Then the trap opened and she was dead at 9:01 in the morning. I hope you will not think we are all evil people. Consider what that sentence is doing. She was not asking for mercy. The time for that had passed. She was not apologizing. She was making a claim about representation, asking that her execution not be read as a statement about an entire category of people. We, all the we and the all are doing significant work in that sentence.

[00:24:56]She wanted to be distinguished from a broader group, to be understood as an exception, even as the gallows stood in front of her as a formal legal declaration that what she had done was among the worst things a human being can do to other human beings.

[00:25:12]She died at 9:01.

[00:25:15]That morning, Albert Pierre Point also hanged Greta Basel, [music] another Ravensburg guard convicted of war crimes, who had been responsible for sending sick and disabled prisoners to their deaths in a selection process she supervised with the specific aim of ensuring that only those capable of full labor were kept alive.

[00:25:36]Bubsel died at Hamlin on the same morning as Bins. Carmon my did not die at Hamlan.

[00:25:43]She died in her cell. Mory's story is unlike that of any other woman tried in the postwar proceedings because she was unlike any other woman in those proceedings.

[00:25:54]Born in Burn, Switzerland in 1906, the daughter of a physician with Filipino heritage, [music] she had been a journalist before the war, working in Berlin, contributing to the Manchester Guardian and other publications. In 1934, she had become a Gestapo agent, spying on German political exiles in Paris. She had been arrested by French intelligence in 1938 and sentenced to death by a French court in 1940 for espionage.

[00:26:24]That sentence had been commuted. She had been rearrested, [music] this time by the Germans, who no longer trusted her after the French had gotten hold of her, and sent to Ravensbrook as a prisoner in 1941.

[00:26:36]Inside Ravensbrook, still a prisoner herself, Carmon Mory managed to become a Kappo. A prisoner given authority over other prisoners by the SS administration. She ran Block 10, a barracks that housed the camp's tuberculosis patients and mentally ill prisoners, people who were among the most vulnerable in a population that was entirely without protection. What she did with that authority has been described by survivors in terms that the trial press could not agree on what to call her. One source called her sedo masochistic [music] and psychopathic.

[00:27:12]Another called her the black angel. The press during the trial called her the monster. A third rate Matahari and Belladona. The Hamburg court convicted her of involvement in approximately 60 murders and sentenced her to death. The night before her scheduled execution, April 9th, 1947, Carmon Mory slashed her wrists in her cell. She did not survive this time. She died before Pure Point could hang her.

[00:27:40]She had been sentenced to death by the French, the Germans, and the British in turn had survived the first two, and had prevented the third by taking the matter into her own hands. The one woman among the condemned who had spent her adult life as a spy, who had moved between countries and allegiances and identities with professional facility, managed to die on her own terms in a prison cell in Hamburg rather than on a gallows in Hamlan. Whether that constitutes an escape from justice or a different form of accountability [music] is a question the historical record does not answer. 2 months after the Ravensbrook executions at Hamlan in January 1948, the most senior female camp official to face a postwar court received her sentence and her death in Kowav.

[00:28:31]Maria Mandal was born in Minskurchin, Austria in 1912. Her father was a shoemaker. Her mother suffered from depression. She had worked as a domestic servant and at a post office before the Angelus, the annexation of Austria into the German Reich in 1938 opened the door to the SS system. She joined the camp staff at Likenberg in October 1938.

[00:28:57]She served at Ravensbrook and then in October 1942 she was appointed Schutzaf Lagafurin at Avitz II Burkanau which made her the highest ranking female SS official in the women's camp at the most murderous facility in the entire history of the Holocaust.

[00:29:16]She reported directly to Rudolph Hers the commonant of Avitz. The scope of what Maria Mandal was responsible for at Burkanau is almost impossible to hold in the mind as a single thing. She ran the women's camp from October 1942 to November 1944, which covers the period during which the annihilation of European jury reached its industrial peak. the deportations from Hungary in the spring and summer of 1944 during which approximately 437 000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Awitz over the course of roughly 8 weeks the largest deportation in the history of the Holocaust happened while Maria Mandal was the head of the Burkanau women's camp she signed the death lists based on the number of lists she signed historians have calculated that she was directly ly implicated in the deaths of approximately 500 000 women and children 500,000.

[00:30:20]The prisoners at Burkanau called her deb [music] bestie the beast. She created an orchestra. This is one of the details of Maria Mandal's time at Avitz Burkanau that seems at first like a bizarre footnote but is in fact a window into the specific psychology of what power meant inside the camp. The women's orchestra at Awitz Burkanau was Mandal's personal creation. She found a prisoner who was a professional musician and told her to form an orchestra from the prisoner population. The orchestra played when new transports arrived, their music filtering across the platform as the selections happened. As the men and women from the trains were divided into those who would live and those who would die. The orchestra played at executions. It played at public punishments. It played when the camp needed the atmosphere of organized civilization that music provides. Draped over scenes of systematic murder. Mandal had built this. She came to listen to the orchestra perform. She brought flowers to the conductor. The beast of Awitz brought flowers to the musicians she had created while signing the death lists that killed half a million people.

[00:31:34]One of the survivors from that orchestra was Fia Nelan whose memoir describing the experience was later adapted for stage and screen. The Awitz orchestra is documented in enough detail by enough survivors to be one of the better understood episodes of the camp's history. The woman who created it went to her death in Kkow in January 1948.

[00:31:58]Mandal had fled south as American forces advanced in 1945 heading toward Bavaria, possibly toward a hiding place, possibly simply away from the collapsing front. [music] She was arrested by American military police on August 10th, 1945 in Hof Bavaria. She was interrogated and described as highly intelligent, sophisticated, and cruel.

[00:32:22]She was extradited to Poland in November 1946.

[00:32:26]She was tried at the Awitz trial in Krakow which began on November 24th, 1947.

[00:32:33]On December 22nd, 1947, [music] the Polish Supreme National Tribunal sentenced her to death by hanging. The verdict noted specifically that she had mistreated women prisoners who had already been selected for death. Even the women she had already condemned to the gas chambers were not safe from her cruelty. That is what [music] the verdict said about her. She had found ways to hurt people who were already dying because of her decisions. She spent her final weeks in Montalupic prison in Krakow. The prison itself had been a Gestapo facility during the war, one of the most feared places in occupied Poland. She shared the condemned wing with another convicted female guard from Awitz, Theres Brandle.

[00:33:18]In the cell next to them was Stanisawa Rakuawa, a Polish woman who had been an Avitz prisoner under Mandal's administration, arrested after the war by the communist authorities [music] as an anti-communist activist.

[00:33:32]Rakuawa spoke enough German to [music] understand the conversations of the two condemned German women. She later described what happened in the days before the execution. Both Mandal and Bralle came to her cell door. Both of them asked her for forgiveness. Maria Mandal asked her prisoner for forgiveness. The woman who had signed 500,000 death lists asked the woman who had lived under her authority for absolution before dying. [music] Rakuawa's account does not tell us what she said in response. On January 24th, 1948, those sentenced to death at the Oshvitz trial were hanged at Montalupic prison at 7:32 in the morning.

[00:34:13]Mandal was the fifth to die [music] that day. Her last words were in Polish. Pska Ya Poland lives. She was 36 years old.

[00:34:24]Her body was given to the medical faculty of the Jagulonian University.

[00:34:28]After the anatomical use was complete, she was buried in an unmarked location in Rakoviki Cemetery in Kov. Her father did not request repatriation. Her name was not added to the family grave in Minskurchin.

[00:34:44]Pska, Poland lives.

[00:34:48]Those two words from the last breath of the woman who had helped try to exterminate Poland's Jewish population are the detail that most writers who have covered this case have stopped to consider because they are not what you expect. They are not a defiance of the court. They are not a denial of her crimes. They are not a tribute to the Nazi Germany that had employed her. They are in some reading an acknowledgement.

[00:35:14]Poland lives. The country she served the regime that tried to eliminate is still standing while she is about to die.

[00:35:22]Poland lives. It is a strange last sentence from a strange woman at the end of a very long drop.

[00:35:30]Now, I want to sit with the question that the entire body of these executions raises because it is a question that has not been settled and that the comfortable narrative of postwar justice [music] tends to prevent us from asking clearly.

[00:35:44]21 women were executed. 3,679 were not. The 21 who were executed were caught either because they were still in their camps when liberation happened or because survivors identified them specifically enough for arrest warrants to be issued or because they were high-profile enough to be on lists that investigators were already working from.

[00:36:07]The ones who escaped were the ones who left early, who fled effectively, who were not recognized, who were not in the right camp at the right moment to be swept up in the immediate arrests that followed liberation.

[00:36:21]Consider Doraththa Bins's role as Oberin at Ravensbrook, the trainer of the next generation.

[00:36:29]She shaped hundreds of women who went on to serve in camps across the Nazi system. She was convicted and hanged.

[00:36:37]But the women she trained, most of them went home. They carried what she had taught them [music] and they went home.

[00:36:43]They learned at Ravensbrook how to see prisoners as a category, how to administer violence without consequence, how to participate in a system of mass murder as a daily professional routine.

[00:36:57]They learned it from Dorothia Bins.

[00:37:00]And then they dispersed across postwar Germany and Austria and they became ordinary people again, or at least people who looked ordinary from the outside. Irma Greasy's sister testified on her behalf at the Lonerberg trial as a character witness. The sister went home after the testimony. Greasie went to the gallows. The family connection to what Greasie had done was not erased. It was absorbed.

[00:37:26]Filed somewhere in the family's collective [music] memory. In the memory of the small community in Meckllinburgg where Greece had grown up, in the broader community of German women who had worn that uniform and come home and were now trying to figure out what post-war life looked like when you had been part of that. Maria Mandal's father in Minskin did not request repatriation of her body. He did not add her name to the family grave. That choice is one piece of evidence about how families of the executed navigated the aftermath.

[00:38:00]There is another piece of evidence in the simple fact that the Austrian press barely mentioned her execution. The woman described as directly implicated in 500,000 deaths, was hanged in Krakow in January 1948, and the country she was born in responded with what amounted to a collective shrug.

[00:38:19]The survivors who testified at these trials chose to go into rooms where the people who had held power over them were sitting and to describe in precise detail what had been done to them. This required something that is hard to name, but that sits at the center of what the postwar trials accomplished. The survivors were not just providing evidence. They were insisting on a principle that what had happened to them was real. [music] that the people who had done it were identifiable and specific and responsible. That the system which had protected perpetrators from any consequence had been replaced at least in part at least for these specific people with a different system.

[00:39:01]A system that said what you did was wrong. You did it. You are responsible.

[00:39:06]Here is the consequence.

[00:39:08]Jenny Wonder Bachmann standing on the back of a truck on Bishop's Hill with a short dropped noose around her neck who two months earlier had been giggling during her own trial who had called pleasure short while receiving her death sentence.

[00:39:23]M agrees at 22 years old saying Schnel to Albert Pierre point and then dying at the end of a precisely calculated rope in Hamlin prison. Dorothia Bins handing a necklace to the executioner and saying I hope you will not think we are all evil people and then dying. Maria Mandal saying Poland lives and then dying. Johanna Borman saying I have my feelings and then dying. Carmon my cutting her wrists in a Hamburg prison cell the night before her scheduled execution and dying on her own terms rather than the courts.

[00:40:01]21 deaths carried out by courts that had assembled evidence, heard witnesses, deliberated, and pronounced sentences.

[00:40:10]Not summary executions, not mob justice, not the kind of violent revenge that the survivors of these camps had every human reason to want.

[00:40:22]legal processes, however imperfect, however inadequate to the scale of what had been done, however targeted only at the women who were visible rather than the women who had disappeared, however limited by jurisdiction and evidence and the practical constraints of postwar administration, legal processes, and then the 3679 who were never in those rooms. If you are troubled by that number, if the gap between who was held accountable and who was not makes you want to understand more about how that gap happened and what it meant for the survivors who had to live alongside people who had done these things and were never charged, subscribe to this channel because that is the question that the next 70 years of Holocaust historioggraphy has been wrestling with and it is the question that cases like that of Hermine Bronstein Orion and [music] bring into the sharpest focus. Brunsteiner had been a Ravensbrook guard, convicted by the Austrians in 1948, [music] released, immigrated to the United States, married, became an American citizen, was discovered by Simon Weisenthal in 1964, living in a house in Queens, New York, and was extradited to West Germany in 1973 to [music] face additional charges for crimes at Maj Danek. The neighbors in Queens said she was a quiet woman who tended her garden. They said they couldn't believe it. The neighbors always say they couldn't believe it because the thing about these women, the thing that survivor after survivor emphasized in testimony after testimony across a dozen courtrooms in three countries in those years [music] is that the cruelty did not announce itself.

[00:42:10]Doraththa Bins was described as beautiful. Irma Greece was described as beautiful. Barkman was the beautiful spectre. Beauty and cruelty occupied the same person simultaneously without any apparent tension. You could not look at them in civilian clothes and identify what they had been. That is what made them dangerous then and what made the postwar world uncomfortable afterward because it meant the woman in the house next door. The woman who tended her garden in Queens, the woman who worked quietly in a town in Bavaria and never talked about the war could have been any of them. The 21 women who were executed are the ones we can name. We can say where they died and when they died and what their last words were and who the executioner was and what the drop was calculated at and where their bodies are buried. The record exists. The names exist. The testimony that put them in those courts exists in archives in Hamburg and Leberg and Gdansk and Krakow. And it preserves what the survivors said in those rooms, the specific things they described, the specific acts they attributed to specific women on specific days in specific places.

[00:43:29]That testimony is not comfortable to read. It was not comfortable to give.

[00:43:35]The women who walked into those courtrooms and sat down across from their former overseers and said what they had seen and what had been done to them were doing something that required extraordinary courage and clarity and an absolute insistence on the principle that what happened to them was real and mattered and needed to be said. They are the reason those trials happened. They are the reason the 21 were convicted.

[00:44:03]They are the reason we have names to say. The 21 who died were not the worst of the 3,700.

[00:44:10]We cannot know who the worst were because most of them were never brought to any court and their crimes were never formally documented in any proceeding that produced a written record. The worst may have died peacefully in the 1970s or the 1980s or the 1990s, tended by nurses who had no idea, mourned by grandchildren who had no idea, buried under headstones that listed their dates and nothing else. The 21 who died are the ones we know. We should know them.

[00:44:42]We should say their names. We should read what the survivors said about them in those courtrooms. We should sit with the last words and the manner of death and the fact that the bodies were buried in unmarked graves so that no one would put flowers on them. We should hold all of that alongside the number 3,679 and understand that the postwar reckoning as significant as it was, as historically unprecedented as it was, as genuinely important as it was to the survivors who needed to see some form of consequence, was profoundly incomplete.

[00:45:17]21 women were held accountable.

[00:45:20]The rest of the accountability is still outstanding. It will always be outstanding. The statute of limitations on murder in Germany was extended and extended and eventually abolished specifically to keep the possibility of prosecution alive. But the last guards are dead now or dying. And the last trials against female guards happened decades ago. And the last of the incomplete accountability is running out of time. The survivors who gave testimony are mostly gone. What they said in those courtrooms in 1945 and 1946 and 1947 and 1948 is what we have left. We have names. We have testimony.

[00:46:02]We have the record of who stood in which dock and what they [music] said and what the court decided and what Albert Pierre Point calculated as the correct drop for each body [music] and what the last words were. If you believe that the testimony matters, if you believe that the names of the 21 who were executed and the names of the women who testified to put them there need to be in the historical record with the same precision as everything else. Subscribe.

[00:46:30]Share this video with someone who needs to understand that the Holocaust was carried out by thousands of specific people making specific choices. And leave a comment telling us which story we should tell next.

[00:46:44]The women who survived Awitz Burkanau and stood in that Lunberg courtroom in September 1945 and told the truth about what had been done to them told the world something about what it means to insist on accountability. When the forces of history would prefer you to stay silent and let the perpetrators go home quietly and tend their gardens, they did not stay silent. We should not either.