We often think of Nazi war criminals as men in black SS uniforms — but women played a darker role than most people realize. Hundreds of female guards and auxiliaries served in concentration camps like Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Majdanek, and many were as brutal as their male counterparts.
When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, the world wanted justice — and some of these women paid with their lives.
🩸 Who Were These Women?
These weren’t just clerks or cooks. Female guards, known as Aufseherinnen, were trained to enforce order in the women’s sections of concentration camps. Many took part in:
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Beatings and killings of prisoners
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Selections for the gas chambers
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Psychological and physical torture
Notorious names like Irma Grese — dubbed “The Beautiful Beast” — and Maria Mandel, the “Beast of Auschwitz,” became symbols of how cruelty knew no gender in Hitler’s empire.
⚖️ Trials and Sentences: Justice Catches Up
After the war, female SS guards were rounded up, interrogated, and put on trial — especially during the British-led Bergen-Belsen trials and the Auschwitz trials in Poland.
Some tried to claim they were “just following orders.” Others denied involvement entirely. But survivors testified, and the evidence was overwhelming.
The Outcome?
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Irma Grese, just 22 years old, was hanged in 1945 alongside two other women: Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath.
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Maria Mandel was executed by hanging in Poland in 1948.
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Dozens of others received long prison sentences, and some disappeared or went underground.
These executions shocked the public. Newspapers called them the "first women to hang for war crimes."
🪦 How Were They Executed?
In most Western trials, condemned female Nazi guards were hanged, often alongside their male counterparts.
In Britain’s postwar hangings, Albert Pierrepoint, the country’s most famous executioner, carried out the sentences. He described the women as cold, defiant, and unrepentant in their final moments.
In Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and the Soviet Union, executions were often swift and public. Some were carried out in former camps — in front of survivors and press — as a symbolic act of justice.
😱 Were They Victims or Monsters?
Some historians argue that not all women knew the full extent of their roles, and were swept up in Nazi indoctrination. But for many, the evidence shows active participation in mass murder.
They weren’t bystanders. They gave orders, fired guns, and sometimes enjoyed the violence.
🕯️ The Forgotten Executions
We remember the Nuremberg Trials. We remember the top Nazi leaders. But the fate of female guards is often left out of the story.
The truth is, justice didn’t care about gender when it came to genocide. And for the women who served the Reich with cruelty, the gallows awaited — just like it did for the men.