Concentration Camp Guards (Aufseherinnen)

Female SS guards at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945

Among the women: Hildegard Kanbach (far left), Irene Haschke (centre), Elisabeth Volkenrath (Head Wardress, partially hidden), and Herta Bothe (far right). Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945.

British Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 4065.

Between 1939 and 1945, roughly 3,500 to 4,000 women served as guards in the Nazi concentration camps. No one honored them. They were tried. The Belsen Trial at Lüneburg, the Auschwitz Trial at Kraków, the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg, the Düsseldorf Majdanek Trial, and the West German courts of the decades that followed put their crimes on the record. This page documents the perpetrators by name and by sentence, because an honest account of women in the war has to hold the ones who ran the camps alongside the ones who died in them.

Irma Ilse Ida Grese

1923 to 1945

SS-Aufseherin, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen.

Grese became a guard at Ravensbrück in 1942 and was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1943, where she rose to a senior position over a section of the women's camp and participated in selections for the gas chambers. Transferred to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, she served as Arbeitsdienstführerin until the camp's liberation. She was tried in the Belsen Trial at Lüneburg, convicted of war crimes, and hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint on 13 December 1945, at Hamelin Prison.

Maria Mandl

1912 to 1948

SS-Lagerführerin, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz II-Birkenau women's camp.

An Austrian, Mandl began as an Aufseherin at Lichtenburg in 1938 and was transferred to Ravensbrück in 1939, where she was promoted to Oberaufseherin in April 1942. From October 1942 she served as Lagerführerin of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the senior female position in the SS camp hierarchy. She personally signed selection lists sending tens of thousands of women and children to the gas chambers. She was tried at the Auschwitz Trial in Kraków in December 1947, convicted of crimes against humanity, and hanged on 24 January 1948.

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan

1919 to 1999

SS-Aufseherin, Ravensbrück and Majdanek.

Born in Vienna, Braunsteiner became a guard at Ravensbrück in 1939 and was transferred to Majdanek in October 1942, where she served until January 1944 and was known to prisoners as "the Mare" for stomping victims to death. She emigrated to the United States after the war and acquired US citizenship through marriage; she was denaturalized and extradited to West Germany in 1973, the first Nazi war criminal extradited from the United States. The Düsseldorf Majdanek Trial convicted her and sentenced her to life imprisonment on 30 April 1981. She was released on health grounds in 1996 and died in Bochum in 1999.

Ilse Koch

1906 to 1967

Oberaufseherin, Buchenwald.

Koch joined the Nazi party in 1932 and worked as a secretary at Sachsenhausen before her marriage to Karl Otto Koch, later Kommandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek. At Buchenwald she held the title Oberaufseherin and prisoners testified to her brutality. After the war she was tried by an American military tribunal at Dachau in 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment, later reduced by General Lucius Clay. Following public outcry she was retried in a West German court, and on 15 January 1951, she was sentenced again to life imprisonment for incitement to murder. She killed herself in Aichach prison on 1 September 1967.

Researched and written by Erin Faith Allen · Fortitude Research

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