WARSAW – In the shadow of the crumbling walls of Pawiak Prison, a brutal chapter of World War II occupation saw its architects face a sudden and violent reckoning. Female guards, key enforcers of a regime of terror within the infamous Gestapo-run facility, were systematically hunted and executed by Polish underground fighters in a covert campaign of reprisal.

The prison, seized by German forces following the 1939 invasion, transformed from a Warsaw municipal jail into one of the most feared sites of incarceration in occupied Poland. Controlled by the Gestapo and the SD security service, it became a transit point to concentration camps and a place of mass execution. Conditions were deliberately murderous, with overcrowding, starvation, and daily torture sessions at nearby Gestapo headquarters.

A distinct section of the complex, known as “Serbia,” was reserved for female prisoners, often those suspected of resistance activities. Designed for 250, it regularly held over 800. Here, a cadre of female guards wielded unchecked power alongside their male counterparts. They inflicted savage beatings, conducted arbitrary executions within the cells, and selected prisoners to be marched into the rubble of the former Warsaw Ghetto to be shot.

The stench of cremated corpses from makeshift firing pits permeated the prison, a constant reminder of the fate awaiting many inmates. As the Polish underground grew in strength and organization, intelligence began to pinpoint the individuals most responsible for the atrocities within Pawiak’s walls. The resistance answer was not to wait for liberation but to deliver justice themselves.

Operation “Bürkl,” a special combat action aimed at assassinating key prison officials, expanded to include these female guards. The underground’s counter-intelligence units began tracking their movements through Warsaw, issuing death sentences and carrying out public executions designed to terrify the occupation apparatus and rally the populace.

One of the first to fall was Sabina Bieńkowska, a collaborator who worked closely with Gestapo officer Ernst Weffels to uncover how prisoners were smuggling messages to the resistance. After identifying Polish hospital staff within Serbia as the conduit, Weffels and Bieńkowska sealed their own fates. Weffels was gunned down on October 1, 1943. Bieńkowska, his partner and accomplice, was shot dead on a Warsaw street just four days later.

The campaign of retribution continued into 1944. Jadwiga Pochradecka, a Volksdeutsche who served as a senior guard or Blockmeisterin, was known for her violent raids into cells and cruel disciplinary punishments. On January 29, a unit of the underground’s counter-intelligence ambushed her, executing her in cold blood. Her body was left in the open as a stark warning.

Weeks later, the resistance targeted Olga Navrecka, another guard implicated in investigating contacts between prisoners and the underground. On April 28, a squad dispatched by Captain “Żuk” intercepted her. She was shot and killed, unarmed, on the street—another public demonstration that collaborators were not safe.

These executions sent a shockwave through the prison administration. They underscored that the Polish Home Army could strike with precision at the very heart of the terror system. The assassinations were acts of defiance during a period of overwhelming brutality, as the Germans, reeling from defeats on the Eastern Front, accelerated mass killings at Pawiak.

In the final days before the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis evacuated and systematically destroyed most of Pawiak Prison, burning records and evidence. Many of the remaining guards, both male and female, melted into the chaos of the war’s end, evading postwar justice. The fates of most of these women remain obscure, their stories buried in fragmented archives and survivor testimonies.

The executions of the female guards of Pawiak stand as a dark, complex footnote in the history of occupied Poland. They represent the underground’s grim determination to mete out immediate justice for crimes witnessed daily, a desperate form of accountability enacted not in a courtroom but in the bullet-riddled streets of a city fighting for its very soul. The rubble of the ghetto, once a site of their victims’ murders, briefly became the stage for their own final judgment.