A public execution on a sunny July afternoon in 1946 drew a crowd of 200,000 spectators, a grim spectacle marking the end for one of the Third Reich’s most brutal concentration camp guards. The condemned was 24-year-old Wanda Klaff, whose path from a quiet life in Danzig to the gallows of Biskupia Górka encapsulates the chilling banality of evil that permeated the Nazi camp system.

Klaff, born Wanda Kalinski in 1922, was a streetcar conductor and housewife before her recruitment in June 1944. The SS faced an acute staff shortage following the establishment of the Bromberg-Ost subcamp, turning to local women from Danzig and surrounding areas. Like many, Klaff came from a lower-middle-class background with no prior professional experience, yet she willingly stepped into a role of absolute power over human life.

She served as a guard in the Stutthof subcamps at Praust and Russoschin, where she quickly gained notoriety for her savage cruelty. Survivors’ testimonies depict a woman who beat and kicked prisoners without provocation, leaving them motionless on the ground. In particularly foul moods, she was known to drown inmates in mud or beat them to death.

Her own words during her later trial laid bare her brutality. “I slapped female prisoners in the face or beat them on the back with a stick,” she stated. “If that didn’t help, I handed such a prisoner over to the SS sergeant, who would react accordingly and beat the prisoner with a pickaxe until unconscious.” The roughly 300 women under her supervision performed backbreaking railway work.

Klaff later admitted to personally selecting approximately 100 exhausted women for transfer back to the main Stutthof camp, a death sentence she understood fully. “After a week I learned that the selected women were sent to the gas chambers and killed,” she explained, noting selections occurred every three days. The main camp, established just outside Danzig in September 1939, was a central site for the Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing against Polish elites.

Conditions across the Stutthof network were horrific, characterized by typhus epidemics, starvation, and systematic murder. From June 1944, the SS used Zyklon B gas chambers, killing about 4,000, while camp doctors administered lethal phenol injections. Of the approximately 100,000 people who passed through Stutthof and its subcamps, at least 60,000 perished.

The camp’s evacuation in January 1945 was another chapter of atrocity, with an estimated 25,000 prisoners dying during death marches and sea transports. Klaff fled Stutthof that same month, attempting to disappear into her parents’ apartment in Gdańsk. Her anonymity was short-lived; she was arrested by Polish security officials on June 11, 1945, and later stood trial in the first Stutthof trial.

Her demeanor in court was marked by defiance and a lack of remorse. She and other female guards reportedly giggled and joked during proceedings. Klaff declared to the court, “I am very intelligent and was very dedicated to my work in the camps. I beat at least two prisoners a day.” On May 31, 1946, she was among eleven defendants sentenced to death by hanging for crimes against humanity.

The execution on July 4, 1946, was deliberately staged as a public event. Newspapers announced the date, factories granted time off, and transport was organized for workers. The eleven condemned, their hands and feet bound, were transported on open trucks to the hill at Biskupia Górka before the massive crowd. Former Stutthof prisoners volunteered as executioners.

The method was calculated to prolong suffering. As each truck drove away, the condemned were left to hang, the drop insufficient to break their necks. Death by strangulation took between ten and twenty agonizing minutes. Klaff’s end held a further moment of macabre theater; when the truck she stood on failed to start, a former prisoner shoved her from the platform.

The crowd’s reaction was one of raw, vengeful fury. They cheered, crying “For our men! For our children!” After the last convict died, security forces allowed the throng to surge forward. People ripped buttons from the clothing, cut away fabric, and kicked and struck the corpses. The bodies were later taken to the Danzig Medical University for use as anatomical specimens.

The event’s disturbing legacy extended beyond the hill. Reports emerged of children, having witnessed the executions, beginning to hang their toys, and in tragic cases, mimicking the act on other children. The execution of Wanda Klaff and her cohorts remains one of only three public executions of war criminals conducted in post-war Poland, a brutal coda to a regime built on terror, and a stark reminder of the human capacity for both cruelty and the thirst for justice.