The hangman’s noose was a brutal equalizer in the winter of 1945, cutting short the lives of young women who had wielded absolute power over the largest killing ground in human history. In the cold dawn hours of December 13th, inside the walls of Hamelin Prison in Lower Saxony, the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentences that would forever mark the end of the Nazi regime’s female guard corps. Among those executed was Irma Grese, just 22 years old, whose blonde hair and striking features had earned her the moniker “The Beautiful Beast” among the terrified inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

According to contemporary reports, her final act was one of chilling efficiency; as the hood was placed over her head, she uttered a single word to her executioner: “Schnell,” meaning “quickly.” Beside her, Joanna Bormann, a 52-year-old guard known for setting her trained dog on prisoners, also met her end, marking the first major wave of retribution against the women who served in the SS auxiliary.

These executions were not isolated incidents but part of a broader, relentless pursuit of justice that swept across post-war Europe. The British had moved with remarkable speed after liberating Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, where they found 60,000 emaciated survivors and roughly 13,000 unburied corpses. The Belsen Trial, which opened in Lüneburg on September 17, 1945, was one of the first major war crimes tribunals, predating even the Nuremberg Trials.

It saw 45 former SS personnel, including Grese and Bormann, face a military court. The evidence was overwhelming, built on the testimony of survivors who had witnessed the daily sadism firsthand. While the British focused on the horrors of Belsen, the Polish government was preparing its own reckoning for the crimes committed on its soil, specifically at the Auschwitz complex, where the scale of murder had been industrialized on a level the world had never seen.

The story of these women begins not in the gas chambers, but in the mundane recruitment offices of wartime Germany. As the Auschwitz camp expanded into a massive complex holding tens of thousands of female prisoners, the SS faced a logistical problem: male guards were forbidden from entering the women’s barracks. To fill this gap, the SS auxiliary, known as the Hilfskräfte, began recruiting female supervisors, or Aufseherinnen.

These were not conscripts; they were volunteers. Newspaper advertisements promised a steady salary, better food rations than most civilians received during the war, and accommodation. Most of the recruits were young women between the ages of 17 and 30, hailing from working-class backgrounds—factories, shops, farms, and domestic service.

They were sent to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp north of Berlin, for training. There, they were drilled in discipline, control of prisoner formations, and the daily administration of a camp. Crucially, they were indoctrinated to view their charges as subhuman, an ideology that some embraced with terrifying enthusiasm.

The first of these female guards arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1942, and at its peak, the women’s camp held over 90,000 prisoners. At the apex of this female hierarchy stood Maria Mandl, a woman born in the small Austrian town of Münzkirchen in 1912. Before joining the SS in 1938, she had lived an unremarkable life.

But in Auschwitz, she rose to the position of Lagerführerin, the head supervisor of the entire women’s camp, making her one of the most powerful women in the SS. Mandl was not a passive administrator. Survivors testified that she personally participated in the selections on the arrival ramp, deciding who would be sent to forced labor and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers.

Historians believe she played a direct role in the murder of an estimated 500,000 women and children. Her cruelty was not limited to the ramp; she regularly inspected barracks, selecting prisoners for punishment, forced medical experiments, or immediate execution. She also created a female orchestra in April 1943, forcing musically talented prisoners to play cheerful classical music as new transports arrived, masking the horror that awaited them.

The dissonance between her appreciation for music and her role in mass murder remains one of the most disturbing aspects of her documented behavior.

Mandl’s subordinates were equally culpable. Therese Brandl, a Bavarian woman born in 1902, served under Mandl and was described by survivors as an active participant in violence, beating women during roll calls and participating in selections. Her name appeared repeatedly in testimonies from survivors who had never met each other, a consistency that proved crucial in court.

Then there was Irma Grese, who arrived at Birkenau in early 1943 at just 19 years old. She quickly rose to the rank of Oberaufseherin (Senior Supervisor). Survivors described her carrying a plaited leather whip which she used liberally against prisoners who moved too slowly, or sometimes simply those who caught her attention.

She was accused of shooting prisoners, participating in selections, and using a trained dog to attack inmates. Her youth and striking appearance made her cruelty seem even more surreal and shocking to those who witnessed it. She showed no remorse, and when the British liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, she was arrested on the spot, making no effort to flee.

While the British were conducting their trial, Poland was preparing its own. The Polish Supreme National Tribunal was established in January 1946 to try Nazi war criminals for crimes committed on Polish soil. The first major case was that of Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz.

He was arrested by British troops in March 1946 while hiding under a false identity on a farm in Schleswig-Holstein. He was tried, convicted, and on April 16, 1947, hanged on a gallows built specifically outside the entrance to Auschwitz I, a short distance from the gas chambers he had helped create. This execution set the tone for what was to come.

The largest post-war trial of Auschwitz staff began in Kraków on November 24, 1947. Forty former SS members stood before the court, including Maria Mandl and Therese Brandl. The trial took place in the Palace of Justice in Kraków, less than 70 kilometers from the camp itself.

The courtroom was packed daily with journalists, foreign observers, survivors, and relatives of victims. The prosecution built its case on a mountain of evidence: camp records seized by the Soviets at liberation, prisoner registration documents, transport logs, physical evidence, and the testimony of hundreds of survivors who traveled from across Europe and the Soviet Union to testify.

The defendants largely relied on the same defense: they were just following orders. The court, however, rejected this argument, focusing on cases where witnesses described guards taking personal initiative in acts of violence that went far beyond any direct order. Mandl’s selections and Brandl’s beatings were not bureaucratic paperwork; they were personal decisions.

On December 22, 1947, the verdicts were announced. Twenty-three of the forty defendants received death sentences, including Mandl and Brandl. Eleven others received prison terms, and six were acquitted for lack of evidence.

On January 24, 1948, the executions were carried out at Montelupich Prison in Kraków. During the Nazi occupation, the Gestapo had used the same prison to hold and execute Polish resistance members. Maria Mandl was hanged that morning at the age of 35.

Therese Brandl was hanged the same day at the age of 45. They were executed alongside 21 other SS officers from the same trial, including Arthur Liebehenschel, who had served as commandant of Auschwitz between November 1943 and May 1944. The executions were carried out individually inside the prison, witnessed by government representatives, and officially documented.

Although they were not public spectacles in front of large crowds, the news was widely announced and published in newspapers across Poland and abroad. Survivor organizations commemorated the date, and the news spread through letters, phone calls, and community gatherings among former prisoners throughout Europe and beyond.

However, not every female guard faced the same fate. The story of Hildegard Lächert illustrates how post-war justice was often inconsistent. Born in Berlin in 1920, Lächert served as an Aufseherin at Auschwitz-Birkenau and later at Majdanek, another concentration camp in occupied Poland near Lublin.

Prisoners at both camps nicknamed her “Bloody Brigitte” due to her reputation for using a whip and participating in the direct abuse and killing of prisoners. She was in her early twenties when these crimes occurred. Lächert was tried in Kraków in 1947 and convicted.

However, unlike Mandl and Brandl, she received a prison sentence rather than the death penalty. The exact reasons are not entirely clear from the surviving records, but historians believe the volume and strength of evidence against her may have differed from the cases against the other women. After serving part of her sentence, she was released.

She returned to West Germany and lived quietly for years. Then, in 1975, prosecutors in North Rhine-Westphalia reopened investigations related to Majdanek. This led to the Majdanek Trial in Düsseldorf, which began on November 26, 1975.

It became the longest criminal proceeding in German history, lasting until June 30, 1981—nearly six years. Lächert was one of the defendants, now 55 years old. Many of the survivors who testified against her had been teenagers when she was working at Auschwitz and Majdanek; they were now middle-aged.

In 1981, the Düsseldorf court convicted Lächert and sentenced her to 12 years in prison. She served part of her sentence before being released due to poor health. She died in Germany in 1995 at the age of 74.

West Germany itself did not confront the crimes of Auschwitz with any seriousness until the 1960s, and much of that was thanks to one man: Fritz Bauer. Born in 1903 in Stuttgart to a Jewish family, Bauer had worked as a lawyer and judge before the Nazis came to power. Forced into exile during the Nazi era, he returned after the war and became the Attorney General for the state of Hesse.

Bauer is also known for secretly providing Israeli intelligence with information about Adolf Eichmann’s whereabouts in Argentina, which helped lead to his capture in 1960 and trial in Jerusalem the following year. Bauer believed Germany was not doing enough to confront its past. For years, he worked to gather evidence for a major trial concerning the Auschwitz camp within West Germany itself.

His efforts led to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, officially known as the First Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. It began on December 20, 1963, and lasted until August 20, 1965, at the Frankfurt Regional Court. Twenty-two former SS members from Auschwitz stood trial.

Death sentences were not possible because West Germany had abolished the death penalty in 1949. The harshest possible sentence was life imprisonment. However, the trial was of immense importance.

For the first time, ordinary West Germans heard detailed public testimony about what happened in Auschwitz. The trial received extensive media coverage. Newspapers reported on it almost daily.

Schools organized visits to the courtroom. Survivors described what they saw and experienced inside the camp, and their testimonies appeared on the front pages of newspapers. Although most of the defendants in Frankfurt were men, the trial set an important legal and social precedent.

The last major case related to Auschwitz involved a woman named Irmgard Furchner. Between 1943 and 1945, she worked as a shorthand typist and secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. In September 2021, at the age of 96, she tried to avoid her trial by leaving her nursing home in a taxi before her first hearing.

Police found her later that same day. The trial continued. On December 20, 2022, the Regional Court in Itzehoe, Schleswig-Holstein, convicted her of complicity in the murder of 10,500 people.

She was sentenced to two years of probation, and she was 97 years old at the time of the verdict. None of these trials would have happened without the survivors. Most survivors remain largely unknown today.

However, the names of the perpetrators became famous through the very trials that their victims helped make possible. The women who volunteered to guard Auschwitz, who chose cruelty over humanity, were ultimately held accountable, but the scale of their crimes remains a chilling testament to the banality of evil and the capacity for ordinary people to commit extraordinary atrocities.