HAMELN, Germany — The gallows at Hameln prison had been tested and measured, the ropes adjusted with clinical precision, and by the time the first light of December 13, 1945, crept over the Weser River, the machinery of justice was ready to claim its most infamous prizes. Inside the cold corridors of the prison, a queue of condemned souls awaited their final walk, but the world’s attention was fixed on three of them, women who had become the face of unspeakable cruelty at Bergen-Belsen. Their executions, carried out by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint, marked the first time in modern history that female war criminals were put to death by the state, a grim finale to a trial that had laid bare the depths of human depravity.

The story of how these women ended up on that scaffold begins not in the chaos of defeat, but in the calculated machinery of the Nazi camp system. Bergen-Belsen, initially opened in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp for French and Belgian soldiers, was a peripheral footnote in the vast network of terror until April 1943, when the SS seized control and transformed it into an Aufenthaltslager, or residence camp. Officially, it was designed to hold Jewish prisoners with foreign passports or dual citizenship, individuals who could potentially be exchanged for German nationals held overseas or traded for hard currency.

But the exchange program was a cynical failure, and the camp’s population swelled with those deemed expendable, treated as bargaining chips rather than human beings. By 1944, as the Eastern Front collapsed and Soviet forces pushed westward, the Nazis began evacuating camps in Poland, including Auschwitz, Chełmno, and Sobibór, forcing prisoners onto death marches and packing them into overcrowded trains heading west. Thousands poured into Bergen-Belsen through late 1944 and early 1945, and the camp, designed for a fraction of that number, buckled under the strain.

The conditions deteriorated into a hellscape that defied comprehension. Food deliveries nearly stopped, water became so scarce that the single pump serving thousands broke down and remained broken for weeks, and barracks built for 200 people were crammed with a thousand. Typhus swept through the starving masses unchecked, and corpses piled up faster than they could be buried.

By March 1945, the camp held more than 60,000 prisoners, surrounded by an estimated 10,000 unburied bodies. The people responsible for this catastrophe did not accidentally wander into it; they were trained, uniformed, and present. While Josef Kramer, the camp commandant, became the public face of the horror after liberation, the daily control of female prisoners, who made up a huge portion of the camp population, was largely handled by women known as Aufseherinnen, or female overseers.

The SS had created the role in 1939 and expanded it heavily after 1942 as Germany ran out of manpower. Most of these women were trained at Ravensbrück concentration camp, where they arrived as civilians and left weeks later in SS uniforms, having practiced violence on real prisoners. They were volunteers, attracted by a salary of around 185 Reichsmarks a month, plus food, housing, and a uniform, a tempting offer for poor, working-class women with few opportunities.

Among the roughly 45 female guards at Bergen-Belsen when the British arrived, three stood out for their particular brutality. Elisabeth Volkenrath, born in 1919 in Silesia, had joined the SS Auxiliary in 1941 and worked at Auschwitz-Birkenau for three years before arriving at Bergen-Belsen in late 1944 as Oberaufseherin, the chief female guard. Survivors described her calmly carrying out random beatings during roll calls, using her fists or a stick, deciding on a whim who would be punished.

Irma Grese, born in 1923 in Mecklenburg, was just 19 when she volunteered for the SS Auxiliary in 1942 after failing to secure a nursing position. At Auschwitz, she became a Rapportführerin, supervising around 30,000 female prisoners, and survivors testified that she carried a braided leather whip, a pistol, and a trained dog, beating prisoners for moving too slowly or looking at her, and participating in selections for the gas chambers. Johanna Bormann, born in 1893, was the oldest of the three at 52, and had served in the SS Auxiliary since 1938, making her one of the longest-serving female guards in the entire camp system.

She kept a dog and used it against prisoners, earning the nickname “Die Frau mit den Hunden,” the woman with the dogs, after multiple survivors testified that she ordered the animal to attack inmates, sometimes killing them.

These women were not anomalies; they were trusted, promoted, and given responsibility within the system. They became infamous only because they were still standing inside Bergen-Belsen when the British Army arrived on April 15, 1945. The liberation was not a violent assault; the Germans had actually requested the British take control, fearing the typhus epidemic would spread into nearby towns.

Soldiers from the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery entered the camp and found a scene of apocalyptic horror. Around 60,000 prisoners were trapped inside, many starving, sick, or dying, surrounded by unburied corpses. The smell was detectable from over a kilometer away.

British medical teams worked desperately to save survivors, but around 13,000 more died in the weeks after liberation despite treatment. BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby broadcast a report from inside the camp that was so horrifying that editors initially refused to air it, believing listeners would never accept it as real. Dimbleby threatened to resign, and the report finally aired on April 19, leaving people across Britain in stunned silence.

Josef Kramer was arrested the same day the camp was liberated, found sitting in his office. The female guards were arrested over the following hours and days, some identified by survivors pointing them out to British troops. Irma Grese was arrested on April 17, as were Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann.

The British Army film and photographic unit recorded everything, capturing footage of the guards being marched through the same camp paths where prisoners had once walked under their control. British forces also ordered SS personnel, both male and female, to carry the unburied corpses to mass graves by hand, and within weeks, footage of guards handling the bodies they had allowed to pile up was shown in cinemas across Britain and America. Audiences watched in complete silence.

Even before the cameras stopped rolling, the British were deciding what would happen to the 45 captured SS personnel. The Belsen trial, officially called the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others, began on September 17, 1945, at the courthouse in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, just 70 kilometers from the camp itself. It was held under a royal warrant issued by the British Crown on June 14, 1945, allowing British military courts to prosecute violations of the laws of war.

Prosecutors did not have to prove the defendants were part of a giant conspiracy; they only needed evidence that the accused had committed or taken part in crimes that broke the laws of war, and survivors could identify exactly who had done what.

Out of the 45 defendants, 16 were women. The trial lasted seven weeks, with prosecutors calling 89 witnesses who described specific incidents, named guards, and provided dates and locations. The defense argued that the guards were simply following orders and that the starvation and disease were caused by Allied bombing and wartime shortages, not deliberate policy.

But the testimony was overwhelming. Witnesses described Volkenrath beating prisoners across the face and body during roll calls for no reason at all. The testimony against Grese was long and consistent, describing her cruelty as something constant, not a single moment of losing control.

Multiple survivors identified Bormann as the guard who ordered her dog to attack prisoners. On November 17, 1945, the court delivered its verdicts. Out of the 45 defendants, 30 were found guilty and 15 were acquitted, a decision that angered many survivors who believed anyone involved in running the camp was already part of a criminal system.

Eleven defendants were sentenced to death, and three of them were women: Elisabeth Volkenrath, Irma Grese, and Johanna Bormann. Other female guards received prison sentences ranging from one to fifteen years, while some were completely acquitted.

The death sentences against the three women sparked immediate public debate, not about their guilt, but about whether Britain would actually execute women. In 1945, executions of women by the state were already rare in Britain, and executing female war criminals had almost no modern precedent. Some in Parliament and legal circles argued for reduced sentences, but British military authorities rejected the requests for mercy without much delay.

The Judge Advocate General’s office reviewed the sentences in early December 1945 and confirmed them, and the British government made it clear that being women would not save them. The execution date was set for December 13, 1945, at Hameln prison, the same town tied to the Pied Piper legend, which the British military had chosen as the main prison for executing convicted war criminals in their occupation zone. Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s official executioner since the late 1930s, was brought in to perform the executions.

He used the long drop method, carefully calculating each prisoner’s drop based on body weight and build to ensure the neck broke instantly. He arrived at Hameln on December 12, with 13 people scheduled to die the next morning, 11 from the Belsen trial and two from a separate case connected to the Neuengamme concentration camp. It became the largest mass execution carried out by British military authorities in the modern era.

The executions began on the morning of December 13. Josef Kramer went first, walking to the gallows without help, and was executed at 9:00 a. m.

The male prisoners followed one after another, each execution taking less than two minutes. Then came the women. Johanna Bormann was the first, receiving the Catholic last rites the night before.

Witnesses described her as frightened but calm, and she died at around 10:38 a. m. Elisabeth Volkenrath was next, walking to the gallows without assistance and without saying anything, dying at around 10:52 a.

m. Irma Grese was the last, at only 22 years old, making her the youngest person executed for war crimes by British military authorities after World War II. In his 1974 memoir, Pierrepoint described Grese walking into the execution room without hesitation, looking at the rope, then looking at him and saying one word: “Schnell,” meaning quickly.

He placed the white hood over her head, tightened the noose, and pulled the lever. She died at around 11:05 a. m.

All 13 executions were finished before noon. The prisoners were buried inside the grounds of Hameln prison in unmarked graves, later covered with concrete during renovations, with no headstones and no publicly marked burial spots.

For survivors of Bergen-Belsen, December 13 brought a sense of justice, but not a complete one. Three of the people responsible for the suffering were dead, but many others were not. Some defendants received prison sentences instead of execution, several were acquitted completely, and many SS staff members had escaped before the British arrived.

Most of the women sentenced at Lüneburg to less than 15 years were out of prison by the mid-1950s, during a period when West Germany was increasingly reintegrating former Nazis into society under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government. Between 1950 and 1955, the Allied High Commission granted clemency to hundreds of convicted war criminals, driven by the political reality that West Germany was becoming a crucial NATO ally against the Soviet Union, and continuing large-scale prosecutions of former Nazis was seen as politically inconvenient. For survivors, watching this happen was deeply painful.

Many had testified at the Lüneburg trial at enormous emotional cost, reliving traumatic memories in public courtrooms, facing defense lawyers, and standing only meters away from the people they accused. They believed they were helping create a permanent record of meaningful punishment, only to watch many of those punishments slowly disappear. Ada Bimko Rosensoft, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen who testified at the trial, became one of the strongest voices documenting what had happened and arguing that post-war justice had never truly been enough.

The executions at Hameln were a moment of reckoning, but they were also a fleeting one, a brief window of accountability that closed as the world moved on and the Cold War reshaped priorities. The women who died on that gallows were gone, but the questions they left behind, about guilt, responsibility, and the limits of justice, remain as haunting as the footage of them carrying the dead.