July 29th, 1948.
Hamlin Prison, Germany.
A young woman walks toward the execution chamber.
Her face pale but composed.
She’s 28 years old, married, once dreamed of becoming a nurse.
In just moments, Britain’s most efficient executioner will place a noose around her neck and end her life.
But here’s what will shock you.
This isn’t just another war criminal execution.
This is the story of a woman who spent less than 10 months as a concentration camp guard but managed to earn the nickname Bloody Ruth among prisoners.
A woman who was seen cutting an inmate’s throat with the sharp edge of a shovel.
A woman who participated in the selection and murder of over 5,000 women and children and the brutal justice that finally caught up with her 3 years after the war ended.
But here’s what makes this story even more disturbing.
Ruth Nud Deck wasn’t a lifelong Nazi fanatic.
She wasn’t raised in hatred.
She was an ordinary working-class woman from Breastlau who volunteered for camp guard duty in July 1944, right when Germany was clearly losing the war.
In less than one year, she transformed from a nobody into one of the most sadistic guards at Robinsbrook.
The journey from textile warehouse saleswoman to convicted war criminal and the cold efficiency of her execution.
That’s a story about how ordinary people become monsters faster than you could ever imagine.
Before we dive in, make sure you’re subscribed and hit that notification bell because we’re about to uncover the darkest transformation in concentration camp history and the swift, brutal justice that ended it.
July 5th, 1920, Breastlau, Germany.
A baby girl named Ruth Closius entered the world.
Today, Breastlau is Rotwave, Poland.
But in 1920, it was a thriving German city in Celisia.
Ruth’s family was workingass.
Nothing remarkable, nothing that suggested she would one day stand trial for war crimes.
She grew up during the chaotic Weimar Republic years, lived through the Great Depression, watched Hitler rise to power.
Like millions of German girls, she absorbed Nazi ideology through school, through radio broadcasts, through the relentless propaganda machine that told her Germany’s problems were caused by Jews, communists, and racial inferiors.
But Ruth wasn’t particularly political.
She had simple dreams.
She wanted to become a nurse.
Nursing was respectable work, honorable, a way for a working-class girl to rise in society.
But her academic record wasn’t strong enough.
The nursing schools rejected her application.
So instead, Ruth Closius found work as a saleswoman in a textiles warehouse in Brelau.
She folded cloth.
She took orders.
She dreamed of something more.
At some point in her early 20s, she married.
Her husband’s surname was New Deck.
She became Ruth Clius Nude Deck, though most people simply called her Ruth New Deck.
We know almost nothing about her husband.
History doesn’t record his name or what happened to him.
What we know is that by July 1944, Ruth Nudk was looking for a way out of her mundane life in Breastlau.
July 1944.
By this point in World War II, Germany was losing.
The Soviets were advancing from the east.
The Americans and British had landed in Normandy.
German cities were being bombed to rubble.
The Nazi regime desperately needed labor.
In February 1943, propaganda minister Joseph Gerbles had given his famous sport palas speech declaring total war.
Every German man and woman was expected to contribute to the war effort.
Women between 17 and 45 were required to register with their local labor office and accept assigned work.
They had no choice.
Refuge and you’d be arrested.
But here’s what makes Ruth New Deck different from many other camp guards.
She wasn’t conscripted.
She volunteered.
In July 1944, when the Third Reich’s prospects for survival were clearly terminal, when anyone with sense could see Germany was headed for catastrophic defeat, 23-year-old Ruth Nud filled out an application to work as an offser, a female guard at a Nazi concentration camp.
Why? We’ll never know for certain.
Maybe she thought it would be easier than factory work.
Maybe she believed the propaganda that camp guards were performing essential security work protecting Germany from dangerous enemies.
Maybe she was attracted to the power.
Or maybe, just maybe, there was something dark inside her that wanted an outlet.
She was accepted.
On July 3rd, 1944, Ruth Nud arrived at Robinsbrook concentration camp to begin her training.
Robinsbrook was Nazi Germany’s primary women’s concentration camp located about 50 mi north of Berlin near a small village in a heavily forested area surrounded by lakes.
The camp had been operating since May 1939.
By 1944, it held over 70,000 prisoners and the SS needed guards desperately.
The training for new offsyn and wasn’t long or complex, maybe two or three weeks of instruction.
The trainees learned how to conduct roll calls, how to supervise work details, how to maintain discipline through beatings and punishments.
They learned that prisoners weren’t people, they were numbers, that showing mercy was weakness.
That brutality was expected and rewarded.
Ruth Nud proved to be an exceptional student.
Within weeks, her superiors noticed something about her.
Unbending brutality.
That’s the phrase used in post-war testimony.
She didn’t hesitate.
She didn’t show doubt.
She embraced the violence with enthusiasm.
By late July 1944, barely 3 weeks after arriving, Ruth Neweck was promoted to block furerin, bareric overseer.
This was remarkable.
Most new guards remained ordinary offseerinan for months or years.
New Deck rocketed up the ranks because she impressed the ass with her cruelty.
As block furerin Nocck was responsible for one of Robinsbrook’s barracks, supervising hundreds of women prisoners.
She conducted roll calls that lasted for hours, forcing emaciated women to stand motionless in all weather.
Any movement earned a beating.
She randomly selected prisoners for punishment, beating them with whips, clubs, whatever was handy.
Former prisoners later testified that New Deck seemed to enjoy the violence.
She didn’t beat prisoners because they violated rules.
She beat them because she wanted to, because it made her feel powerful, because she could.
But here’s where Ruth Newck’s story takes an even darker turn.
In December 1944, just 5 months after joining the camp system, she was promoted again.
This time to Oberof Sarin, senior overseer, one of the highest ranks a woman could achieve in the camp hierarchy.
and she was transferred to a place that would become synonymous with death, the Ukermark concentration camp.
Ukermark was a satellite camp near Robbins.
Originally established to house teenage girls deemed a social by the Nazi regime.
Girls who refused to conform, who were promiscuous, who came from broken homes, who showed signs of rebellious behavior.
But in late 1944, as the Nazi regime’s final months approached and resources became scarce, Uchermark was converted into something more sinister, an extermination complex.
The elderly, the sick, the weak prisoners from Robinsbrook, whose bodies had been destroyed by forced labor.
They were sent to Ukermark, not for recovery, for liquidation.
The Nazis called it selection.
Guards and SS doctors would inspect prisoners and decide who could still work and who was no longer useful.
Those deemed unfit were marked for death.
Some were sent to other camps with gas chambers.
Some were simply killed at Uchucker Mark itself through starvation, lethal injection, or systematic neglect.
Between December 1944 and March 1945, over 5,000 women and children passed through Ukar’s selection process.
Most never came out alive.
Ruth Nudek, 24 years old, was in charge.
As Oberov Sarin, she conducted the selections.
She stood with SS doctors and decided who would live and who would die.
Survivors testified that New Deck showed no emotion during selections.
She pointed at women left or right, work or death, as casually as if she were sorting laundry.
And for those selected for death, the end came in various forms.
Some were loaded onto trucks and driven to other camps with functioning gas chambers.
Some were given lethal injections by camp doctors.
Some were simply left to starve in unheated barracks during the brutal winter of 1945.
But Noc’s cruelty wasn’t limited to selections.
Former French prisoner Geneviev de Gaul Antonio’s niece of Charles de Gaulle was at Robbins during Noc’s tenure.
After the war, she provided testimony that shocked the courtroom.
She testified that she personally witnessed Ruth Nudek cut the throat of an inmate with the sharp edge of her shovel.
Let that image sink in.
A woman takes a shovel, the kind used for digging, and uses its sharpened edge like a blade to slice open another woman’s throat.
This wasn’t an execution ordered by superiors.
This wasn’t following protocol.
This was murder committed on impulse with a tool designed for moving Earth.
The detail about the shovel became one of the most notorious aspects of New Deck’s crimes.
Other guards beat prisoners.
Other guards conducted selections.
But cutting a throat with a shovel, that required a special kind of sadism.
It suggested someone who enjoyed inflicting pain, who was creative in their cruelty, who treated murder as a form of personal expression.
Prisoners at Robinsbrook gave her a nickname, Bloody Ruth.
Not because of the shovel incident alone, but because her entire presence was associated with blood, violence, and death.
When Bloody Ruth appeared, prisoners knew someone was about to suffer.
In March 1945, as Soviet forces closed in from the east and the Nazi regime entered its final death throws, Ruth Naidc was transferred again.
She became head of the Bar sub camp, another satellite of Robinsbrook.
Barous women forced to work in armaments factories.
By this point, the camps were descending into chaos.
Food supplies had collapsed.
Disease was rampant.
Guards were burning documents and preparing to flee.
But even in these final weeks, Ruth Nud continued her reign of terror.
Survivors from Bar testified that she beat prisoners until the very end, that she showed no signs of recognizing the war was lost, or that she would face consequences for her actions.
Late April 1945, Soviet forces liberated Robinsbrook and its subc camps.
Tens of thousands of prisoners were freed, though many were so sick and malnourished they died shortly after liberation.
Ruth Nud fled.
She didn’t try to blend back into civilian life immediately.
Like many camp guards, she probably hoped the chaos of Germany’s collapse would allow her to disappear.
But the British army, which controlled the occupation zone that included the Robinsbrook area, was systematically hunting for war criminals.
They had lists of names provided by survivors.
They had testimony from liberated prisoners.
And Ruth Newck’s name was near the top of those lists.
British investigators arrested her within weeks.
The exact date isn’t recorded, but by May 1945, she was in custody.
For three years, she sat in prison while the British gathered evidence.
This was standard procedure.
The Allies conducted multiple rounds of trials for concentration camp personnel.
The first Robinsbrook trial took place in 1946 and 1947.
The second in 1947 and 1948.
The third trial, sometimes called the Uchermark trial, was specifically focused on the guards and administrators of that extermination complex.
Ruth Nud would be tried in that third proceeding.
The trial began on April 14th, 1948 at the Curio House in Hamburg, a building the British military used for war crimes tribunals.
Five women stood accused.
All had worked at Uchermark in various capacities during its operation as an extermination site.
The prosecution called dozens of survivors to testify.
Women who had been at Robinsbrook and Ukermark described the conditions, the selections, the murders.
They pointed at the defendants and identified them by name.
They recounted specific acts of cruelty.
They told the judges about Bloody Ruth.
When Ruth Newck took the stand, she did something that surprised many observers.
She confessed not to everything, but to enough.
She admitted to participating in selections.
She admitted to beating prisoners.
She didn’t try to claim ignorance.
She didn’t say she was just following orders, at least not in the way that would absolve her.
The 28-year-old former saleswoman sat in the dock and acknowledged her role in the murder and maltreatment of thousands of women and children.
Perhaps she thought honesty would earn leniency.
Perhaps the weight of what she’d done had finally broken through her psychological defenses.
or perhaps she simply realized that the testimony against her was overwhelming and denial would be pointless.
The other four defendants presented various defenses.
Two claimed they had been forced to work at the camps against their will.
Two others admitted involvement but tried to minimize their personal responsibility.
The judges, British military officers trained in law, heard all the evidence.
They deliberated.
On April 26th, 1948, the verdicts came down.
Two defendants were acquitted.
Two received prison sentences.
Ruth Closius Nudek was found guilty of war crimes, specifically the torture and murder of men, women, and children in the selection of prisoners for gas chambers and execution.
The judge pronounced sentence, death by hanging.
Ruth Nud showed little reaction.
Perhaps she had expected hit.
Of the five women tried together, she was the only one condemned to die.
This tells you something about the evidence against her.
The British judges weren’t conducting a witch hunt.
They carefully evaluated each defendant’s individual culpability.
Two women walk free.
Two went to prison.
Only Ruth Nudek, whose crimes were so systematic, so cruel, and so well documented by survivor testimony, received the death penalty.
She was transferred to Hamlin Prison, a facility in the British occupation zone that served as the central location for housing and executing convicted Nazi war criminals.
Hamlin had been used for this purpose since 1945.
Dozens of concentration camp guards, SS officers, and Gustapo agents had been hanged there.
The prison had a dedicated execution chamber and it had Britain’s most experienced executioner.
Albert Pierre Point.
Albert Pierre Point was the third generation of his family to work as an executioner.
His father Henry and his uncle Thomas had both been hangmen.
Albert had joined the profession in 1932 and by 1948 had executed hundreds of people.
He was considered the best in the business because of his efficiency.
Pierre Point had developed a technique called the long drop method to perfection.
He could calculate the exact length of rope needed based on a person’s height and weight to ensure the neck broke instantly, causing immediate unconsciousness and rapid death.
Previous hangmen had been imprecise, sometimes decapitating prisoners or leaving them to strangle.
Perpoint prided himself on quick, professional executions.
Between December 1945 and October 1949, Pierre Point traveled repeatedly to Hamlin and executed 226 people, often more than 10 per day.
These mass executions of war criminals were treated as assemblyline justice.
Multiple gallows were prepared.
Condemned prisoners were hanged in rapid succession, sometimes in pairs.
The British wanted the process completed efficiently and humanely, if hanging can ever be described as humane.
Perpoint’s method minimized suffering.
The condemned prisoner would be led to the gallows, positioned under the noose, hooded, and dropped through the trap door within seconds.
If done correctly, death was instantaneous.
For 3 months, Ruth Nudk waited on death row at Hamlin.
She shared the prison with other condemned war criminals.
Some had worked at Berg and Bellson, some at Robinsbrook, some at other camps.
They waited in small cells knowing that any day the guards could come and tell them their time had arrived.
There was no long appeals process.
The British military tribunals were final.
If you were sentenced to death, you would hang.
The only question was when.
July 29th, 1948.
Ruth Nudex’s day had come.
She was 28 years old.
Four years earlier, she had been folding textiles in Brelau, dreaming of something more exciting than her ordinary life.
She got her wish.
For 10 months, she had wielded absolute power over thousands of women.
She had beaten, selected for death, and murdered with impunity.
Now she would pay the price.
The execution was scheduled for early morning.
This was standard.
Hangings always occurred shortly after dawn when the prison was quiet and the condemned prisoner had minimal time to dwell on their fate.
Guards entered her cell.
They informed her that the time had arrived.
Ruth Neweck was led from her cell down the quarter toward the execution chamber.
Some sources indicate she remained composed, showing little emotion.
Others suggest she was visibly afraid.
What’s certain is that she walked to her death knowing exactly why she was there and what she had done.
There would be no lastminute reprieve, no dramatic rescue, no mercy.
The execution chamber at Hamlin was a simple room.
It contained a trap door in the floor with a noose suspended above it.
The rope was carefully measured for Ruth Newck’s height and weight.
Pierre Point would have examined her during a prior visit to make his calculations.
He took notes on every condemned person, their build, their demeanor, any physical characteristics that might affect the hanging.
He aimed for 1,260 lbs of striking force on the second and third cervical vertebrae, enough to sever the spinal cord and produce instant unconsciousness and rapid death.
Ruth Naidc was positioned under the noose.
Her hands were pinioned behind her back.
Her legs were strapped together.
These restraints ensured the prisoner couldn’t struggle or try to grab the rope.
A white cotton hood was placed over her head.
This served two purposes.
It prevented the prisoner from seeing the moment of death approaching and it spared the executioner and witnesses from seeing the prisoner’s face during strangulation.
The noose was placed around her neck.
The thick hemp rope was positioned so the knot sat at the left side of the jaw.
This placement was critical.
When the trap door opened and the body dropped, the knot would jerk sharply to the side, breaking the neck at a specific point in the cervical spine.
Albert Pierre Point pulled the lever.
The trap door opened.
Ruth New Deck dropped through the opening.
The rope snapped taut.
If Pierre Point’s calculations were correct, her neck broke instantly.
Her second and third cervical vertebrae fractured.
Her spinal cord severed.
All nerve signals to her body ceased immediately.
She would have felt a sudden sensation of falling, then nothing.
Unconsciousness came within a fraction of a second.
Her heart continued beating for a few minutes as her body ran through its final autonomic functions.
But Ruth Nudk, the woman who had been Bloody Ruth at Ravensbrook, was gone.
The prison doctor waited the required time, then examined the body to confirm death.
He checked for a pulse, for breathing, for any signs of life.
Finding none, he declared Ruth Clius Nud dead.
Her body was left hanging for the standard period, usually an hour, to ensure death was complete.
Then she was cut down.
Her body was photographed for official records, then placed in a coffin.
She was buried in the cemetery at Hamlin Prison, later transferred to Well Cemetery, where many executed war criminals were interred.
No elaborate funeral, no mourners, just another body in a mass grave of people who had served the Nazi death machine.
But here’s what makes Ruth Nudex’s story so disturbing.
She spent less than 10 months in the camp system from July 1944 to April 1945, barely more than 9 months.
In that incredibly short time, she rose from traininee guard to senior overseer.
She participated in the deaths of 5,000 women and children.
She earned a reputation among prisoners as one of the most brutal guards at Robinsbrook, a camp that had cultivated Irma Gracie and dozens of other sadistic women.
How does someone transform that quickly? How does a workingclass saleswoman become a throat-slitting murderer in less than a year? The answer reveals something terrifying about human nature.
Ruth Nud wasn’t born evil.
She wasn’t a psychopath from childhood.
She was ordinary.
And that’s precisely what makes her so frightening.
Given the right circumstances, given power over helpless victims, given a system that rewards cruelty and punishes mercy, ordinary people can become monsters with shocking speed.
The Nazi concentration camp system was designed to bring out the worst in its personnel.
Guards were encouraged to dehumanize prisoners.
Brutality was normalized.
Sadism was rewarded with promotions.
And for people like Ruth New Deck, people who had felt powerless their entire lives.
The sudden ability to control others fates was intoxicating.
Think about her trajectory.
A failed nursing student, a warehouse saleswoman, a nobody with no prospects.
Then overnight, she’s wearing a uniform, carrying weapons, commanding hundreds of women who must obey her every word or face death.
That kind of power corrupts rapidly, especially when there are no moral constraints, no consequences for cruelty, no external force reminding you that your victims are human.
Ruth Nud embraced her role because it gave her something she had never experienced before.
Significance, control, the ability to inspire fear.
And once she tasted that power, she couldn’t get enough of it.
But let’s talk about the execution itself and what it represents.
Ruth Nudex’s hanging was efficient, professional, and as humane as execution can be.
Albert Pierre Point was arguably the best hangman in the world.
His method minimize suffering.
If executed correctly, long drop hanging causes instantaneous unconsciousness.
The condemned person doesn’t experience prolonged agony.
They don’t strangle slowly.
They don’t suffer the way New Deck’s victim suffered.
This raises an uncomfortable moral question.
Did Ruth Newe Deck deserve a quick death? The women whose throats she cut with his shovel died slowly, painfully in terror.
The thousands she selected for gas chambers died gasping for air as Cyclon B poisoned their lungs.
The prisoners she beat died from their injuries or from infections and wounds she inflicted.
None of them received mercy.
None of them died quickly or painlessly.
So, should Ruth New Deck have been executed the same way she killed? Should she have been slowly strangled or had her throat cut? The answer reveals the difference between justice and revenge.
The British didn’t execute war criminals to satisfy blood lust.
They executed them because crimes had been committed that demanded the ultimate punishment, but they did so according to established legal procedures and humane methods.
Even monsters receive the protections of civilized law.
This isn’t mercy to the criminal.
It’s a statement about who we are as a society.
We don’t torture.
We don’t inflict unnecessary suffering.
We punish swiftly and move on.
Because if we become as cruel as those we punish, then evil has won.
But I want to address something that often gets glossed over in discussions of female camp guards.
There’s a tendency to portray women like Ruth New Deck as exceptions, as uniquely evil outliers.
The truth is more disturbing.
Robinsbrook trained over 4,000 female guards between 1939 and 1945.
Many of them were ordinary women from working-class backgrounds, and many of them became brutal, sadistic killers.
Some historians would argue that women guards were actually more cruel than their male counterparts.
Why? Because they had more to prove.
Because the Nazi system didn’t initially respect them.
Because they were competing with men for recognition and advancement in a male-dominated hierarchy.
And because they were supervising a wallet of women which removed certain social inhibitions that might have existed in male female interactions.
Ruth New Deck exemplifies this phenomenon.
She volunteered.
She excelled at brutality.
She rose rapidly through the ranks and she showed absolutely no remorse until the very end.
The testimony from her trial reveals a woman who had fully internalized Nazi ideology and who genuinely believed that the prisoners under her control were subhuman and deserved whatever treatment she inflicted.
This is the danger of dehumanization.
Once you convince yourself that your victims aren’t really people, any atrocity becomes possible.
Three years elapsed between Ruth Nudex’s crimes and her execution.
In those three years, she lived in prison, ate regular meals, slept in a bed, and was treated according to international standards for detained prisoners.
Meanwhile, the women she had tormented were either dead or struggling to rebuild shattered lives.
Some had lost entire families in the Holocaust.
Some bore permanent physical scars from beatings and medical experiments.
Some suffered psychological trauma that would never heal.
The survivors who testified at New Deck’s trial had to relive their worst memories to ensure she faced justice.
And even then, some probably wondered if one quick hanging was adequate punishment for years of systematic cruelty.
July 29th, 1948, Ruth Closius Nudex ceased to exist.
The former textile saleswoman, the aspiring nurse, the woman who volunteered for power and found her calling and cruelty.
She died at age 28, having spent less than four years in the camp system, but having compressed a lifetime of evil into those brief months.
Her execution was barely noted in German newspapers.
By 1948, the public was exhausted by war crimes trials.
Dozens of camp guards had been hanged already.
Ruth Nud was just another name on a long list of people who had served the Nazi death machine and paid with their lives.
But she shouldn’t be forgotten.
Not because she deserves remembrance, because we need to remember that evil doesn’t always announce itself with fanaticism and ideology.
Sometimes evil looks like an ordinary person seeking an escape from an ordinary life.
Sometimes evil is a failed nursing student who finds validation in violence.
Sometimes evil is a woman with a shovel who discovers she enjoys using it to cut throats.
And sometimes evil rises so fast that within 10 months an unknown nobody becomes a war criminal whose name will forever be associated with one of history’s darkest chapters.
The question we must ask ourselves is this.
Would we have been different? If we had been born in 1920 in Brelau, grown up under Nazi propaganda, faced mandatory work assignments during total war, would we have had the moral strength to refuse? Would we have chosen the harder path of resistance or passive disobedience? Or would we, like Ruth Nudek, have seen an opportunity and taken it, convincing ourselves that we were just doing our jobs, just following orders, just trying to get ahead.
The uncomfortable truth is that most people throughout history have chosen compliance over courage.
Most people given power over others have abused it.
Ruth Nud wasn’t an exception.
She was an example, and that’s the truly terrifying lesson her story teaches us.
What other stories from history’s darkest chapters should we uncover next? Are there modern parallels to the choice Ruth New Deck made? Let us know in the comments.
And don’t forget to subscribe because the truth is ordinary people commit extraordinary evil every day.
They just don’t always face consequences.
Ruth Newck did on July 29th, 1948 at Hamlin Prison.
Justice finally caught up with Bloody Ruth.
And for three brief seconds as she fell through that trap door, she experienced the same terror her victims had felt.
Then it was over.
Quick, professional, efficient, far more merciful than she ever
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
