October 26th, Lublin prison, Poland.
An old woman named Elsa Erich walks toward the gallows.
This is the same woman who spent over a year standing in a concentration camp yard deciding which women and children would live and which would die that afternoon.
The same woman who would beat a sick prisoner for accepting a blanket, who oversaw a women’s camp inside one of the most savage killing installations in the entire history of human civilization.
And now, in the quiet interior of a Polish prison far from any crowd, she faces the rope.
Before she was arrested, she sent a letter to the Polish president begging for mercy.
She cited her small son.
She said she wanted to atone.
The president read it and rejected it without reply because what Elsa Erich did inside Majdanek concentration camp placed her beyond the reach of mercy.
And what she did will force you to confront a question that historians have wrestled with for 80 years.
How does an ordinary woman from a small German town become the person responsible for the deaths of thousands, including children she beat and sent to gas chambers while their mothers watched and screamed? Elsa Lieschen Frieda Erich was born on March 8, 1914 in Brederiche, a tiny village in the Brandenburg region of what was then the German Empire, about 100 km north of Berlin.
She was raised in an Evangelical Lutheran family.
Her name was actually misspelled in the church registry at her baptism recorded as Elsa instead of Else.
And that minor clerical error followed her everywhere, into every document, every official record, eventually into the court proceedings that would condemn her to death.
She grew up in a Germany convulsed by the aftermath of the First World War, the collapse of the Kaiser’s empire, the humiliations of Versailles, the chaos of Weimar.
She left school as a teenager and did what many working-class Germans did in the 1930s.
She found whatever work was available.
For Elsa Erich, that work was in the slaughterhouse.
She spent years in that environment before the summer of On August 15, 1940, Erich volunteered for service as a concentration camp guard at Ravensbruck.
She was 26 years old.
She volunteered.
That word deserves to sit there for a moment.
Nobody drafted her.
Nobody threatened her family.
Nobody held a gun to her head.
The concentration camp system was actively recruiting women for guard positions.
The Aufseherinnen and Elsa Erich signed up.
The pay was decent for the era.
The authority was absolute.
And Ravensbruck, at that point, was already a functioning concentration camp holding tens of thousands of women from across occupied Europe.
By 1941, she had risen to the rank of Rapportführerin, a report leader, responsible for taking roll calls, tracking prisoner counts, and reporting discrepancies to the SS command.
This was not a passive role.
Roll call at Ravensbruck could last for hours, regardless of weather.
Women stood in the cold, the rain, the heat, motionless while guards walked among them.
Prisoners who collapsed were beaten.
Prisoners who counted wrong were beaten.
The Rapportführerin was the person who set that tone, who decided how long the punishments lasted, how severe they became.
Erich did this for over a year, learning the rhythms of the system, becoming competent at managing terror as an administrative function.
Then, in October 1942, she was transferred.
Her destination was a camp that was still relatively new, still under construction, built on the southeastern edge of Lublin in occupied Poland.
The Nazis called it Konzentrationslager Lublin.
The locals had already given it a name.
They called it Majdanek.
To understand what Elsa Erich walked into in October 1942, you need to understand what Majdanek was because unlike Auschwitz, which sat in a relatively isolated rural area, Majdanek was built less than 2 miles from the center of a major city.
The residents of Lublin could see the barbed wire from the road.
They could smell the crematoria.
They knew what was inside.
That proximity made it unique and, in one sense, made its eventual liberation uniquely significant.
Majdanek began operating in October 1941 as a prisoner of war camp for Soviet captives.
The first 2,000 Soviet POWs sent there were placed in a field with no barracks, no shelter, no food, no water in the Polish winter.
Most of them died within weeks.
That was how Majdanek began.
By 1942, the SS had constructed a gas chamber, initially a makeshift wooden structure using Zyklon B, the same poison deployed at Auschwitz.
Later, they built a brick gas facility.
By October 1942, when Erich arrived, the camp was already killing people with industrial regularity.
When the first female prisoners arrived at Majdanek on October 7, 1942, the same week as Erich’s transfer, the SS installed Erich as Oberaufseherin, the senior female overseer, the top of the women’s camp hierarchy.
She brought with her approximately 20 to 30 guards from Ravensbruck, trained and transferred to staff the new women’s section.
Under her command, her deputy was a woman named Hermine Braunsteiner, who would decades later become the first Nazi war criminal extradited from the United States, having hidden in Queens, New York until a journalist found her in 1964.
Braunsteiner became notorious in her own right.
Survivors testified that she grabbed children by the hair and threw them onto trucks bound for the gas chambers, that she stomped women to death with steel-studded boots, earning her the name The Mare.
But in 1942 and 1943, Braunsteiner was Erich’s subordinate.
The system that produced The Mare was run by Erich.
The women who arrived at Majdanek in those months came from a landscape of catastrophe.
Many were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation.
Between 18,000 and 22,000 Polish Jews, including women and children, were deported to Majdanek in the spring and summer of 1943 after the ghetto uprising was crushed.
Others came from Slovakia, from Bohemia, from France, from the Netherlands.
They had already survived years of persecution, ghetto confinement, family separation, starvation.
They stepped off the transport trains into Majdanek carrying whatever they had left, which by that point was almost nothing.
The intake process was designed to strip away the last of it.
Survivor Jadwiga Wengierska testified at the Majdanek trials about what arrival looked like.
The women were ordered to undress immediately in front of male SS personnel and male prisoners employed in the bathhouse.
Resistance meant beatings.
The humiliation was not incidental.
It was structural, designed to destroy any remaining sense of personhood.
The female guards, under Erich’s authority, enforced this process.
They were the ones walking among the new arrivals.
They were the ones deciding who resisted and needed to be reminded of their position.
Children arrived with their mothers.
Majdanek registered children under the same prisoner number as their mothers.
Historian Doris Bergen, writing about the camp’s culture, documented what surviving prisoners and later investigators confirmed.
The SS contingent at Majdanek had developed a reputation even within the broader culture SS, even compared to other concentration camps for savagery.
Guards killed children in front of their mothers.
They forced prisoners into fatal sports.
The violence had a performative quality, a deliberate visibility, as though the infliction of suffering in plain sight of witnesses was part of the point.
Elsa Erich stood at the center of this system in the women’s camp.
She held the daily roll calls, hours-long exercises in domination where any deviation from silence and stillness resulted in punishment.
She assigned women to labor groups.
She coordinated with the political department and the male SS command on prisoner allocation.
And she participated in selections.
The word selection is clinical and almost antiseptic for what it actually meant.
Guards and SS officers walked among prisoners and determined, based on arbitrary criteria that changed depending on the day and the officer’s mood, which women would continue in the labor system and which would be taken to the gas chamber that afternoon.
Erich, as Oberaufseherin, was present at these selections.
She took an active part in all the major ones.
The court record from the second Majdanek trial is explicit on this point.
Her participation in the gas chamber selections was documented and corroborated by multiple witnesses.
She was not a bureaucrat who signed papers from a distance.
She was there, on the field, making choices.
One survivor testified about a moment that captured Erich’s character with almost unbearable precision.
A sick prisoner was being loaded onto a cart that would take her to the camp infirmary.
Her fellow prisoners had placed a blanket over her in the cold trying to give her something.
When Erich saw this, she approached the cart, pulled the blanket off the dying woman, lashed her with a whip, and told her not to waste hospital property.
A dying woman.
A blanket [clears throat] placed on her by someone trying to maintain a scrap of human decency.
And Erich’s response was to take the blanket and beat the woman for having received it.
This is the person who later asked a national president for mercy.
By November 1943, Majdanek had become the site of the single largest mass killing of any one day at any single concentration camp in the entire Holocaust.
On November 3, 1943, SS and police units surrounded the camp in the pre-dawn darkness.
The Jewish prisoners, separated from the non-Jewish population, were taken to field five near the crematoria and the execution ditches that prisoners had been ordered to dig days earlier under the pretense that they were anti-aircraft trenches.
Music blasted from loudspeakers across the camp, sustained for hours.
The music was there to drown out the shots and the screaming.
Before that day was over, 18,400 Jews had been machine-gunned into those trenches at Majdanek alone.
Across the Lublin district simultaneously, the total came to 43,000 in a single day, an operation the SS called Erntefest, harvest festival.
The 311 women who survived that day by being assigned to sort through the clothing of the dead were sent to Auschwitz months later.
They were gassed there.
The 25 Jews who had managed to hide during the November 3rd killings were found the next morning and shot.
By the end of Harvest Festival, Majdanek held 71 Jewish prisoners out of a total population of over 6,000.
Errich was the Oberaufseherin during all of this.
She was there for the build-up, the organization, the preparation.
The women’s camp was under her authority.
The selections she participated in contributed, prisoner by prisoner, to the population of women and children who were fed into that system.
In February 1943, she contracted typhoid, the same disease that was killing prisoners by the hundreds in the barracks she supervised, a grotesque irony, and was briefly removed from duty.
She recovered.
She returned.
In April 1944, as Soviet forces began pressing westward and the SS started evacuating Majdanek’s prisoners to camps further from the front, Errich was reassigned.
She became Oberaufseherin at Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the camp made infamous by its commandant Amon Göth.
From June 1944 to April 1945, she served at Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg.
She moved through the system carrying her rank and her methods from camp to camp.
When the war ended, she ran, but not very far.
In May 1945, British occupation authorities arrested her in Hamburg.
She was held at a war crimes internment camp at the former Dachau subcamp prisoner enclosure PWE 29, where she shared a cell with Maria Mandel, who had been the Oberaufseherin at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s women’s camp and was herself awaiting trial for crimes that would see her hanged in 1948.
From American custody, Errich was extradited to Polish authorities.
The Polish government had been building its Majdanek case since the camp’s liberation in July 1944.
When Soviet forces arrived to find the gas chambers and many of the barracks still standing, the SS retreat had been so hasty that they hadn’t managed to destroy the evidence.
Majdanek became the first major concentration camp to be liberated and it was captured nearly intact.
The ovens were still warm.
The Zyklon B pellets were still on the shelves.
The documentation was largely preserved.
Majdanek would become and remains today the best preserved example of a Nazi killing installation in the world.
The second Majdanek trial opened in Lublin on November 25th, 1946.
It ran for over a year, concluding in May 1948 before the district court delivered its verdicts.
Errich was the sole female guard from Majdanek to receive a death sentence, a fact that reflects not the absence of crimes among other female guards who served there, but the severity and leadership role that distinguished her case from the rest.
She had not been a subordinate following orders handed down from above.
She had been the one giving the orders.
She had directed the approximately 30 guards in the women’s camp.
She had run the daily operations that kept the women’s section functional as a killing machine.
The witnesses who testified against her were survivors.
They had carried what they saw inside Majdanek for years before they stood in a Lublin courtroom and named her.
They described the roll calls, the beatings, the selections, the whip.
They described children.
They described mothers.
The court record documents her direct involvement in ordering and administering beatings, in selecting prisoners for the gas chambers, in enforcing the conditions that caused deaths from starvation, exposure, and deliberate violence.
On June 10th, 1948, the court pronounced Elsa Errich guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The sentence was death by hanging.
She had four months between the sentence and its execution.
At some point during those four months, she wrote to Polish President Bolesław Bierut.
The letter asked for clemency.
She cited her young son.
She said she wanted to atone.
She wanted the president to understand that she was a mother, that she had someone who depended on her, that there was some version of her humanity that deserved to be weighed against what she had done.
President Bierut received the letter.
He rejected the request.
No reasons were provided.
None were required.
October 26th, 1948.
Inside Lublin prison, away from any crowd, away from the public spectacle of the Biskupia Góra executions two years earlier that had disturbed even the Polish clergy, Elsa Errich was hanged.
She was 34 years old, the same age as many of the women who had stood in the selection lines she walked while deciding who would live another few weeks and who would be taken to the gas chamber.
She was the only female guard from Majdanek to be executed.
Of the 1,037 known SS personnel who served at Majdanek, only 170 were ever prosecuted.
95 were convicted.
One was hanged as a woman.
The rest, the vast majority, lived out their lives without consequence.
The question that surrounds Elsa Errich’s story, as with all stories of perpetrators at this level, is the one about the space between a person and a monster.
She was born in a village in Brandenburg.
She was baptized in a Lutheran church.
She left school and went to work.
She was, by every external marker, an ordinary person from an ordinary background.
The slaughterhouse work before her SS service is often noted by historians studying female perpetrators, not because it automatically explains anything, but because it suggests a tolerance for industrial killing that may have made the transition to camp work feel less transgressive than it would have for others.
But she volunteered in 1940, before the full scale of what the camps would become was publicly known, but not before it was knowable, not before the violence of the Nazi state was visible to anyone paying attention.
She volunteered and she rose.
She became competent at her work, earned promotions, took on more responsibility, and moved from camp to camp carrying expertise in the management of confined and suffering women.
The survivors who testified against her at the second Majdanek trial did not describe a woman who seemed reluctant or who showed private distress at what she oversaw.
They described a woman who functioned, who was present, who beat a dying woman for accepting a blanket and didn’t appear to find that action remarkable.
One of the most disturbing things about the historical record of Majdanek’s female guards, Errich, Braunsteiner, and the others who served under them, is that when they were later asked to explain themselves, the explanations
were ordinary.
They had needed the income.
They had been following orders.
They had not personally operated the gas chambers.
They had been young and not understood fully what they were part of.
Errich’s letter to President Bierut takes this one step further into something almost surreal.
She had watched children be taken to their deaths.
She had participated in the selections that determined which mothers would be separated from their children at the selection line, which children would walk one direction and which would walk another, which ones would still be alive in the evening and which would not.
And then, from a prison cell awaiting execution, she invoked her own child.
She asked for mercy on the grounds of motherhood.
The president read it and said no.
Majdanek today is a museum.
It stands on the edge of Lublin, reachable by city tram.
You can walk through the barracks.
You can see the gas chambers.
You can stand in the crematorium and look at the ovens.
At the far end of the site, there is a massive stone mausoleum holding the ashes of the victims, a gray dome visible from across the city.
It is one of the few places in the world where the physical infrastructure of the Holocaust survives largely intact, where the architecture of organized mass murder can be seen rather than imagined.
In a room inside the museum, there is a display of shoes, tens of thousands of shoes taken from the prisoners who entered Majdanek and did not leave it.
Children’s shoes, leather shoes, work boots, heels, the shoes of people from two dozen countries speaking a dozen languages who were brought to a camp on the edge of Lublin and killed there.
Elsa Errich walked among those people for over a year.
She held authority over the women and children in that camp.
She selected them for death.
She beat them.
She enforced the conditions that turned the act of survival into something that required superhuman endurance every single day.
And when it was over, when the rope had been placed around her own neck, she had asked to be excused on the grounds that she had a child who loved her.
The historical record does not preserve her son’s name or what became of him or whether he ever learned in full what his mother had done inside the wire at Majdanek.
History is silent on that.
What it is not silent on is what Elsa Errich did, who she did it to, and what the district court of Lublin determined she deserved as a consequence.
The survivors who testified remembered.
They remembered her face, her voice, the whip she carried.
They remembered the sound of children being taken.
They remembered the mothers.
They remembered Errich walking among them, functional and purposeful, doing her job.
They carried that memory into a courtroom, stood in front of a judge, and said, “This is what happened.
This is what she did.
” And the court believed them.
If this history means anything, and it must mean something, it means that the ordinary background of a perpetrator is not a defense.
That competence in evil is still evil.
That the children who were taken from that camp because of the selections Elsa Erik participated in were real children with real names and real mothers who loved them.
That their deaths were not administrative outcomes.
They were murders.
And the woman who helped organize those murders asked a Polish president for mercy and was told, simply, “No.
