December 13th, 1945.
9:34 a.m.
Hameln Prison, Germany.
Elizabeth Volkenrath walks the final steps down a corridor she’s walked before during rehearsals yesterday when British executioner Albert Pierrepoint measured and weighed her to calculate the perfect drop.
She’s 26 years old.
She’s been Oberaufseherin, head female guard, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, commanding all female sections of the largest death factory in human history.
She knows exactly what awaits her at the end of this corridor because Pierrepoint explained it yesterday with clinical precision.
The execution chamber, the gallows, the noose, the drop, the break.
She’s been trying to maintain composure since guards came for her at 7:00 a.m.
But as the chamber door opens and she sees the wooden beam, sees the noose hanging from the trapdoor, her legs buckle.
Guards support her under the arms.
She’s crying, begging.
The arrogance she showed at trial, the cold denial of her crimes, it evaporates in seconds.
Pierrepoint steps forward.
He’s done this hundreds of times.
Speed is mercy.
Hood overhead.
4 seconds.
Noose around neck.
3 seconds.
Position on trap.
2 seconds.
Lever.
The trapdoor opens.
Elizabeth Volkenrath drops 7 ft 6 in.
Her neck breaks with an audible crack.
She’s dead in seconds.
The first woman executed at Hameln.
The first of three female guards to die today.
Her body hangs for the regulation hour before being cut down.
And here’s what will shock you most about why this 26-year-old former hairdresser had to hang.
The evidence against her wasn’t one crime or 10 or even 100.
It was systematic participation in genocide.
4 years of selecting prisoners for gas chambers.
4 years of beating women to death.
Four years of overseeing three hangings personally.
Four years of transforming from an ordinary working class German girl into a mass murderer.
This is why Elisabeth Volkenrath had to hang.
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September 5th, 1919.
Elisabeth Müllau is born in Schönau under Cottbus, Silesia, now part of Poland.
Her family is ordinary working class German.
No obvious signs of the monster she’ll become.
She leaves school at 14 or 15, the standard age for working class girls in interwar Germany.
She trains as a hairdresser, learns to cut and style women’s hair, works in salons.
It’s respectable work, modest but steady.
By age 20, she’s an ungelernte Hilfskraft, an unskilled worker living an unremarkable life in Nazi Germany.
Then in October 1941, at age 22, Elisabeth Müllau volunteers to become a concentration camp guard.
She’s not conscripted.
She’s not forced.
She actively seeks employment with the SS.
Why? We’ll never know for certain.
Maybe she needs money.
Maybe she’s attracted to power.
Maybe she believes Nazi Weltanschauung ideology.
Whatever her motivation, she joins the SS Gefolga, the auxiliary organization for female guards, and reports to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbrück is Nazi Germany’s primary women’s camp, located about 90 km north of Berlin.
It opens in May 1939 and becomes the training center for female guards who’ll staff camps across the Reich.
The conditions there are brutal by design.
Prisoners are starved, worked to death, beaten regularly, subjected to medical experiments.
Between 1939 and 1945, approximately 130,000 women passed through Ravensbruck.
At least 30,000 are murdered or die from disease and starvation.
This is where Elisabeth learns to be a guard.
This is where she’s trained to view prisoners as subhuman.
This is where she perfects the techniques of terror that she’ll use for the next 4 years.
She serves at Ravensbruck for about 18 months, from October 1941 to March 1943.
No detailed records survive about what she did there, but we know she was competent enough to be promoted and transferred.
In March 1943, she’s sent to Auschwitz II Birkenau, the extermination camp adjacent to the main Auschwitz complex.
And it’s at Auschwitz that Elisabeth Muhlau becomes Elisabeth Volkenrath.
She meets SS Rottenführer Heinz Volkenrath, who’s been working as a Blockführer, block leader, at Auschwitz since 1941.
They marry in 1943.
She’s 24 years old, a concentration camp guard marrying another concentration camp guard.
They’re building a life together in the pit of gas chambers that murder thousands daily.
But wait until you hear what Elisabeth does at Auschwitz.
Because her crimes there will seal her fate.
Auschwitz Birkenau in 1943 and 1944 is the epicenter of the Holocaust.
The gas chambers and crematoria operated maximum capacity.
Trains arrive daily carrying Jews from across occupied Europe.
The selection process happens on the platform.
Left means forced labor, right means immediate death in gas chambers.
Over a million people are murdered at Auschwitz, most of them in Birkenau’s four gas chamber crematorium complexes.
And Elisabeth Volkenrath participates actively in this machinery of death.
As an Aufseherin guard, she supervises female prisoners.
She beats them with rubber truncheons.
She reports infractions that result in punishment or death.
And crucially, she participates in selections.
Selections are the heart of Auschwitz’s murder system.
Periodically, SS doctors and guards walk through the barracks identifying prisoners too weak, too sick, or too old to continue with slave labor.
Those selected are sent to block 25, the death block, where they wait to be transported to gas chambers.
The selections happen constantly.
Some days dozens are selected.
Some days hundreds.
And Vulcanrath is there pointing at women, deciding who lives and who dies.
Survivor testimony is consistent on this point.
Elizabeth Vulcanrath actively participated in selections.
She didn’t just assist SS doctors, she made selections herself.
She walked through barracks, looked at emaciated women barely clinging to life, and pointed, “You, you, you.
” Those women were dead within hours.
In November 1944, Vulcanrath is promoted to Oberaufseherin, the highest position a woman can hold in Auschwitz.
She’s now responsible for all female sections of the camp.
She commands hundreds of guards.
She oversees tens of thousands of prisoners.
She’s 25 years old with absolute power over life and death.
And survivor testimony indicates she loves it.
She doesn’t show mercy.
She doesn’t try to minimize suffering.
She exceeds what’s required of her.
Witnesses describe her beating prisoners with rubber truncheons until they collapse unconscious.
They describe her personally overseeing three executions by hanging, watching as condemned prisoners are hanged from gallows erected specifically for public executions designed to terrorize other prisoners.
January 1945.
Soviet forces are advancing toward Auschwitz.
The SS begins evacuating the camp.
Most prisoners are forced on death marches west.
Some are shipped to other camps.
Elisabeth Volkenrath is transferred to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, where she arrives February 5th, 1945.
And even in those final months of the war, even knowing Germany is losing, she continues her brutality.
On April 14th, 1945, 1 day before British forces liberate Bergen-Belsen, Volkenrath is witnessed beating a prisoner with her fists so violently that the woman collapses and doesn’t move again.
1 day before liberation, she’s still torturing people.
She can’t stop.
The cruelty has become her nature.
April 15th, 1945.
British troops of the 11th Armoured Division reach Bergen-Belsen.
What they find defies comprehension.
13,000 corpses lying unburied.
60,000 prisoners barely alive.
Typhus spreading unchecked.
The stench of death overwhelming.
The camp commandant, Josef Kramer, meets liberators in uniform, treating the takeover as routine administrative transfer.
And Elisabeth Volkenrath is still there, still serving as a guard, still wearing her SS uniform.
British forces arrest her immediately along with Kramer, Irma Grese, Johanna Bormann, and dozens of other SS personnel.
They’re held pending trial for war crimes.
September 17th, 1945.
The Bergen-Belsen trial opens at a gymnasium in Lüneburg.
It’s officially called the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others.
The defendants include 45 former SS men, women, and kapos from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
Elisabeth Volkenrath sits in the dock wearing number seven on her chest.
She’s charged under two counts.
Crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen and crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Most defendants face only one count or the other.
Volkenrath faces both because she worked at both camps, and the evidence against her from both locations is overwhelming.
The prosecution presents testimony from over 100 witnesses.
Survivors from Auschwitz describe Volkenrath participating in selections.
They describe watching her point at women who were thus sent to Block 25 and never seen again.
They describe her beating prisoners with rubber truncheons, striking them across the back, the shoulders, the head.
They describe her supervising hangings, watching executions with cold indifference.
Survivors from Bergen-Belsen describe her continued brutality even in those final weeks.
The testimony is consistent across dozens of witnesses who had no contact with each other.
This isn’t mistaken identity.
This isn’t exaggeration.
This is documented, corroborated evidence of sustained criminality over 4 years.
Volkenrath’s defense is denial.
She admits to working at the camps.
She admits to her positions.
But she denies participating in selections.
She claims she only attended roll calls where SS doctors made the actual selections.
She claims she never knew what happened to selected prisoners, never knew about gas chambers, never participated in the murder process.
When asked about beatings, she admits to slapping prisoners with her hand but denies ever using a rubber truncheon or any other weapon.
When asked who was responsible for conditions at Auschwitz, she blames commandant Rudolf Höss and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
She was just a guard doing her job.
She didn’t make policy.
She wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust.
The tribunal doesn’t believe her.
The evidence contradicts every claim.
Multiple witnesses specifically identify her using rubber truncheons.
Multiple witnesses describe her selecting prisoners independently of SS doctors.
Her signature appears on camp documents.
Her promotion to Oberaufseherin proves she wasn’t some low-level guard following orders reluctantly.
She was senior leadership actively participating in camp operations.
And her behavior on April 14th, 1945, beating a prisoner to collapse one day before liberation, proves she wasn’t coerced or reluctant.
She was enthusiastic.
She enjoyed the power.
She exceeded what was required of her.
November 17th, 1945.
After 2 months of testimony, the tribunal delivers verdicts.
Of 45 defendants, 14 are acquitted.
19 receive prison sentences.
And 11 are sentenced to death by hanging.
Elisabeth Volkenrath is found guilty on both counts, crimes at Auschwitz and crimes at Bergen-Belsen.
She’s sentenced to death.
So are Josef Kramer, Irma Grese, Johanna Bormann, Dr.
Fritz Klein, and six men.
They’re given the right to appeal to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
All 11 appeal.
All 11 are denied.
The executions are scheduled for December 13th at Hameln Prison.
Volkenrath spends her final weeks in a cell at Hameln.
She’s allowed to write letters.
She’s visited by clergy.
She has time to reflect on her life, on her choices, on what she’s done.
Does she feel remorse? We have no record of genuine repentance.
Her appeal focused on legal technicalities and claims that witnesses exaggerated.
She never admitted the full scope of her crimes, never acknowledged that participating in genocide was wrong.
Never expressed sympathy for her victims.
She maintained her innocence to the end, insisting she was just following orders, just doing her job, just a guard in a system she didn’t control.
December 12th, 1945.
The day before execution, Albert Pierrepoint arrives at Hamelin.
He’s Britain’s chief executioner, summoned from England specifically for this mass execution.
He’s 40 years old, has hanged over 200 people, is known for speed and precision.
A Pierrepoint execution takes under 10 seconds from entering the chamber to dropping through the trap.
He calculates everything meticulously.
Weight, height, drop distance needed to break the neck cleanly.
Around 8:00 p.
m.
on December 12th, each condemned prisoner is brought to him individually to be weighed and measured.
Elizabeth Volkenrath, 5 ft 3 in weighing 130 lb, calculated drop 7 ft 6 in.
She knows what’s coming.
In less than 24 hours, she’ll be dead.
That final night accounts differ on how the condemned behave.
Some claim Irma Grese, Volkenrath, and Johanna Bormann sang Nazi songs and laughed, maintaining defiance to the end.
Other accounts suggest fear and despair.
Probably both are true at different moments as the night passes and dawn approaches.
The arrogance probably cycles with terror.
The denial probably alternates with crushing realization.
By dawn, when guards come for them, the condemned know death is minutes away, and that knowledge breaks even the strongest.
December 13th, 1945.
The executions begin at 9:00 a.
m.
The women are hanged individually to ensure proper execution.
At 9:34 a.
m.
precisely, guards enter Elizabeth Volkenrath’s cell.
She’s been waiting since 7:00 a.
m.
sitting alone with her thoughts, knowing this moment was coming.
When the door opens, she stands.
Her legs shake.
Guards escort her down the corridor toward the execution chamber.
And as she sees the gallows through the door, sees the noose hanging from the beam, she breaks completely.
The woman who showed no mercy to thousands of prisoners, who participated in selections with cold efficiency, who beat women to collapse.
She starts crying, begging, pleading for her life.
Guards have to support her.
She can barely walk.
Pierrepoint is ready.
He’s positioned himself to minimize her suffering.
The moment she enters the chamber, he moves with practiced efficiency.
White hood over her head.
4 seconds.
Noose around her neck positioned precisely at the left side.
3 seconds.
Adjust her position on the trap.
2 seconds.
Step back.
Pull lever.
The trapdoor opens.
Volkenrath drops 7 ft 6 in.
The rope tightens.
Her neck breaks with an audible crack.
She’s dead in seconds, unconscious instantly.
Her body’s final convulsions just autonomic response.
At 9:34 a.
m.
on a December 13th, 1945, Elizabeth Volkenrath is dead, age 26, executed for crimes against humanity.
The body hangs for the regulation hour while a doctor confirms death.
Then it’s cut down and placed in a coffin.
The execution continues.
At 10:03 a.
m.
, Irma Grese.
At 10:38 a.
m.
, Johanna Bormann.
By afternoon, all 11 condemned from the Belsen trial are dead.
Their bodies are buried in the prison courtyard without ceremony.
No markers, no memorials.
In 1954, the bodies are moved to Amwell Cemetery in Hameln and buried in an unmarked section, an empty field that becomes overgrown with grass.
Elizabeth Volkenrath’s grave has no stone, no marker, nothing to identify it.
She’s erased from history except as a warning.
So, why did Elizabeth Volkenrath have to hang? The simple answer is that she participated in genocide.
She worked at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen over 4 years.
She selected thousands of prisoners for gas chambers.
She beat women with rubber truncheons.
She supervised executions.
She was promoted to the highest position a woman could hold at Auschwitz, commanding all female sections.
She showed no mercy, no compassion, no humanity.
And she continued her brutality until the day before liberation, still beating prisoners when she knew the war was lost, still torturing people when British tanks were literally at the gates.
But there’s a deeper answer.
Elisabeth Volkenrath had to hang because she represented something particularly disturbing about the Holocaust, the participation of ordinary people in genocide.
She was a hairdresser.
She came from a working-class family.
Nothing in her background predicted she’d become a mass murderer, but given the opportunity, given power over helpless people, given an ideology that dehumanized them, she embraced cruelty.
She didn’t just follow orders reluctantly.
She volunteered for the job.
She sought promotion.
She exceeded what was required of her.
She was enthusiastic about her work.
This makes her more dangerous than an aberrant psychopath because it suggests that under the right circumstances, ordinary people can become mass murderers.
That cruelty doesn’t require unique pathology.
That systematic evil can be committed by someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone who cut hair for a living before joining the SS.
Volkenrath had to hang not just to punish her crimes, but to affirm that when ordinary people embrace genocide, they face consequences.
That participating in the Holocaust has a price.
That claiming you were just following orders doesn’t work when you volunteered for the position and exceeded every order.
Her execution also served British justice interests.
The Belsen trial was one of the first major war crimes prosecutions.
It established precedents for Nuremberg and subsequent trials.
It demonstrated that Britain would prosecute Holocaust perpetrators under military law.
And it showed that female perpetrators face the same accountability as men.
That gender didn’t shield you from consequences for participating in genocide.
Of the 45 defendants, 16 were women.
Three women were sentenced to death.
The message was clear.
Women who committed war crimes would hang just like men.
Fact that Volkenrath broke down before execution, that she cried and begged, that she had to be supported by guards, this matters.
Because it proves that the arrogance she showed at trial was performance.
When death was abstract, a distant possibility she could deny, she maintained composure.
But when death was real, when she stood before the gallows knowing she had minutes to live, the facade crumbled.
She wanted mercy she never showed.
She wanted compassion she never displayed.
And she didn’t get it.
She hanged at 9:34 a.
m.
The first of three women executed that day, dying afraid, dying begging, dying with no more dignity than the thousands she’d sent to gas chambers.
Never forget that Elisabeth Volkenrath participated in selecting thousands of prisoners for gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Never forget that she beat women with rubber truncheons at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Never forget that she supervised three executions personally.
Never forget that she continued brutalizing prisoners until one day before British liberation.
Never forget that she was 22 years old when she volunteered for this work, 26 when she hanged for it, spending four years of her life actively participating in the Holocaust.
And never forget that she came from an ordinary background, worked as a hairdresser, showed no obvious signs of evil until she was given power over helpless people, and discovered she enjoyed inflicting suffering.
The lesson of Elizabeth Volkenrath isn’t about one woman or one execution.
It’s about the capacity for evil that exists in ordinary people.
It’s about how someone with no particular pathology, no history of violence, can become a mass murderer when given the right circumstances.
Power without accountability, an ideology that dehumanizes victims, a system that rewards cruelty.
Volkenrath had to hang because her crimes were so extensive, so sustained, so deliberate that lesser punishment would mock justice.
She spent four years facilitating genocide and she selected thousands for death.
She beat hundreds.
She supervised executions.
She showed no mercy until she stood before her own execution and discovered what it feels like to know death is coming and there’s no escape.
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