The Brutal EXECUTION of Elisabeth Becker *Warning Reall Footage

Picture this, a summer afternoon, July 4th, 1946. The sky over Jerpin Surs, scarless and burning blue. Church bells echo in the distance. Children sit on their father’s shoulders. Women press handkerchiefs to their faces. Old men stand perfectly still, hats removed, eyes locked forward.

 200,000 people have gathered on a single hill. They are not here for a parade. They are not here for a festival. They are here to watch 11 people die and somewhere in that crowd, survivors. People who entered a concentration camp as healthy human beings and crawled out as skeletons. People who watched their children be selected, loaded on the trucks and driven away forever.

 People who had spent the last year asking one single question, will they actually pay for what they did to us? Today, they get their answer. You are watching Nazi History Profiles, the channel that refuses to let history be buried. If you are new here, subscribe right now and hit the bell. Every video on this channel is a promise to the victims that the world will not forget their name.

Now, let’s get into it. To understand Elizabeth Becker, you first have to understand the world she was born into because monsters are rarely born. They are manufactured. She came into the world on July 20th, 1923 in a small town called Neutiech inside the Free City of Danzig, a semi-independent territory that existed in a kind of political limbo after the First World War.

 Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the victorious Allied Powers, the United States, Great Britain and France, stripped defeated Germany of territory, military power and dignity. Danzig, a majority German port city on the Baltic Sea, was torn away from Germany and placed under international supervision. Germany was forced to watch as a city it considered deeply its own was handed to an international committee.

 The humiliation never healed. It festered for 15 years. Then in January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and that wound became a weapon. By May 1933, the Nazi Party had taken political control of Danzig. Anti-Polish hostility, already simmering beneath the surface, exploded into open policy. Polish children were refused admission to public schools.

 Polish businesses were strangled out of existence. Poles were fired from German companies and replaced overnight. They were banned from restaurants, public spaces, cultural institutions. The Polish language itself, spoken by families for generations, was outlawed in public. To simply speak your mother tongue on the street was an act of resistance that could get you arrested.

 This was the world young Elizabeth Becker grew up in, not  on the edges of it, at the center of it. Here is a detail that most people overlook when they talk about Elizabeth Becker and it is important. She was not a hardened criminal before the war. She was not someone who showed early signs of violence or cruelty.

 She was, by all external appearances, an ordinary young German woman. At 13, she was enrolled in the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Hitler Youth, led by Nazi Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach. These were not optional after-school programs. They were the primary indoctrination machine of the Third Reich, designed to produce a generation of young Germans who would obey without question and serve without hesitation.

Girls were taught physical discipline, racial ideology, total loyalty to Hitler and the belief that Jewish people, Polish people and other groups were sub- human enemies of Germany. They marched in rallies. They sang Nazi hymns. They were told they were the future of a thousand-year empire. At the infamous 1936 Nuremberg Rally, over 100,000 young participants gathered in a sea of red and black.

 The atmosphere was electric, almost hypnotic. Historians who studied the rally describe young attendees as genuinely euphoric, weeping with devotion when Hitler appeared. 900 girls between 15 and 18 years of age returned home from that rally pregnant. Pre-marital sex was quietly encouraged among Aryan youth in the name of producing the next generation of the Reich.

 In German classrooms, portraits of Adolf Hitler hung on every wall like religious icons. Textbooks had been rewritten from scratch to teach children that anti-Semitism was science, that militarism was virtue and that obedience to the state was the highest moral calling. An entire generation had its moral compass surgically removed and replaced with a swastika.

 Elizabeth Becker was one of millions shaped by that machine. By 1938, she was working as a tramway conductor in Danzig, an ordinary young woman riding an ordinary city tram through a city that had already decided some of its residents were less than human. She was 16 years old when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939 and the Second World War began.

 The same month the war erupted, German authorities established the Stutthof concentration camp in a wooded, isolated area roughly 22 miles east of Danzig. It began modestly, a civilian internment camp under the local Danzig police chief, designed specifically to eliminate the Polish intellectual and civic leadership. Priests, professors, politicians, community organizers.

 The Nazis had prepared lists of names before the first shot was even fired. By January 1942, Stutthof had been absorbed into the formal SS concentration camp network. It expanded aggressively. A second camp was built alongside the original. 30 new barracks surrounded by electrified barbed wire fencing. In 1943, a crematorium was constructed, then a gas chamber.

 That gas chamber had a maximum operational capacity of 150 people per execution cycle. In June 1944, Stutthof was officially incorporated into the Holocaust, the Nazi regime’s coordinated industrial program to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe. Gassings with Zyklon B began immediately. 4,000 people, including women and children, were killed in that chamber before the camp was evacuated.

 Camp doctors performed lethal phenol injections directly into the hearts of prisoners deemed too sick to work. Typhus epidemics tore through the overcrowded barracks in 1942 and again in 1944, killing hundreds who had somehow survived everything else. The Stutthof system eventually expanded to 105 subcamps spread across northern and central German-occupied Poland, a vast network of forced labor and slow death.

 As many as 100,000 human beings passed through it. 60,000 of them did not survive. By mid-1944, 23,566 Jewish prisoners, among them 21,817 women, had been transferred into Stutthof from Auschwitz alone. The camp was overwhelmed. The SS was running out of personnel to run it. So, they did something that reveals just how ideologically committed they were to the machinery of murder.

 They recruited ordinary women from Danzig and the surrounding cities to serve as camp guards. In the early autumn of 1944, Elizabeth Becker, by then working as an agricultural assistant in Danzig, accepted the assignment. On September 5th, 1944, she arrived at the Stutthof SK3 women’s subcamp as a guard. She was 21 years old.

 What happened next was not the story of a soldier following orders reluctantly. It was the story of someone who discovered that cruelty came naturally to her. Becker beat with her bare hands. She carried a whip and used it without provocation. When her mood was particularly dark, and survivors testified that her mood was often very dark, she would force female inmates face first into the mud and hold them there.

 Some she beat to death on the spot. Others she clubbed unconscious and left where they fell. Now, here is the detail that stops people cold every time they hear it. The children. When transports arrived at the camp, families ripped from their homes, mothers still holding their children’s hands, Becker would walk the line. She would look.

 She would point. And the children she pointed at, along with their mothers in some cases, were separated from the group and sent to the gas chamber. She did not look away. She did not hesitate. She performed these selections with the casual efficiency of someone sorting paperwork. She personally selected at least 30 female prisoners for gassing, a number she later admitted in court before attempting to retract her confession.

 Survivors who testified against her described a woman who seemed to enjoy her work. By January 1945, the Soviet Red Army was advancing from the east at terrifying speed. The SS command gave the evacuation order. Nearly 50,000 prisoners were still alive inside the Stutthof system at that point. What followed was one of the most brutal episodes in the entire history of the concentration camp system.

 Thousands of prisoners were marched in savage winter conditions. Temperatures far below freezing, minimal clothing, no food. Thousands died on the roads. Approximately 5,000 prisoners from various Stutthof subcamps were marched to the shore of the Baltic Sea, forced into the freezing water and machine-gunned. The water turned red.

The bodies floated. Advancing Soviet forces eventually cut off the westward retreat and the surviving prisoners were driven back toward Stutthof in a second murderous march. In late April 1945, with the camp completely encircled, the final prisoners were evacuated by sea. Hundreds were again pushed into the water and shot.

 When Soviet troops liberated Stutthof on May 9th, 1945, they found approximately 100 survivors. People who had managed to hide during the chaos of the final evacuation. It is estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in every two people still alive at the start of the evacuation, died during the evacuation alone.

 Elizabeth Becker did not stay to face any of it. She fled in January 1945, slipping back to her hometown of Neuteich. Shortly after, she contracted typhus and was admitted to a hospital in Danzig. It was there, in a hospital bed, that Polish authorities found her on April 13th, 1945. She was placed under arrest.

 The first Stutthof trial opened on April 25th, 1946 in Gdańsk before a Soviet-Polish special criminal court. 13 former camp officials and guards faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. What struck journalists and observers in the courtroom was not the weight of the evidence. It was the attitude of the defendants.

 The five female defendants, women who had operated inside one of the deadliest camps in the entire Nazi network, giggled. They whispered to each other. They smirked at the proceedings as though the whole affair was an inconvenience, not a reckoning. Witnesses described them as visibly bored during the testimony of survivors. Becker initially confessed to personally selecting at least 30 prisoners for the gas chamber.

 Then she recanted, claiming the confession had been forced out of her through beatings. But survivor after survivor took the stand. The testimonies were consistent, specific, and devastating. The court deliberated. On May 31st, 1946, 11 of the 13 defendants were sentenced to death. Elisabeth Becker was among them. The smirk disappeared.

 She wept openly in the courtroom as the sentence was read aloud. She wrote desperate pleading letters to Polish President Bolesław Bierut begging for mercy. She argued she had not been as severe as co-defendants Gerda Steinhoff or Jenny Wanda Barkmann. She pointed out she had served less time at the camp than any of the others.

 The court itself had even recommended commuting her sentence to 15 years. President Bierut reviewed the case. He reviewed the evidence. He reviewed the 60,000 dead. He denied the pardon. July 4th, 1946, 3 days before the execution, newspapers across Poland published the date, time, and location.

 Workplaces announced the day off. Employers organized transportation. People traveled hours to be there. By 5:00 p.m., the hill was a sea of human beings. 200,000 people stood shoulder to shoulder in the blazing summer heat. Security forces, militia and army alike, struggled to maintain any kind of order. Genuinely afraid the crowd would overwhelm the gallows before the executions could proceed. At exactly 5:00 p.m.

, 11 open military trucks rolled onto the execution ground. Each truck carried one condemned prisoner, hands and feet bound, standing on the tailboard. Six men, five women. Former Stutthof prisoners wearing the same striped uniforms they had worn inside the camp, volunteered to serve as executioners. They walked up to each condemned person and placed a simple cord noose around their neck.

 This was the short drop method. There would be no long fall, no broken neck, no  instant death. Each of the 11 would strangle slowly. It would take between 10 and 20 agonizing minutes for each one to die. The first truck carried Johann Pauls, the former commander of Stutthof’s guard force.

 As the engine started and the truck eased forward, Pauls managed to scream, “Heil Hitler!” before the rope pulled taut and his voice was cut off forever. The crowd answered him with a roar of fury that shook the hill. One by one, the trucks moved. One by one, the bodies began the convulsing death witnesses recorded as the rope danced. When one truck’s engine stalled and failed to start, a former Stutthof prisoner stepped forward without hesitation and shoved the condemned off the platform himself.

 From the crowd, “For our husbands! For our children!” When the last of the 11 went still, security forces allowed the crowd forward. People surged to the gallows. They tore buttons from the uniforms. They cut away fabric. Some struck the bodies with their hands and feet. Eventually, the crowd was pushed back by soldiers.

 The 11 bodies were cut down and loaded onto a transport. They were taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk and used as cadavers in anatomy classes. No tombstones. No memorials. No mourners. Nobody cried for Elisabeth Becker. 100,000 people passed through Stutthof. 60,000 of them were murdered. Of the roughly 2,000 SS personnel who worked there, fewer than 80 were ever brought to trial.

 That number should stay with you. Fewer than 80. Justice, when it finally came to Biskupia Górka Hill on that July afternoon, was incomplete, imperfect, but it was real. And for the 200,000 people who stood on that hill watching the last chapter close on 11 of history’s most callous killers, it felt for just one afternoon like enough.

 This is what Nazi History Profiles is built for. Not to glorify. Not to sensationalize. To remember accurately, unflinchingly, and completely so that the world is never again caught looking away. If this story meant something to you, smash that like button. Subscribe  to Nazi History Profiles right now. And tell us in the comments, do you believe justice was truly served on that hill in 1946, or did these criminals get off too easily? We read every comment.

 We will see you in the next episode.