July 4th, 1946. Biskupia Górka Hill, Gdańsk, Poland. 5:00 in the afternoon. The crowd that has gathered on this hill, estimates range widely from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand, watches a row of T-shaped gallows that have been specially constructed along the hilltop. Military trucks are parked beneath each noose.
The condemned will stand in the truck beds, be noosed, and then the trucks will drive away, leaving them to strangle at the end of short ropes that will provide no neck-breaking drop, no instantaneous death, only the slow compression of the airway and the blood vessels and the gradual extinction of consciousness while the crowd watches.
The first truck pulls away at 5:00 precisely. Jenny Wanda Barkmann is the first to be dropped. She is 24 years old. She came from Hamburg. The prisoners at Stutthof concentration camp called her the beautiful specter, not because she was beautiful in any way that comforted them, but because her physical attractiveness made her cruelty more shocking, more surreal, more difficult to process.
She had selected women and children for the gas chamber. She had beaten prisoners to death. She had moved through the women’s camp at Stutthof with the absolute authority of someone who understood that nobody there could stop her doing anything she chose to do. At her trial, she had changed her hairstyle every day.
She had flirted with the prison guards. She had been seen arranging her hair while witnesses testified about what she had done. When the death sentence was pronounced, she delivered what has become the most chilling post-war courtroom statement in the historical record of the Stutthof trials.
“Life is indeed a pleasure,” she told the court, “and pleasures are usually short.” She is the first to be dropped on this July afternoon. The truck drives away. The rope pulls tight. In the documentary photographs taken by military photographers who have positioned themselves at the execution site, she is still alive in the image captured in those first seconds, visibly struggling.
The short drop having produced strangulation rather than the instantaneous death she might have received from a properly calculated long drop. Next to her in the photograph, Ewa Paradies is being prepared. Down the row, other condemned are at various stages of the process. Some already suspended, some not yet dropped. The staggered nature of the execution meaning that the later condemned watched the earlier ones die before their own turn came.
By the time the sun sets on July 4th, 1946, five women from Stutthof’s guard staff will have died on this hill. And the story of who these women were, what they did inside Stutthof and how they ended on that hilltop is one of the most comprehensive records that the historical archive provides of how ordinary women became instruments of mass murder.
And what accountability looked like when the world finally caught up with them. Subscribe, because this story forces the most uncomfortable question in the entire history of Nazi war crimes. Not how the ideology produced male monsters, which has been examined extensively, but how it produced female ones.
And what the difference between those two things reveals about the nature of the system itself. Stutthof concentration camp sits 36 km east of Gdansk, where the Vistula Delta meets the Baltic Sea. It was the first camp established by the Nazis on Polish territory, operational from September 2nd, 1939, one day after the invasion of Poland began.
For its first years, it functioned primarily as a detention facility for Polish civilians and political prisoners. That changed catastrophically in the summer of 1944, when the Soviet advance through the Baltic states forced the SS to evacuate their eastern camp network. More than 50,000 Jewish prisoners flooded into Stutthof in the months between June and October, 1944.
The camp’s infrastructure, barracks, sanitation, food supply, could not accommodate a fraction of this number. Typhus swept through the population in waves. The death rate in December 1944 alone approached 9% of the entire prisoner population in a single month. Into this situation, in August 1944, the SS began deploying trained female guards.
The Aufseherinnen, female overseers, had been a feature of the camp system since Ravensbruck’s establishment in 1939, but Stutthof’s expansion created urgent demand for them in numbers. Recruitment campaigns reached into the cities and towns of the German-speaking Baltic region, targeting women with no particular qualifications required beyond willingness and proximity.
The training period was brief, a matter of weeks at most. What was trained was not skill, but attitude. The operational assumption that the women on the other side of the wire were not entitled to the considerations that would normally govern the treatment of human beings in distress.
A gas chamber was operational at Stutthof from mid-1944 using Zyklon B, the same pesticide deployed industrially at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Camp doctors administered lethal phenol injections directly into the hearts of patients in the infirmary. The infrastructure of organized mass murder was in place before the female guards arrived.
What the Aufseherinnen were recruited to manage was not just the camp’s security perimeter, but the daily experience of the tens of thousands of women who had been designated for destruction by starvation, disease, or the gas chamber, and who had to be kept compliant, productive when possible, and controlled at every moment in between.
The five women who would die on Biskupia Gorka Hill on July 4th, 1946 had arrived at Stutthof through different paths, at different times, with different backgrounds. What they shared was the authority that the SS structure placed in the hands of anyone willing to wear the uniform and enforce the rules.
Jenny Wanda Barkmann had grown up in Hamburg. Born on May 30th, 1922, she was 22 years old when she volunteered as an Aufseherin at Stutthof’s SK 3 women’s subcamp in 1944. Before Stutthof, she appears to have done ordinary civilian work. Nothing in her background predicted what she became inside the camp.
Survivor testimonies from the women who lived through the SK 3 section described Barkmann as actively brutal, not reluctantly compliant, not passive within the system, but someone who used the authority the camp structure offered with enthusiasm and without apparent restraint. She beat prisoners. She participated in selections, walking among the women and determining which ones would be taken to the gas chamber.
She was so consistently and gratuitously cruel that the prisoners gave her a name that captured the dissonance between how she appeared and what she was. The beautiful specter, a ghost in attractive form, a presence that brought death. Gerda Steinhoff had been born on January 29th, 1922 in Danzig-Langfuhr, the Gdansk suburb that was at the time a German majority city within the Free City of Danzig.
She had worked as a housemaid on a farm in Tiegenhagen as a teenager, then in a bakery in Danzig, and later as a tramway conductor. She married in 1944 and had a child. In October 1944, she joined the Stutthof camp staff in response to the Nazi call for new guards, becoming a Blockleiter and Blockführer in the SK 3 women’s camp.
The speed of her advancement within the camp hierarchy was notable. By October 31st, 1944, only 30 days after joining, she had been promoted to SS-Oberaufseherin, senior overseer, and assigned to the Danzig Holm subcamp. Promotion in the SS guard structure rewarded compliance, effectiveness, and the willingness to use authority without hesitation.
Steinhoff received commendations from the regime. She participated in selections. Prisoner testimonies placed her at the moments when women were chosen for the gas chambers and administered punishments. By December 1944, she was reassigned back to the main Stutthof camp as one of its senior female authorities.
Wanda Klaf had been born Wanda Kalacinski on March 6th, 1922 in Danzig. Her father was a railway worker. She had finished school in 1938 and worked in a jam factory until 1942. She married Willy Gapes and became a housewife. Then in 1944 joined the SS staff at the Stutthof satellite camp at Praust, moving later to the Russoschin subcamp.
She contracted typhoid during her service and was hospitalized in Danzig where Polish police arrested her on June 11th, 1945. At her trial, Klau did not attempt the strategic denial and minimization that characterized some of the other defendants. She said on the record in front of the court something that has been preserved in the trial documentation precisely because of its extraordinary candor.
“I am very intelligent and very devoted to my work in the camps. I struck at least two prisoners every day. This was not a confession extracted under pressure. It was a statement delivered apparently as a form of pride. She had done her job. She had been devoted to it. The striking of prisoners was in her self-understanding professional conduct.
Elizabeth Becker had been born on July 20th, 1923 in Neuteich, a village in the Free City of Danzig. She was 22 years old at the time of the Biskupia Gorka executions, the youngest of the five women executed that day. She had arrived at Stutthof’s SK3 women’s camp in September 1944 and served there until January 15th, 1945 when she fled as Soviet forces approached and returned to Neuteich.
Polish police arrested her on April 13th, 1945 3 months after her flight. At the trial, Becker initially made a confession that proved her undoing. She admitted to select at least 30 female prisoners for what was designated as the labor pool, selections that in practice determined who would be gassed and who would be kept for work. She later attempted to retract this confession claiming she had not known the women she selected would be gassed, that the selection was framed to her as separating the fit from the unfit for labor. The court did not accept the
retraction. The selections happened. The women died. Becker had done the selecting. Ewa Paradies, whose story has been told in detail separately in this series, was born on December 17th, 1920, and had arrived at Stutthof’s SK3 subcamp in August 1944. Survivor testimonies described her as aggressive and volatile, administering beatings during roll calls and work details, and participating in the selections through which prisoners were designated for the gas chamber.
She fled the camp during the January 1945 evacuation, was captured in Lębork in May 1945, and was brought to trial alongside the other Stutthof defendants. The trial that brought these five women to Biskupia Górka was the first of four Stutthof trials conducted in Poland in 1946 and 1947. It was held by the Joint Soviet-Polish Special Criminal Court in Gdańsk between April 25th and May 31st, 1946. 13 defendants sat in the dock.
Commandant Johann Pauls, five female guards, five male kapos, and two additional male defendants. All 13 were found guilty. 11 received death sentences. Two received prison terms. The trial record documents the behaviors of these women in the specific, concrete language of witness testimony: who struck whom, when, with what, producing what injuries.
The clinical precision of the trial record is itself a form of historical evidence of the bureaucratic thoroughness with which the camp system had operated, and of the survivor community’s ability to recall and name specific acts of specific individuals years after the events. These were not abstract charges against a category of person.
They were specific charges against specific women whose names the survivors remembered and whose faces they could identify in the courtroom. During the proceedings, observers recorded details about the defendant’s courtroom behavior that have been cited repeatedly in historical accounts of the trial precisely because they illuminate the gap between the gravity of the charges and the defendant’s apparent relationship to those charges.
Barkmann changed her hairstyle every day. She flirted with the prison guards. She was observed arranging her hair while witnesses testified about the deaths she had caused. She giggled during interruptions in the proceedings. The other female defendants showed similar patterns of what contemporary observers could only describe as indifference, not the stunned grief-struck indifference of someone overwhelmed by the horror of what they were hearing, but the casual indifference of someone who could not find a reason to take the proceedings
entirely seriously. This behavioral pattern has been analyzed by his historians and psychologists studying the trial record. The most frequent interpretation is that these women genuinely did not believe the legal proceedings would result in their deaths. They had spent months in institutional environments, the camp system, the pre-trial detention facilities, in which German women in SS uniforms occupied positions of authority.
The transition to being defendants in a Polish court accused of crimes by Polish and Jewish survivors may not have been fully processed as a reality that would result in death. The cavalier courtroom behavior was the behavior of people who had not yet accepted that the world had fundamentally changed. The world had fundamentally changed.
When the death sentences were pronounced, the appeals for clemency were submitted immediately. All five women appealed to the Polish president. All five appeals were rejected. The execution date was set. The morning of July 4th, 1946, the condemned were transported to Biskupia Gorka Hill. The crowd that had gathered was documented by journalists and by military photographers whose images entered the international press the following day.
Food stalls had been set up around the perimeter. Ice cream vendors moved through the crowd. The Polish Catholic clergy would later condemn the carnival atmosphere, the fusion of public justice and public spectacle that made the event feel to some observers more like a festival than a legal proceeding. But the crowd that had come to this hill was a crowd of people who had lived through the occupation, who knew what Stutthof was and what had happened there, who had in many cases personal connections to the victims. The gallows that had been
specially constructed for the occasion consisted of a row of four T-shaped double gallows with a central triple beam structure. Military trucks were positioned beneath each noose. The condemned would stand in the truck beds, be noosed while standing, and the trucks would drive away. The former Stutthof prisoners who volunteered to serve as executioners placed the nooses.
The choice was deliberate and symbolic. The people who had survived what these women had built and operated would be the ones to end them. At 5:00 in the afternoon, the executions began. Bachmann was first. The truck beneath her drove forward. The rope pulled tight. In the photographs taken at this moment, photographs that entered the historical record and have been analyzed in documentaries and academic studies ever since, Bachmann is visible suspended above the crowd, her body fighting physiologically against the
strangulation, the short drop having produced none of the instantaneous death that a properly calculated long drop would have delivered. She had said, when the sentence was pronounced, that life is a pleasure and pleasures are usually short. The pleasure of her life had lasted 24 years and the dying was not short.
Down the row, the executions proceeded in staggered sequence. Parodies was prepared next to where Bachmann hung. Becker, Klapf, and Steinhof followed. In the center of the row, Commandant Johann Pauls was executed alongside Steinhof on the triple beam structure. The five male capos completed the line. In documentary photographs taken from the crowd looking toward the gallows row, some of the condemned are already suspended while others have not yet been dropped.
The sequential timing making visible for anyone looking at the full width of the apparatus, the different stages of dying at different points along the line simultaneously. Gerda Steinhof, who had received commendations from the SS for her work and had risen from new recruit to senior overseer in 30 days, died on this hill at 24 years old.
Wanda Klapf, who had told the court she struck at At two prisoners every day, died at 24. Elizabeth Becker, the youngest, died at 22. Ilse Weber Parodies died at 25. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, who had told the court that pleasures are usually short, died at 24. She had been correct, though not in the sense she intended. The question that the historical record of the Stutthof female guards refuses to resolve cleanly is the one about the relationship between background and conduct.
Gerda Steinhoff had been a tramway conductor who married in 1944 and had a child. Wanda Klaff had worked in a jam factory. Elizabeth Becker was a 21-year-old from a small village when she put on the SS uniform. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann had grown up in Hamburg doing ordinary things. These were not women who had been radicalized through years of ideological indoctrination in the SS leadership school, not career fanatics who had constructed identities around Nazi racial ideology from childhood.
They were working-class women from the German-speaking Baltic region who were asked if they wanted a job with the SS, completed a few weeks of training, and were handed authority over tens of thousands of prisoners that the system had stripped of every protection. The training they received did not teach them to be cruel.
What it taught them was that cruelty had no consequences, that the women on the other side of the wire were, within the operational framework of the SS, objects rather than subjects, beings whose suffering registered on no moral ledger that the system recognized. What each individual woman then did with the authority and the impunity was, within significant limits, a matter of individual choice.
The system created the conditions. The individuals made the choices within those conditions. Wanda Klaff chose to strike at least two prisoners every day and experienced this as devotion to her work. Barkmann chose to beat women and select them for death and arranged her hair while survivors described it in court. The choices were theirs.
The historian’s difficulty in assigning precise moral categories to these five women does not apply to the legal categories the court applied. The charges were crimes against humanity. The evidence was overwhelming. The verdicts were guilty. The sentences were death. And the executions on Biskupia Gorka Hill on July 4th, 1946, were the implementation of those sentences in the only execution method available in the Soviet-Polish legal framework operating in Gdansk that summer.
The short drop hanging from the backs of military trucks that produced strangulation rather than instantaneous death. There is one detail from the July 4th executions that has been discussed in historical accounts and that sits with particular weight in retrospect. In the photographs taken at Biskupia Gorka, clearly visible in the image showing the full row of the condemned before the trucks drove away, are the five women standing in the truck beds with the nooses around their necks and the crowd stretching behind them across the
hillside. They are standing upright. They are looking forward. The moment before the trucks moved is captured in that image. Whatever they were thinking in that moment, whether Barkmann’s remark about pleasures being short had been bravado or genuine indifference or something she had not yet fully translated into understanding of her own situation, is not recorded.
The photograph captures only the posture, not the interior. The trucks drove away at 5:00. The ropes pulled tight. The crowd of tens of thousands watched in relative silence with only a brief murmur when the first nooses tightened. The Catholic clergy who would condemn the public nature of it afterward were not present on the hill.
The families of Stutthof’s dead or those families who had survived, who were not themselves among the 65,000 victims who died within Stutthof’s boundaries or the additional deaths during the evacuation, were. Their silence was not the silence of indifference. It was the silence of people for whom this moment had been a long time coming and who were now watching it arrive.
The Stutthof trials that followed the first one, three additional proceedings in 1946 and 1947, prosecuted additional camp personnel. Of the 1,037 known SS staff who served at Stutthof, 170 were eventually prosecuted. 95 were convicted. The five women who died on Biskupia Gorka Hill on July 4th, 1946, represented a small fraction of the people who had built and operated the system that killed up to 85,000 people.
The overwhelming majority of Stutthof’s guards, administrators, doctors, and logistical personnel were never prosecuted and lived out ordinary post-war lives in Germany and Austria. One guard who survived the post-war accounting was Hertha Bothe, known at Stutthof as the sadist of Stutthof, who had been conscripted as a camp guard at Ravensbrück in September 1942, and later transferred to Stutthof, where survivor testimonies described systematic cruelty.
She was tried at the Bergen-Belsen trial by British military authorities alongside Irma Grese and others, convicted and sentenced to 10 years. She was released in 1951 and lived until 2000. Her survival into the 21st century, while Barkmann and Steinhoff and Klaff died at 24 on a Polish hilltop, is a function of which legal jurisdiction captured them, which court tried them, and which standard of proof applied.
Justice in the post-war period was not uniform. It was geographically contingent. Stutthof itself still stands outside the village of Sztutowo as a museum and memorial. The gas chamber, the crematoria, the barracks, the physical infrastructure of what was done there, is preserved as evidence. Visitors can walk through it. The preserved camp is the most complete physical testimony to what the Aufseherinnen of Stutthof were part of and what they chose to do within it.
Jenny Wanda Barkmann said that pleasures are usually short. She was 24 years old when she said it, and 24 years old when she died. The pleasure of the authority the SS had given her, the pleasure of being the beautiful specter, the pleasure of moving through a camp where nobody could stop her doing anything she wanted to do.
It lasted less than a year. The consequences lasted the rest of her life, which was not much longer.
