July 4th, 1946. Biscupia, Gorka Hill, Gdansk, Poland. Tens of thousands of people stand in suffocating silence as military trucks roll toward a row of specially constructed gallows. On the back of those trucks, 11 figures stand with nooes already around their necks, waiting for the engines to roar forward and leave them swinging in the summer air.
Among them is a 25-year-old woman named Iwa Parades about to die for crimes so horrific that witnesses wept in the courtroom. But here’s what will shock you. This young woman who stripped prisoners naked in freezing temperatures and beat them until they collapsed was once just an ordinary girl from a small German town.
How does someone transform from a factory worker into a monster? And why did justice for her victims require such a brutal public spectacle? The answer will reveal the darkest capabilities of human nature. Before we descend into this disturbing tale, make sure you’re subscribed to this channel and hit that notification bell. We uncover the most brutal truths that history tried to bury.
Trust me, what’s coming next will change how you see evil forever. December 17th, 1920. A baby girl named Awa Paradis entered the world in Lowenberg, Pomerania, today known as Labour, Poland. Nostrasa, 100, a modest Protestant household where nothing suggested the horror this child would unleash. Her father worked ordinary jobs.
Her family attended church and young Aa seemed destined for the unremarkable life of millions of other German girls in the VHimar Republic. But the poison was already seeping into German society, a toxic ideology that would transform ordinary citizens into executioners. And awa Parades would drink deeply from that poison well. She left school in 1935 at just 14 or 15 years old.
A girl with basic education and limited prospects in a Germany still recovering from the devastation of the First World War and the economic catastrophe that followed. Picture this teenager bouncing between dead-end jobs in Vupertal Airfort and back to her hometown of Lenberg. Factory work, menial labor, the grinding monotony of workingclass existence.
But something was changing in Germany. Adolf Hitler had seized power in 1933. And by the time Aba left school, Nazi propaganda had infected every corner of German life. The Hitler youth rallies, the speeches blaring from radios, the textbooks rewritten to teach hatred as fact. This was the air young breathed every single day.
In the region where she lived, the free city of Danig and the Polish corridor, Nazi influence intensified throughout the 1930s. By 1937, Galler Albert Forester had de facto control of Danig, creating an atmosphere saturated with German nationalism and anti-semitism. Local institutions, youth organizations, every social structure bent toward one purpose, preparing Germans to accept and participate in unimaginable crimes.
Awa Parades grew up marinating in this hatred. There’s no record of her joining Nazi organizations as a teenager, but she didn’t need to. The ideology was everywhere, inescapable, seductive in its simplicity. It told people like that they were superior, that others were subhuman, that violence wasn’t just acceptable, but necessary.
For nearly a decade, Edwa drifted through various low-skilled jobs. Unmarried, unremarkable, one of millions of workingclass Germans whose lives seemed to have no particular direction. She worked in factories and shops, never rising above her station, never achieving anything noteworthy. If the war had never come, Ewa Paradis would have lived and died in complete obscurity, maybe married a local man, raised a few children, grown old in the same town where she was born.
But history had other plans. Because when evil calls, it doesn’t always choose the obviously cruel. Sometimes it chooses the ordinary, the struggling, the overlooked. And when those people discover they have power over life and death, when they realize they can inflict suffering without consequence, something terrible awakens inside them.
But what happened next would prove that the most dangerous monsters are often the ones nobody sees coming. August 1944, as the Second World War ground into its fifth year and Germany’s defeat became increasingly inevitable, 23-year-old Awa Paradis received orders that would seal her fate. She wasn’t a volunteer.
She was conscripted. The SS desperately needed guards for the expanding camp system, particularly women to oversee female prisoners. Starting in June 1944, Nazi authorities had begun forcibly recruiting women from Dansig and surrounding cities. They needed bodies to staff a new sub camp called Bramberg O in the city of Bgos.
Eva Paradis found herself on a train to Stutoff SK3 camp for training as an offseer and an overseer, a concentration camp guard. Let that sink in for a moment. She didn’t seek this position. She was forced into it. Does that make what comes next any less horrifying? Does it excuse the monster she became? Hold that thought because the transformation from ordinary woman to sadistic killer happened faster than you can imagine.
Stuto concentration camp sat in a secluded marshy wooded area near the village of Stuto about 34 km east of Danig. It was the first concentration camp the Nazis established outside Germany’s pre-war borders. opening on September 2nd, 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland. That first day, 150 prisoners, mostly Polish political leaders and intellectuals, passed through those gates.
Within 2 weeks, 6,000 people were imprisoned there. Originally a civilian internment camp under local SS control, Stutoff officially became a concentration camp in January 1942. By 1943, they’d added a gas chamber and crematorium. The killing machine was ready. For the first years, nearly all prisoners were non-Jewish Poles.
Then came Soviet prisoners of war, Danes, Norwegians, others from across occupied Europe. But in 1944, everything changed. In July of that year, the first transport of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Awitz. Eventually, more than 23,000 Jews would be transferred to Stutoff from Avitz alone and another 25,000 from camps in the Baltic states as Soviet forces advanced westward.
The camp’s population exploded. By mid January 1945, 25,000 prisoners crowded the main camp with an equivalent number in sub camps scattered across the region. The conditions at Stutoff were among the worst in the entire Nazi camp system. Tens of thousands died from starvation, disease, exposure to the brutal Baltic winter, exhaustion from slave labor, and systematic murder.
Typhus epidemics swept through in the winter of 1942, then again in 1944. The death toll reached 250 prisoners per day by January 1945. Bodies piled faster than the crematorium could process them, so guards constructed a crematory p of the new camp. alternating layers of corpses with logs soaked in heavy fuel oil.
The smell of burning human flesh hung over the camp like a toxic cloud. This was the kingdom of death where I paradises would discover her true nature. Her training finished quickly, too quickly. Within weeks, this factory worker with no experience in violence or authority became a wardress with absolute power over hundreds of women’s lives.
And something awakened in awa parades. something dark and hungry. In October 1944, just 2 months after arriving, she was reassigned to Stutoff’s Bramberg Ostamp. There, away from the main camp’s scrutiny, she began to reveal who she really was. The testimonies from survivors paint a picture of calculated cruelty, of a woman who discovered she enjoyed inflicting suffering.
But wait until you hear what she did that winter, because what came next would make hardened prosecutors physically ill. Picture this. It’s the dead of winter, December 1944 or January 1945. The temperature hovers around or below freezing. A group of female prisoners stands shivering in their thin prison uniforms, already weakened by starvation and disease. Then Iwa Parades arrives.
She’s 24 years old, well-fed, warm in her SS uniform. She holds absolute power over these women. Power she’s about to exercise in the most sadistic way imaginable. She orders them to strip naked, right there in the freezing cold. The women hesitate, their bodies already trembling violently. Strip, she commands. They have no choice.
One by one, skeletal women remove the threadbear rags that provide their only protection against the killing cold. They stand there exposed, vulnerable, naked in the snow while Parades watches. Then she does something that made witnesses gasp in horror when they testified at her trial. She grabs buckets of ice cold water and douses the naked prisoners.
The shock of freezing water hitting already hypothermic bodies. The unimaginable torture of it. But she isn’t finished. When the women’s bodies react instinctively, when they move to try to warm themselves, try to shield themselves from the wind and water. Awa Parades beats them. She beats freezing, naked, dying women for the crime of trying to survive.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. Multiple witnesses testified about this particular form of torture. Ella Paradis repeated it, perfected it, made it her signature cruelty. Some of those women died from exposure. Others survived only to face more torture the next day and the next and the next. In January 1945, Parades was transferred back to the main stove camp as Soviet forces advanced from the east.
The Red Army’s winter offensive had begun and the Nazis knew their time was running out. Camp authorities started burning incriminating documents in preparing for evacuation. But even in those final chaotic months, even knowing defeat was inevitable, Iwa Parades continued her reign of terror. She accompanied one of the last transports of women prisoners to the Lberg subc camp in April 1945.
And there, as the Third Reich collapsed around her, she participated in the murder of prisoners. Those final weeks saw desperate Germans killing as many witnesses as possible before the liberators arrived. On May 9th, 1945, Soviet forces liberated Studuto, finding only about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation.
The rest were dead or scattered across death marches throughout northern Poland and Germany. It’s estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners died at Stutoff and its sub camps out of approximately 110,000 total deportes. That’s a death rate approaching 60%. But here’s the thing you need to understand. This wasn’t death through neglect or accident.
This was systematic murder carried out by people like Parades who made conscious choices every single day to inflict maximum suffering. But the story doesn’t end with liberation. Because what came next would be captured in photographs so disturbing they still shock viewers 80 years later.
Within days of Stutoff’s liberation, Polish and Soviet authorities began hunting down the guards and officials who had fled. Iwa Paradis tried to disappear back into the civilian population in her hometown of Lenberg. She probably thought she could blend in, go back to being nobody, escape justice for what she’d done. She was wrong.
In May 1945, Polish officers found her and placed her under arrest. She was taken to Gdans to await trial. The Polish special criminal court operating under joint Soviet Polish authority convened the first sto of trial on April 25th, 1946. 13 defendants sat in the dock. the camp’s commonant Johan Paul’s, five female SS guards, and six male capos, who had collaborated in the torture and murder of their fellow prisoners.
Iwa Parades was the youngest of the female guards at 25 years old. Seated beside her were Jenny Wanda Barkman, 24, known as the beautiful spectre for her angelic looks and demonic cruelty. Elizabeth Becker, 22. Wanda Claf, 24, who had boasted during her time at Studuto, “I am very intelligent and very devoted to my work in the camps.
I struck at least two prisoners every day. And Gerta Steinhoff, 24, the most senior, and Oberal Sirin, who had been awarded the Iron Cross for her wartime efforts, five young women in their early 20s. Under different circumstances, they might have been working in shops, raising families, living ordinary lives.
Instead, they sat accused of crimes against humanity. The trial lasted 5 weeks. Survivors of Schnuto took the witness stand day after day, describing in excruciating detail the tortures they had endured. When witnesses testified specifically about Parades, the courtroom went silent. One witness told the court exactly what we described earlier.
The forced stripping and freezing weather, the ice water, the beatings. Other testimonies revealed the scope of suffering she had caused, the constant violence, the selections, the deaths. All 13 defendants pleaded not guilty. They claimed they were just following orders, that they had no choice, that the witnesses were lying or exaggerating.
The female guards, several observers noted, didn’t seem to take the trial seriously at first. They were seen arranging their hair, chatting among themselves, seemingly unable to grasp the gravity of what they faced. Jenny Barkman reportedly giggled during proceedings and flirted with her guards. They appeared to believe they would somehow escape punishment, but survivor after survivor testified.
The evidence mounted into an insurmountable mountain of documented atrocity. And slowly the reality began to dawn on them. They weren’t going home. They were going to pay for what they’d done. On May 31st, 1946, the court delivered its verdict. All 13 defendants guilty. 11 sentenced to death, including all five female guards.
Only two defendants received prison terms. The court specifically noted that Iwa Prades brutalities, including causing the deaths of prisoners through her torture, merited the ultimate punishment. After sentencing, several of the condemned, wrote letters begging for clemency. Elizabeth Becker wrote multiple letters to Polish President Bsw Beirut insisting she hadn’t been as cruel as the other guards.
The court itself recommended commuting Becker’s sentence to 15 years on the grounds that she’d been at the camp for the shortest time and her crimes, while horrific, weren’t as severe as Steinhoffs or Barkman’s. President Beirut rejected all appeals. The death sentences would be carried out. Justice demanded it, but nobody was prepared for what happened next because the Polish authorities had decided this execution would send an unmistakable message.
July 3rd, 1946, the newspaper Jennick Baltiki published a notice that would draw crowds from across the region. Stud’s war criminals will be publicly hanged in Gdansk publicly, not behind prison walls, not in secret, but in full view of anyone who W anted to watch. The executions were scheduled for July 4th at Biscupia Gorka Hill, a strategically significant location close to central Dansk that had a dark history of its own.
During the war, the Germans had established a prisoner of war camp there. Now it would become the sight of justice. July 4th, 1946 dawned warm and clear. By early afternoon, crowds began gathering at Biscupia Gorka. Polish press reports estimated between several dozen thousand and 50,000 spectators. Think about that number. Tens of thousands of people traveling to watch 11 human beings die.
Among the crowd were former prisoners of Stutoff, people who had survived the horrors those 11 defendants had inflicted. They came to see justice done to witness the end of their tormentors. But there were also curiosity seekers, those drawn by the spectacle of public execution, and there were children in the crowd, young enough that we can see them clearly in the photographs taken that day.
A special gallow structure had been erected specifically for this occasion. four T-shaped double gallows on either side of a central triple gallows, forming a row that could accommodate all 11 condemned prisoners simultaneously. This wasn’t going to be the quick, merciful, long drop hanging used by professional executioners like Britain’s Albert Pierre point, where the condemned fell through a trap door and died almost instantly from a broken neck.
This was going to be short drop hanging, a method that causes death by slow strangulation. The condemned would die conscious, struggling, taking minutes to suffocate while hanging in front of tens of thousands of witnesses. The prisoners were brought out in the afternoon. They rode standing on the backs of military trucks, nooes already placed around their necks, the ropes attached to the gallows cross beams above them.
On one truck stood Jenny Wanda Barkman and Yua Paratt side by side. On another stood Elizabeth Becker, Wanda Claf, and Gerta Steinhoff. The male prisoners, including commandant Johan Poles and the five capos, occupied the other trucks. The trucks slowly maneuvered into position, backing up to place each condemned prisoner directly beneath their designated noose.
The crowd pressed forward, silent now, witnessing history. Jenny Barkman, the beautiful spectre, was first in line on one end of the gallows row. She stood straight, her face unreadable. Next to her, Ella Paradis looked out at the massive crowd that had gathered to watch her die. What was she thinking in those final moments? Was she afraid? Did she feel remorse? Did she understand finally the magnitude of what she’d done? We’ll never know because the engines roared to life and the trucks began to move forward slowly, inexurably, pulling away from beneath
the prisoner’s feet. And then they were hanging all 11 at once. But because of the timing, some trucks pulled away before others. In the photographs taken in those terrible seconds, you can see Jenny Barkman already swinging, her body fighting for life, while other prisoners were still standing on their trucks, watching, knowing their moment was seconds away.
Parades hung next to Barkman, the rope tight around her neck, her feet kicking at empty air, her body’s desperate autonomic response, trying to find solid ground that wasn’t there. The photographs are gut-wrenching. In the center on the triple gallows, commandant Johan Paul’s hangs with Gerta Steinhoff visible in the foreground.
Behind them, the five male capos sway in a line extending back into the crowd. And on the side gallows, the women struggle and die while tens of thousands watch. Short drop hanging doesn’t kill instantly. It can take 5, 10, even 15 minutes for unconsciousness to come. The condemned strangle slowly, the weight of their own bodies, cutting off the blood flow to their brain and the air to their lungs.
It’s agonizing. It’s brutal. And it was photographed from multiple angles, preserved forever in images that still circulate today. Survivors of Stutoff volunteered to serve as executioners, pulling away the trucks and ensuring justice was done. For them, this was closure, a necessary end to their nightmare.
Watching these five women who had beaten them, tortured them, selected their friends and family for death, now dying themselves. Finally powerless, finally held accountable. Iwa Paradis was the last woman to hang, positioned on the end of the gallows line. She died there on Biscupia Gorka Hill at 25 years old, the same age at which many of her victims had died.
Her body swayed in the summer breeze for what seemed like an eternity before she was finally still. The youngest of the five female guards executed that day and the last to die. When it was over, when all 11 bodies hung motionless in the afternoon sun, the crowd slowly dispersed. The bodies were eventually cut down. Unlike the elaborate burials given to Nazi officials in some jurisdictions, these bodies were treated with the same disregard they had shown their victims.
Disposed of without ceremony, no graves marked with their names. They had become nothing as they had tried to make their victims nothing. The trial and execution of Awa Parades raises questions that haunt us to this day. How does an ordinary person become a monster? Was she always cruel, just waiting for permission to unleash it? Or did the system create the monster, transforming a workingclass girl into a sadistic killer? The answer is probably both.
The Nazi system created conditions that rewarded brutality and punished mercy. Guards who showed cruelty were promoted. Those who hesitated were reassigned or worse. The ideology dehumanized victims so thoroughly that guards genuinely believed they were dealing with subhumans who didn’t deserve compassion. When you combine that systematic dehumanization with absolute power over helpless people with pure pressure to conform to increasingly brutal norms and with the removal of all legal and moral constraints, ordinary people can do
extraordinary evil. But here’s what you can’t escape. Paradis made choices. Yes, she was conscripted. Yes, she operated within a system designed to create killers, but she chose to go beyond what was required. Nobody ordered her to douse naked women with ice water in the middle of winter.
Nobody demanded she beat them when they tried to warm themselves. Those were her choices, born from something dark inside her that the system enabled. The boring factory worker discovered she loved having power over life and death. She reveled in it. Witnesses testified to that. And for those choices, she paid the ultimate price.
The stud trials continued after that first mass execution. Between 1946 and 1953, Poland held six separate trials prosecuting staff and guards from Stuv in its sub camps. More death sentences were handed down. More executions followed. Germany itself has continued prosecuting Stuv personnel into the 21st century. In 20 to20, a 93-year-old former guard went on trial.
In 2022, a 97year-old secretary was convicted as an accessory to murder for her administrative work at the camp. The pursuit of justice continues even as the last perpetrators reach extreme old age. As for Stuhof itself, Soviet forces initially used parts of it as a prison for captured Germans.
The camp was largely dismantled after the war, its infrastructure destroyed. But in 1962, the Polish government established a museum at the site. Today, you can visit Stutoff and walk through the remaining barracks, see the crematorium, stand in the gas chamber where thousands died. Memorial plaques honor the victims. Educational programs teach new generations about what happened there.
The goal is to ensure that the 65,000 who died at Stutoff are never forgotten, that their suffering has meaning, that history cannot repeat itself. But here’s what terrifies historians and scholars of the Holocaust. It can repeat itself. The conditions that created EWA parodies and thousands like her, they weren’t unique to Nazi Germany.
They can occur anywhere. Anytime a society begins to dehumanize certain groups, when authority figures encourage violence, when ordinary people are given power without accountability, when hatred is normalized and cruelty rewarded. The transformation from ordinary person to killer happens faster than anyone wants to believe.
Ewa Parades was not born evil. No baby is. She was born into a world that shaped her, a society that poisoned her and a system that unleashed her worst impulses. But she still made choices. She still chose to torture and kill. and she paid for those choices with her life, swinging from a rope on a Polish hillside in front of tens of thousands of witnesses who wanted to see justice done.
The photographs from that day remain deeply disturbing. You can find them online if you search, though many websites warn viewers before displaying them. They show the moment of execution, women struggling in midair, the enormous crowd watching from every angle. Some people argue those photographs should be banned, that they’re too graphic, too dehumanizing.
Others argue they must be preserved as evidence, as a reminder of the price of atrocity. What’s undeniable is their power. They force us to confront the reality of justice, the reality of consequence, and the reality that evil, no matter how ordinary its face, must be defeated. The story of Ewa parodies should terrify you.
Not because she was some unique monster, but because she wasn’t. She was ordinary. She could have been anyone. The girl working the cash register at your local shop. The woman sitting next to you on the bus. Your neighbor, your coworker, your classmate. Under the right circumstances, with the right pressures, with the right system in place, ordinary people can become killers. That’s the lesson of stov.
That’s the warning history screams at us. So when you see hatred rising, when you see groups being dehumanized, when you see violence being normalized, remember Edwa Paradis. Remember that she was nobody special. And remember that the transformation from nobody to monster can happen in weeks, not years. It can happen to anyone who lets it.
The only defense is eternal vigilance, the courage to speak up, and the absolute refusal to participate in dehumanization, no matter what authority figures demand. Iwa Parades died at 25, but her victims range from children to elderly prisoners who had survived years in the camps only to be tortured by a young woman who enjoyed their suffering.
They deserve better. They deserve to live, to rebuild their lives after the war, to tell their stories. Instead, they met their end at the hands of someone who had surrendered her humanity for the intoxicating pleasure of cruelty. Never forget what happened at Studuto. Never forget the 65,000 who died there.
Never forget that ordinary people committed these crimes. And never forget that it could happen again if we’re not vigilant. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance against hatred. The price of humanity is refusing to participate in dehumanization. The price of justice is holding people accountable, no matter how ordinary they seem.
What other dark secrets from history should we uncover next? What lessons must we learn to prevent the next Stoof? Let us know in the comments below and subscribe for more historical truths that will challenge everything you think you know about human nature. Because the truth is, the next parodies might be closer than you think. The question is, will we recognize her before it’s too late?
