What Happened to Female Nazi Guards After World War 2?
Ravensbrook wasn’t just another Nazi concentration camp. It was the only major camp built specifically for women. Over 130,000 women passed through its gates. Mothers, daughters, teenagers. Guarding them were the Alvesinan. Female SS officers trained not to protect but to punish. They kicked prisoners in the teeth with their boots, dragged women by the hair, starved them until their bones showed, beat them until they couldn’t stand.
Some tore newborns from their mothers and left them to die. Others forced prisoners to strip naked and march into the snow, laughing as they froze. These weren’t men. They were women. And over 3,500 of them served in camps like these. But how did so many women, often seen as gentle or maternal, become instruments of terror? And when the war ended, what became of them? In this video, we uncover the brutal truth behind the female guards of Nazi Germany, their shocking cruelty inside the camps, the roles they played in
daily atrocities, and what really happened to them after the war finally came to an end. The Nazi concentration camp system wasn’t built overnight. It evolved from a few detention centers in the 1930s to a massive network of over 44,000 facilities. Some were labor camps, some transit hubs, others death factories designed for industrialcale murder.
But all of them had one thing in common. They were meant to break human beings down. Prisoners were reduced to numbers, starved, beaten, and worked to death. The SS ran the system with military efficiency backed by ideology that painted Jews, Roma, Poles, the disabled, and political dissident as subhuman. But not all camps were the same.
In 1939, the Nazis constructed Ravensbrook just north of Berlin. It was different. It was the only major concentration camp built specifically for women. At first, it held a few thousand prisoners, mostly political enemies of the Nazi state. But as the war escalated, so did the numbers. Women from occupied Poland, France, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere poured into the camp.
Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prostitutes, lesbians, anyone the regime considered a threat or an inconvenience. By the end of the war, over 130,000 women had passed through Haravvensbrook. Most did not survive. The camp was brutal. Prisoners were forced into hard labor, used in horrific medical experiments, and subjected to daily beatings, hunger, and humiliation.
Children were born and died within its fences. Entire transports of women disappeared into mass graves or crematoria. And as the prisoner population grew, so did the camp’s infrastructure. Satellite camps spread across Germany and occupied territories. And with each new site, the need for guards exploded. But the SS had a problem.
Most of their male personnel were being sent to the front. The Reich was stretched thin. They needed more people to run the camps and fast. So, the Nazis turned to a group they had largely ignored until then, women. The SS realized that women could fill administrative and supervisory roles in concentration camps, especially those like Robvens, where the prisoner population was overwhelmingly female.
And so in the early 1940s they launched a massive recruitment campaign. They didn’t advertise openly for torturers or killers. Instead they disguised the role under titles like off seaarin overseer. Many of the job offers were sent through the German labor office which women already used to find domestic work. Others were listed in local newspapers.
Some women were approached directly, often by friends or former co-workers who were already employed by the SS. The job pitch was simple. Decent pay, housing, uniforms, regular meals, and status. For many women, especially those from poor or rural backgrounds, it sounded like a stable, respectable government job.
Few were told what the camps actually were. Few were still asked. Some were nurses bored with their hospital duties. Others were clerks, shopg girls, or factory workers. Some joined voluntarily out of loyalty to Hitler or belief in Nazi ideology. Others were sent by force, assigned to the camps under Germany’s mandatory wartime labor program.
Whether they chose it or not, once they were in, they were trapped. Refusing orders could result in punishment or reassignment to hard labor themselves. They arrived young, most between 18 and 25 years old, though some were as young as 16. Many were unmarried with little education, little money, and no real power of their own.
And then they were sent to Ravensbrook. Here, it wasn’t just a camp for prisoners. It was also a training ground. A place where ordinary women were taught to enforce one of the most brutal systems the modern world has ever seen. The SS called them aler inan overseers. The training was short, just 3 to 6 weeks, but it didn’t need to be long. It just needed to be effective.
When new recruits arrived, they were immediately placed under the authority of senior SS women. hardened guards who had been working in the camp system for years. These veterans were cold, disciplined, and often cruel. They didn’t just teach rules, they modeled them. The first lessons weren’t about weapons or uniforms.
They were about mindset. New recruits were told to obey orders without hesitation. Questioning a superior could mean reassignment or worse. The system was built on loyalty, and that loyalty was tested from day one. Recruits had to memorize SS regulations, master German military drills, and respond to commands instantly.
Failure to meet standards resulted in public shaming, extra duties, or physical punishment. You learned quickly, or you left. But marching and obedience were only part of the process. The true core of SS training was dehumanization. Trainees were told explicitly not to see the prisoners as human. They were taught that Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, and political dissident were racial enemies, unmention or subhumans.
Showing compassion wasn’t just discouraged. It was framed as a betrayal of the Reich. Senior guards led by example. They bered prisoners during roll calls, slapped them for minor mistakes, laughed at their suffering. Trainees watched and were expected to follow. One woman who later testified at the Hamburg Ravensbrook trials recalled being told, “They are not like you.
They are not women. They are filth. Treat them as such.” Trainees were encouraged to beat prisoners, scream at them, humiliate them. At first, some were hesitant. Some even cried. But over time, hesitation faded. It had to. You either hardened or broke. Training included practical experience, too. After just a few days of drills, new guards were assigned to different areas of the camp under supervision.
Some worked in the punishment blocks. Others oversaw forced labor squads or food distribution lines. Everywhere they went, power over life and death followed. They were taught how to break up fights, suppress resistance, and impose order through violence. One key technique taught during training was the use of attack dogs.
Recruits learned how to handle and command German Shepherds trained to maul prisoners on Q. letting a dog loose was a way to control the crowd or settle a personal grudge. Other lessons included how to conduct strip searches, often performed in degrading, unnecessary ways, designed to shame the women being searched.
It wasn’t about security. It was about control. After a few weeks, the recruits were given full assignments either within Ravensbrook or sent to satellite camps like Avitz, Maidan or Bergen Bellson. Some stayed close to home. Others were sent deep into Poland. But wherever they went, they carried rank, uniform, and the full authority of the SS.
These women didn’t hold the same rank as male officers, but they operated within a structured female SS hierarchy. The lowest rank was Hilsaharin or assistant overseer, essentially a trainee or junior guard. From there, they could be promoted to offser, the standard guard responsible for overseeing prisoners during roll call, labor, or punishment.
Above them were Oberov Seer Inan, senior overseers who supervised lower ranking guards and often reported directly to male camp commonants. Some reached even higher positions like Logger Furerin, female camp leader, tasked with managing the women’s sections of entire camps. While men held the highest authority, female guards had terrifying levels of autonomy within the blocks they controlled.
They made decisions about work details, punishments, rations, and discipline, often without needing approval. In practice, this meant they could beat, starve, or even kill with little consequence. In larger camps like Achvitz, female divisions were often separated from the main male SS command structure, creating a bubble of cruelty where power could be exercised unchecked.
In many women’s blocks, offserin were the final word. Some used that power ruthlessly. Out of the approximately 3,500 female guards trained during the war, a disturbing number were promoted for their brutality. Promotions came not through merit or leadership, but through obedience and cruelty. The more merciless they were toward prisoners, the more they gained the trust of their SS superiors.
And among these women, a few names stand out for their sheer savagery. One of the most infamous was Maria Mandal. She began her SS career at Likenborg, transferred to Ravensbrook, and was eventually appointed Ober Alf Zerin, senior overseer at Avitz Berkanau, the largest Nazi death camp. There she commanded over 200 female guards and tens of thousands of prisoners.
Mandal was described by survivors as a blonde angel of death, but her beauty was a mask. Behind it was relentless violence. She had a signature method of punishment. Prisoners would be forced to kneel for hours on gravel, hands raised, often under the sun or in snow. If they collapsed, they were beaten with rubber tunchons.
She took pleasure in attending public executions, selecting women for the gas chambers, and organizing roll calls that sometimes lasted from sunrise to nightfall with prisoners collapsing from exhaustion. Mandal personally selected children and mothers for extermination. And in a disturbing twist, she also oversaw the women’s orchestra at Ashvitz, a group of prisoners forced to play classical music as other inmates were marched to their deaths.
Under her, music became a tool of psychological torture. Another name that echoes with horror is Irma Graasa. Barely out of her teens, Graca became the youngest female guard sentenced to death for war crimes. She served at Ravensbrook, Ashvitz and Bergen Bellson, rising quickly through the ranks thanks to her extreme behavior. Greece was known for wearing tightly fitted uniforms, polished jack boots, and carrying a riding crop or whip, which she used freely and often.
Survivors recalled how she would beat women across the breasts and faces or set her trained dog loose on prisoners for minor infractions like looking at her the wrong way. She reportedly forced prisoners to undress in front of her and mocked their bodies then sent them to die. At Bergen Bellson, her cruelty intensified as the camp descended into starvation and chaos.
Greece, still in her early 20s, walked among corpses stacked like firewood, laughing, well-fed, and untouched by the misery around her. Unlike Graca, Elizabeth Vulcanroth was calm, collected, and calculated. Her cruelty came not in outbursts, but in routine efficiency. As senior overseer at both Achvitz and later Bergen Bellson, she organized mass selections with cold detachment.
Vulcanrath conducted inspections of prisoner barracks during which she punished women for untidiness by withholding food or ordering extra labor. One survivor recounted being made to scrub a floor with a toothbrush while Vulcanroth watched silently. She directed forced labor assignments, sending weak or sickly women to tasks that were guaranteed to kill them, like hauling stones, moving corpses, or working in freezing water.
She didn’t need to yell or strike to assert dominance. Her authority was backed by power, and she used it to send thousands to their deaths through indirect orders. And then there was Johanna Borman, known informally as the woman with the dogs. She roamed roll calls like a predator, her dog snarling at her heels.
A slight cough, a broken rhythm, a backwards glance. All you had to do was twitch. The dogs lunged. Guards cheered. She’d light a cigarette, flick ash on the mud, and watch flesh tear and blood flow. She thrived on it. She thrived on the power to command life or death with a bark, a gesture, a toss of her head. When they returned to the camp kitchens, she contributed to the torture by withholding food from entire blocks.
Hunger became another weapon, everpresent, silent, deadly. These women didn’t just copy male guards. They elevated cruelty to an art. They swapped techniques in the courtyard, teased each other about whose whip left the deepest bruise, whose dog was deadliest. They traded trophies, locks of hair, shards of broken teeth, symbols of dominance.
They formed clicks, passing around the mantle of fear, and demanding one-upping displays, a longer punishment parade, a louder scream, a stranger selected for overnight time in a punishment cell. Across the camps, the cruelty of female guards followed patterns. One common punishment was forcing women to stand for hours, sometimes 12, 24, even 36 hours straight.
No sitting, no resting, just standing still, cold, tired, and hungry. If someone fainted or fell, a guard would beat her with a stick. If another prisoner tried to help, both were punished. The message was clear. No kindness allowed. Some women were made to crawl through gravel on their knees until their skin tore and bled. Others had to dig their own graves, not because they were going to die, but because the guards wanted to scare them.
Sometimes the women had to sing while digging. The guards would laugh, then walk away, leaving the prisoners shaking and unsure if next time it would be real. Roll calls could last up to 10 hours. In freezing snow or blazing heat, prisoners had to stand perfectly still. If they swayed or collapsed, guards kicked them or hit them with rifles.
Some guards pulled out hair by the handful or smashed fingers just for fun. Children and babies were treated with the same cruelty. At Ravensbrook, a high-ranking female guard named Doraththa Bins became known for her harshness. She would throw babies into ditches or leave them outside to freeze. Mothers who cried or begged were slapped, kicked, or knocked unconscious.
Sometimes prisoners had to watch their friends suffer. One woman was whipped 40 times in front of her whole block just for stealing a potato. She died from the lashes. The other women were forced to stand beside her body in silence for hours. This wasn’t random. These punishments were planned. Guards used pain, fear, and exhaustion to control the prisoners completely.
And those guards were trained to see this cruelty as normal. After years of brutal war, the Nazi Empire finally began to crack. By early 1945, it wasn’t a matter of if the Allies would win, but when. From the east, the Red Army surged forward, relentless and angry. From the west, American, British, and Canadian forces pushed through shattered towns and broken cities.
The front lines collapsed like dominoes. Then came the final blow. Hitler was dead, alone in his bunker, deep beneath the ruins of Berlin. And with that, the heart of the Nazi regime stopped beating. Far from the front, in the camps scattered across Germany and occupied Poland, the ripple effect hit hard.
The chaos of war crept in like smoke. Rumors moved faster than orders. Supply lines were gone. Communications cut. Trains stopped running. Inside the camps, something shifted. Not overnight, but fast. The order, the structure, the chain of command that had ruled through fear, it all began to dissolve. Guards who once walked with confident stride found themselves trembling.
Male guards began to flee or refuse orders. Female guards embedded in the system faced a sudden vacuum of authority. Some froze, staring at the empty towers. Others took action. Panic spread. In Ashvitz Birkanau about mid January 1945, the SS received orders to evacuate most prisoners and destroy evidence, gas chambers, crematoria, documents before the Soviets arrived.
Female guards scrambled to burn records, duty rosters, punishment logs, guard files. They packed them into stoves or hidden pits behind barracks. Flames clawed at paper in the cold dawn. Some smeared ash over names, but wind and snow spread the evidence like ghosts across courtyards. With buildings ablaze and authority eroding, some guards panicked and fled.
One notorious figure, Theres Brle, previously at Ashvitz and later at Muldorf, slipped away just weeks before US troops arrived. She tried to vanish into the Bavarian countryside, trading uniforms for civilian clothes, but was caught in the Alps on August 29th later that year. Another prominent example was Margot Dreschel, a senior overseer under Maria Mandal.
In April 1945, she fled Ravensbrook, thinking she could disappear. Instead, she was recognized on a road leading into Soviet controlled territory. former prisoners identified her and she was captured shortly after. Then there’s Johanna Langfeld, once Oberov Zarin at Ravensbrook and Achvitz. Arrested by US forces in December 1945, she escaped Polish custody in late 1946.
She hid in a convent under an alias, worked quietly in a private home, and eventually resurfaced in Munich under her sister’s care. Another is Irma Grea. As chaos spread, she attempted to escape on a horsedrawn cart after blackening her face with coal to appear as a starving prisoner. But she hadn’t thinned enough.
A group of Polish women recognized her and violently dragged her from the wagon. She didn’t manage to vanish and later stood trial. Many other guards sank into desperation. Some burned their uniforms or cut their hair to look less like SS women. Others slipped into refugee flows from bombed cities.
A few made it to family homes in Bavaria only to find themselves hunted when survivors began circulating descriptions and photos. A handful succeeded for a time, but most were eventually recognized. But hiding wasn’t simple. In many towns, neighbors noticed arrivals wearing ration stamps, but not fitting their ages. One guard was found when a local shopkeeper noted her military posture and uniformed walk. Rumors rippled.
Within days, troops captured dozens of female guards in makeshift shelters, stables, schools, even church basement. Those who didn’t flee often stayed too long. The British liberated Bergen Bellson in April 1945 and found female guards drinking and laughing amid corpses. They were quickly identified, stripped of their uniforms, and detained.
In Ravensbrook, when the Soviets marched in, survivors had already collected identities. Records remained hidden in trunks and crawl spaces, and mustering evidence helped capture guards who tried to blend in with civilians. Some cowardly lied, claiming they were only cooks, cleaners, or secretaries. One guard, a former chauffeur for Maria Mandal, showed forged papers labeling her a Red Cross volunteer.
She was questioned alongside former prisoners, and the discrepancies in stories betrayed her. Once they were caught, the trials began almost immediately, and they were public. These were not private whispers. Judges, prosecutors, former prisoners, soldiers, and journalists filled makeshift courtrooms. Let’s follow a few of them. Ma Graza, the hyena of Achvitz, stood trial in the first Bellson trials held in Lunberg from September to November 1945.
She was only 22. The charges were brutal. selections at Avitz and Bellson, beatings, shootings, setting dogs on prisoners, and using a plated whip and pistol for torture. Survivors testified she took sadistic pleasure in her acts. During her trial, a prosecutor asked, “You used the whip of your own accord against regulations?” She replied, “Yes.
” When asked if others did the same, she said, “I do not know.” That moment sealed her fate. Cruelty rooted in personal choice. She showed no remorse. Defiant even when sentenced. On December 13th in 45 at 22 years old, she became the youngest woman executed by the British after Worldwitt 2. Maria Mandal known as the beast faced trial in Kov in 1947 before Poland’s Supreme National Tribunal.
She had been the logger furerin at Avitz 2 Birkanau, commanding over 200 guards and tens of thousands of women. Survivors recalled her executing children, orchestrating selections, and convening the camp orchestra to play as inmates marched to their deaths. In her defense, she denied guilt, claiming she only followed orders.
The Polish judges found her testimony false and consistent in cruelty. On January 24th, 1948, Maria Mandal was hanged. Johanna Borman and Elizabeth Vulcanroth also saw justice under British military law. Both were tried alongside Graca. Borman had been a vicious guard at Avitz and Bellson, nicknamed the woman with the dogs, and Vulcanroth, a high-ranking overseer who conducted selections.
Both were convicted and executed on December 13th, 1945. Elizabeth Lupka, another female overseer from Avitz and Ravensbrook, was arrested in 1945, extradited to Poland, and brought before Krov’s court in July 1948. She was charged with whipping prisoners and selecting women for gas chambers. Found guilty, she was hanged on January 8th, 1949.
Altogether, 77 female guards eventually stood trial. While some female guards were sentenced to death right after the war, others received prison time and some were even released years later. Hera Aert was one of them. Aert had worked as a guard in several camps including Ravensbrook, Avitz, and Bergen Bellson.
She admitted during her trial that she had beaten prisoners, but she also claimed she was simply following orders. In 1945, she was arrested by the British after the liberation of Bergen Bellson. She was one of the defendants in the Bergen Bellson trial, one of the first major postwar trials for crimes committed in concentration camps.
During the trial, Aert tried to defend herself by blaming her superiors and saying she was treated harshly, too. But witnesses described her as someone who took part in brutal beatings and punishments. Despite that, she was not sentenced to death. Instead, she received a 15-year prison sentence, which was later reduced.
She was released from prison in 1953, having served only about 8 years. Another case was Louise Dans, a former guard at camps like Achvitz, Plashov, and Ravensbrook. Survivors remembered her cruelty. She was said to beat prisoners regularly and take part in selections, choosing who would live and who would be sent to their death.
In 1947, Dan was tried in Poland and found guilty of war crimes. She was sentenced to life in prison. But just like in many other cases, the sentence didn’t last. Dan was released early in 1957 after serving only 10 years. Both Aert and Dans went on to live long lives after the war. Aert died in 1997. Dan lived until 2009, dying at the age of 92.
Their fates shocked many people, especially survivors, because their punishments seemed small compared to what they had done. Meanwhile, some Nazi trials didn’t happen right away after the war. They continued for decades. One of the most well-known cases was Hermine Bronsteiner, a former guard at the Maidan and Ravensbrook camps.
She was known by survivors as the stomping mayor because she would kick prisoners, especially women and children, with her heavy boots, sometimes to death. After the war, she escaped justice for a while. She moved to the United States, got married, and became a US citizen. For years she lived quietly in New York, hiding her past.
In 1960 four, a Nazi hunter named Simon Visenthal found her. Eventually, she was stripped of her US citizenship and extradited to West Germany in 1973. She went on trial in Dusseldorf in what became known as the Third Maidan trial, which lasted from 1975 to 1981. It was one of the longest Nazi war crime trials in history.
Survivors gave emotional testimony describing the brutal things she did, selecting women and children for the gas chambers, beating inmates, and helping in mass killings. In 1981, Bronsteiner was found guilty of murder in 1,181 cases and accessory to murder in 5,000 more. She was sentenced to life in prison. After serving about 15 years, she was released in 1996 because of poor health and died in 1999.
Her case proved something important. Even decades later, justice could still be done. Time didn’t erase what happened or what she had done. But not everyone faced justice. And even today, many questions still hang in the air. Why was so much of this brutality, especially by women, overlooked for so long? After the war, it was easy to picture the worst Nazi crimes as something done by men.
Men in uniforms, men giving orders, men building the camps, running the trains, choosing who lived and who died. That’s what people expected to see. Women. Most people saw them as mothers, nurses, caretakers. The idea that women could be cruel, not just passively involved, but actively sadistic, just didn’t fit the story the world was ready to tell.
It was easier to believe they were victims, too, or simply doing what they were told. So, while the Nuremberg trials made headlines and Nazi leaders were hanged, many female guards were barely mentioned. Even survivors who spoke out often found their voices ignored when they described female guards, as if no one wanted to believe women could take part in that kind of horror.
But over time, the evidence piled up. Witness statements, trial transcripts, camp records, and a new question began to rise. One that challenged everything. What does it mean when women expected to protect life are the ones who take it? Historians and psychologists have looked deeper in the years since. They found that female guards weren’t just powerless cogs in a machine.
Many had choices. And some, like Maria Mandal, used their power to abase, punish, and humiliate, not out of fear, but out of loyalty or hate, or sometimes disturbingly enjoyment. This isn’t easy to talk about. It forces us to look at evil without relying on the usual stereotypes, but it’s necessary. Today, places like the Ravensbrook Memorial in Germany keep this history alive.
Names that were once buried in silence are now on plaques, in archives, and in exhibitions. Researchers continue to dig, sometimes literally, to uncover what was lost, destroyed, or hidden. These female guards are now part of the broader story of the Holocaust. Their actions, once pushed aside, are finally being studied and taught alongside the men who ran the camps.
Still, one haunting question remains. For every guard who faced trial, how many disappeared into the postwar crowd? How many changed their names, moved towns, and lived out quiet lives? never answering for what they did. The answer is we don’t know. Records were burned, witnesses died, and in the chaos of postwar Europe, it was easy to vanish.
It’s estimated that over thundry 500 women served as guards in Nazi camps. A few hundred were tried, even fewer were convicted, and many served only short prison terms. The rest, they became shadows. Maybe we’ll never find all the names. Maybe not every question will be answered. But as long as we keep asking, we keep the story alive. And that’s something the victims of these crimes deserve.
Not just silence, but truth. Not forgetting but remembering.
