In any country occupied by the Nazis, the Gestapo appeared almost instantly. The task of the Gestapo specialists was to beat testimony out of the detainees. The aims and methods of their interrogations have become one of the most inhumane practices in modern history, and Gestapo executions remain one of the most terrible phenomena in all of human history.
In France, women often suffered much more than men because the Gestapo actively used psychological torment in addition to physical torture. It is known that since the beginning of mass raids in France, the Gestapo officially executed about 40,000 people by court verdicts. However, what the prisoners endured in the torture chambers defies any understanding.
In France, both women and men had their toes broken or cut off. Needles and splinters were driven under their nails, their legs were dislocated, and they were beaten to a pulp with whips woven from bull tendons. Electric shocks and dipping victims into ice-cold water until they began to choke were common practices.
To force a woman or a girl to speak, the Gestapo used additional tools designed to completely break a person. Since women care about their appearance, terrible methods were used to destroy their looks and morale. The Gestapo enjoyed disfiguring faces, a process that sometimes lasted more than a week. During an interrogation, a girl’s face might be slashed multiple times, or part of her ear or the tip of her nose cut off. They would pull her hair out from the roots, tear out her nails, or completely disfigure her. Finally, believing that a woman’s legs were no less important, the Gestapo disfigured them by making deep cuts and breaking bones.
In addition to physical torture, the conditions of detention were equally terrible. Up to 20 people could be kept simultaneously in a small cell designed for a maximum of five. The inability to attend to natural needs, the terrible unsanitary conditions, lice, and dirt were unbearable tortures for the girls. General detention conditions increased the likelihood of contracting a serious infection hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Furthermore, the girls were often denied fresh air, forbidden from communicating with their relatives, and kept in complete isolation.
In France, a certain Monsieur became notorious in the field of inventing torture. He often interrupted interrogations to drink tea, coffee, and even cognac. According to some reports, he even shared these drinks with his unfortunate victims. Just when a woman thought the torture was over, the executioner would finish his coffee and start again.
Part 2: Profiles of Courage and the Norwegian “House of Horror”
Perhaps some will find it hard to believe that this was possible, but history has preserved the memory of those who managed to survive even in such inhumane conditions. For example, British intelligence officer Odette Hallowes went through the Gestapo dungeons, where her nails were pulled out and a heated iron was applied to her back.
French Resistance fighter Violette Szabo survived a literal hell. According to eyewitnesses, when she and a group of prisoners were taken to be shot, the beautiful and charming girl she had been before her arrest remained only a memory. In front of the firing squad stood a woman who appeared to have aged several decades, making it difficult to identify her as Violette Szabo. Violette remained in the memory of her executioners because she was the only condemned prisoner who managed to face her death looking them in the eye; the rest could not even turn around and were shot from behind.
British intelligence agent Eileen Nearne also miraculously survived the torture chambers. She remembered the Gestapo primarily in the context of torture in the bathroom. Nearne described it this way:
“The investigator immediately told me, ‘You are a spy and we have to make you talk.’ Then I was taken to a room where there was a bathtub.”
They tried to get her to admit she was a spy using the most terrible torture: waterboarding and near-drowning, where a person was repeatedly submerged in a bath of water.
In the Norwegian city of Kristiansand, there was a building known as the “House of Horror.” Unlike their French colleagues, the Gestapo in Norway tried not to use certain physical tortures on women—such as beating them with chains or passing electrical currents through their heads. Instead, the sadism of the executioners in Norway manifested in inventing even more psychologically devastating tortures. For example, they mutilated women’s hands and crushed their joints, but the psychological torture was much worse.
A wife might be forced to watch the Gestapo mutilate her husband or beat her children, who were brought in specifically for the interrogation. Sometimes the roles were reversed, and in front of the husband’s eyes, the executioners would beat or even rape his wife. According to some reports, Gestapo executioners even raped teenage girls in the House of Horror in front of their distraught mothers.
The degree to which this shocked Norway is illustrated by a historic fact: even though the death penalty did not exist in the country before World War II (or was practically never used), all identified and detained executioners who tortured citizens were publicly hanged in 1947. The Norwegian authorities even specially amended the penal code for this purpose. This remains probably the only case of mass executions for crimes in Norway over the last two or three centuries.
Part 3: Atrocities in Eastern Europe and the Weaponization of Dignity
Often, the Gestapo attempted to hide the locations of its facilities. To be fair, in relatively peaceful Western European countries, the Nazis tried to conceal the facts of torture in their dungeons as much as possible. However, in occupied territories like Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, and Poland, the Gestapo did not even pretend to observe any rules of decency.
For instance, in the dungeons of Riga, in addition to severe beatings, women were tortured according to local cruelties. Women were stripped naked and forced to dance. According to eyewitness testimony from a former Gestapo prisoner in Riga, the women lived in a waking hell.
Women were especially brutally persecuted in Poland. There, the Gestapo often used an ordinary bathroom as a site of the most terrible psychological and physical torture. To this day, the full extent of the atrocities reached by the Gestapo is not known for certain. However, the simulation of drowning (waterboarding)—which former prisoners recall with a shudder—was widely developed and varied. In any case, there is abundant evidence that many women simply could not withstand the Gestapo’s torture and lost their minds.
Mass torture of women was also systemic, such as the so-called “cold torture” used during intense heat. Prisoners were driven into a shower room and the water was turned on. Initially, the girls and women rejoiced at the unexpected opportunity to wash off the dirt, blood, dried wounds, and insects. However, the showers kept running, and the drains worked poorly. After some time, the prisoners began to realize that something was wrong. Despite their screams and pleas, no one opened the shower door. Before long, the prisoners were standing almost chest-deep in ice-cold water. The horror was compounded by the fact that the sun was shining brightly outside and it was hot. One of the prisoners, standing in the shower room, remarked:”This will not pass without a trace. Sooner or later, it will cause a serious illness—of course, if anyone even survives.”
Finally, one cannot omit the most terrible violation: the torture of dignity. Young, attractive girls and women were often raped even before being sent to their cells. Sometimes, women in the cells were forced to undress and were then marched out into the corridor, where German soldiers lined both walls. The men commented loudly, using vulgar expressions, and deliberately laughed at them.
But the worst fate was reserved for pregnant women who fell into the hands of the Gestapo. Here, the executioners unleashed a true orgy of madness and horror. These women were systematically beaten and kicked, sometimes causing them to go into labor right during the interrogation. Therefore, it is not surprising that many women simply could not endure this level of brutality, humiliation, and physical and moral pain, and ultimately lost their sanity.
