Female guards in Nazi concentration camps - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Female guards in Nazi concentration camps - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

In St. Lambrecht it was Jane Bernigau (1944/?), while at Stutthof there were Johanna Wisotzki and Gerda Steinhoff, promoted to chief female overseers, while at Theresienstadt this was given to Hildegard Neumann.

Ruth Closius headed Uckermark (January 1945-March 1945), Margarete Gallinat (Maria) oversaw Vught (?-June 1944), Susanne Hille was head female guard at Unterluess (or Vuterluss) (September 1944-April 1945), and Hilde Hahn oversaw the Flossenbürg subcamp at Zwodau from June 1944 until May 1945. Closius was convicted of war crimes and hanged on July 29, 1948.

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The only female guard to tell her story to the public has been Herta Bothe, who served as a guard at Ravensbrück in 1942, then at Stutthof, Bromberg-Ost subcamp, and finally in Bergen-Belsen. She received ten years' imprisonment, and was released in the mid-1950s. In an interview in 2004, Bothe was asked if she regretted being a guard in aconcentration camp. Her response was, "What do you mean? ...I made a mistake, no... The mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it - otherwise I would have been put into it myself, that was my mistake."^[7]

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The last trial of a female overseer was held in 1996. Former Aufseherin  Luise Danz, who served as overseer in January 1943 at Plaszow, then at Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and at the Ravensbrück subcamp at Malchow as Oberaufseherin, was tried at the first Auschwitz Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. In 1956, she was released for good behavior. In 1996, she was once again tried for the murder of a young woman in Malchow at the end of the war. The doctor overseeing the trial told the court that the proceedings were too much for the elderly woman and all charges were dropped. As of 2011, Danz is still alive at the age of 94.^{[citation needed]}