The Public*EXECUTION OF THE BERGEN-BELSEN FEMALE GUARDS*Are Hard to Stomach! Timelines of War

They ran one of the most brutal concentration camps in Nazi Germany. They chose who worked. They chose who starved. They chose who died. And when the war ended, they took off their uniforms, walked into ordinary neighborhoods, and tried to disappear forever. One was found working as a nurse.

 One was living quietly in a suburb. One was caught walking down a street with her fiancee, acting like nothing had ever happened. Within 2 years, every single one of them was standing on a gallows. But here’s what history books never tell you. The women who survived Ravensbruck II didn’t just want these guards punished. They traveled from across Europe specifically to watch it happen.

 They stood in that crowd holding photographs of the people who never made it out. And what those guards had actually done inside that camp. What made thousands of people show up just to watch them die is something most people have never fully heard until now. If you believe history’s darkest chapters deserve to be told completely and honestly, subscribe to Timeline of War and turn on notifications right now.

 Every story on this channel is real. Every name you’re about to hear was a real person. And what happened inside Ravensbruck II is something every person alive today should understand. Let’s start from the beginning. Spring 1939. The Second World War hadn’t officially started yet. Most of the world still believed conflict could be avoided.

Diplomats were still talking. Newspapers were still hopeful. And in the quiet German countryside, 90 km north of Berlin, construction crews were finishing a new concentration camp on the banks of a still gray lake. The location was chosen deliberately. Remote enough to stay out of sight. Close enough to railway lines to receive prisoner transports from anywhere in occupied Europe.

 But what made this camp different from every other facility the Nazi regime had built was not its location or its size or even its design. It was its purpose. Ravensbruck II was built exclusively for women. The only major Nazi concentration camp constructed specifically with that intention. And from the moment its gates opened in May 1939, it became a place where ordinary life, ordinary human dignity, was systematically and deliberately destroyed.

 The first prisoners arrived that same month. A few hundred women, most of them German citizens, communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, women who had publicly criticized the regime or been accused of doing so. Women whose only real crime was existing in a country that had decided certain people had no right to exist freely.

As Germany’s military machine consumed more and more of Europe, Ravensbrück filled faster than anyone had planned. Women arrived from Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Yugoslavia, and dozens of countries beyond. By 1942, transports were pulling in almost every single day. By the war’s end, more than 130,000 women from over 40 different countries had passed through those gates.

 The reasons for imprisonment ranged from the serious to the absurd. Jewish women targeted purely for their ancestry, Roma women swept up in Nazi racial laws, resistance fighters caught hiding Allied soldiers or smuggling information, women arrested in random street roundups who had done absolutely nothing at all, mothers separated from children with no explanation given and no information ever exchanged.

 Running a camp of this scale and deliberate brutality required a specific kind of workforce. Male SS officers held senior command positions, but couldn’t manage thousands of female prisoners alone. So, the SS began recruiting recruiting women as guards. First a handful, then dozens, then hundreds. And the women they recruited would eventually become some of the most notorious war criminals in modern history.

The recruitment process was almost insultingly casual. Newspaper advertisements, word of mouth through neighbors and family, no military experience required, no advanced education expected. The only genuine qualifications were loyalty to Nazi ideology and a willingness to follow orders without hesitation or conscience.

Many recruits came from poor or working-class families. The job offered something genuinely appealing in wartime Germany, steady wages, a uniform, housing, and regular meals at a time when food rationing had become a grinding daily reality for millions of civilians. Training took place inside Ravensbrück itself.

 New recruits learned to run roll calls, assign labor details, and enforce discipline through beatings, isolation, and extended punishment duties. The explicit training objective was simple and brutal, maintain absolute control and break the spirit of every woman behind those fences. Among the hundreds who passed through that training program, a smaller group emerged whose specific cruelty, deliberate sadism, and hunger for power left marks that survivors would carry for the rest of their lives and that would eventually bring each of them

before a military tribunal. Dorothea Binz was 19 years old when she volunteered for the SS Women’s Auxiliary and arrived at Ravensbrück okay. She came from a completely ordinary working-class background in the small German town of Templin. Limited education, limited prospects. The Nazi regime offered her something her civilian life never had, authority.

 She adapted to that authority with a speed that disturbed even those around her. Prisoners remembered her walking the camp perimeter with a riding crop, unhurried, almost relaxed, occasionally smiling as she selected women for punishment, not because they had violated specific rules, sometimes simply because they were there and she could.

She rose quickly to deputy head of guard training, a position that gave her direct influence over every single female guard entering Ravensbrück. Whatever Dorothea was, she made sure the women she trained understood how to be a too. Grete Bosel arrived in 1944 with a nursing background, a profession built entirely around the concept of healing.

Inside Ravensbrück okay, that background served a completely different purpose. Her role placed her at the intersection of guard duty and the camp’s medical program, a program that used living prisoners as test subjects for experiments that left women permanently crippled, disfigured, or dead. Survivors remembered Greta moving through the prisoner hospital with cold, clinical detachment, not assessing who could be treated, but identifying who had become too weak to continue producing labor value, and sending them toward

facilities from which no prisoner ever returned. Elisabeth Marschall held the title of head nurse and controlled the prisoner hospital. In theory, this made her the one person in Ravensbruck whose job was to preserve life. In practice, her authority determined who received treatment and who was turned away to die.

 Under her watch, the hospital became the place prisoners feared most. Sick women who reached its doors were as likely to be selected for death as they were to receive any form of genuine medical care. Gertrud Heiss enforced camp regulations with a severity that left even other guards uncomfortable. Erna Petermann controlled labor assignments, a position whose power was almost invisible from the outside, but meant everything to the women living under it.

The difference between a survivable work assignment and a fatal one was entirely within her discretion. Margarete Gallinat was known for unpredictable, explosive violence, the kind that kept every prisoner in a constant state of physical alertness because there was no way to predict when it would arrive. Together, these women didn’t simply participate in Ravensbruck case structure of brutality.

They were its architecture. They made decisions every single day that determined whether specific women lived or died, and for years, there were absolutely no consequences for any of it. That was about to change. Through 1943 and into 1944, the world outside Ravensbruck case fences was transforming rapidly.

 Germany was no longer the advancing superpower that had swept across Europe in the war’s opening years. The Soviet Red Army had broken through on the Eastern Front, and was grinding westward with unstoppable momentum. American and British bombers were dismantling German cities systematically, reducing industrial centers and civilian neighborhoods alike to rubble.

 Supply chains that had once functioned smoothly were fracturing under the pressure of a war being lost on every front simultaneously. Inside Ravensbrück the consequences were catastrophic. The camp had always been brutal. Now it became something that defies straightforward description. Transports kept arriving despite the deteriorating conditions.

Hundreds of new prisoners at a time, delivered into a facility that had already exceeded every reasonable capacity limit. Barracks designed for 40 women held well over 100. Women slept on bare wooden planks or on cold concrete floors without blankets, pressed against strangers in darkness that smelled of sickness and unwashed bodies.

Disease moved through the overcrowded barracks with nothing to stop it. Typhus, dysentery, infections that would have been treatable under normal circumstances became death sentences in this environment. Rations shrank to quantities that sustained nothing. Women became so severely malnourished that their bones pushed visibly through skin stretched paper thin across their frames.

The guards responded to the collapsing conditions not with any moderation, but with escalating violence. A stumble during roll call, a moment of visible physical weakness, looking in the wrong direction, any of these could bring an immediate beating. Public punishment became not just disciplinary, but theatrical, designed to maintain psychological control over thousands of women who, if they had ever stopped being afraid long enough to think clearly, vastly outnumbered their captors.

In 1944, as the Soviet Army liberated Poland, the SS began evacuating other camps before prisoners could be freed. Women from Auschwitz, Majdanek, and dozens of smaller facilities were loaded onto overcrowded transports and redirected to Ravensbrück. I came. Many arrived already beyond recovery. Starved past the point where food could help them.

 Diseased past the point where treatment could reach them. The death rate accelerated dramatically. The camp was consuming itself. By early 1945, with Allied armies advancing from both directions, the SS shifted into evidence destruction mode. Thousands of the weakest prisoners were forced onto death marches. Columns of emaciated women driven through freezing winter conditions with almost no food or water covering impossible distances at a pace designed to kill those who couldn’t keep up.

 Anyone who fell was shot on the spot and left where they lay. On April 30th, 1945, Soviet soldiers reached Ravensbruck I came. Of the 130,000 women who had entered those gates, approximately 3,500 were still alive. The majority too physically destroyed to stand without support. The guards who hadn’t fled were taken into custody immediately.

 Those who had escaped into the chaos of Germany’s collapse believed they had gotten away clean. They hadn’t. The Allied investigation into Ravensbruck I came began almost immediately after liberation and survivors were its most irreplaceable resource. These women could identify former guards with extraordinary accuracy.

 Not just faces, specific mannerisms, particular ways of walking, the sound of a voice, a distinctive scar, a habitual gesture. Details that no personnel file could capture. Their testimonies were recorded with meticulous care building an identification database that investigators would use across months of searching.

 British, Soviet, and Polish authorities combined their intelligence, photographs from camp records, interrogation transcripts, personnel rosters, and thousands of individual witness statements collected from survivors across Europe. Investigators moved actively through the field rather than waiting for information to arrive. Coming through displaced persons camps, questioning civilians in small German towns, cross-referencing refugee lists against SS employment records.

 Any woman identified as having served in the SS, particularly at a women’s facility, was brought in for questioning. The defense most of them attempted was identical. They had only been clerks or cooks or administrative workers. Nothing to do with the violence. Simple employees of a system they had no real part in.

 Then survivors looked at their faces. The recognition was frequently instant and absolute. Dorothea Binz was arrested in May 1945 alongside her fiance, a former SS officer from another camp. While both were attempting to pass as ordinary civilians, Greta Bosel was located shortly afterward having blended into a residential neighborhood in the hope that changed circumstances would make her invisible.

Elisabeth Marschall had settled quietly into a small community presenting herself as a straightforward nurse with an unremarkable personal history. Gertrude Heise was found in the British occupied zone and transferred to Polish custody, handed to the nation where the majority of her victims had once lived and where their family still waited for something resembling justice.

The women who had once been untouchable were now completely powerless. And the proceedings that would decide their fates were about to begin. The first Ravensbruck camp trial opened in Hamburg in December 1946 conducted by British military courts. 11 defendants appeared in the dock, three former male SS officers and eight female guards.

The charges covered murder, deliberate starvation, arbitrary shootings, systematic beatings, and direct participation in medical experiments conducted on living human beings without their consent and without anesthesia. The medical evidence was some of the most disturbing testimony the court received.

 Survivor after survivor described procedures carried out on conscious women, bones deliberately fractured and then deliberately infected to study wound contamination. Tissue surgically removed for examination, dangerous chemical compounds injected into healthy bodies to observe their effects. Women left permanently disabled or disfigured.

 Women who died on the operating tables of an institution that called itself a hospital. Polish survivors took the stand in succession, each one describing specific actions by specific guards with a precision that left no ambiguity. They described Dorothea Binz selecting women for punishment seemingly at random and the expression on her face while she did it.

 They described Grete Bosel moving methodically through rows of sick prisoners, pointing coldly at those whose productivity had reached its end. They described Elisabeth Marschall turning dying women away from the hospital doors, deciding their lives were no longer worth the resources treatment would require. But, following orders, defense collapsed under the weight of the testimony.

Witness after witness described individual choices, individual moments of cruelty that went far beyond any instruction issued from above. These weren’t women who had reluctantly participated in a system that gave them no choice. These were women who had exercised personal authority, made personal decisions, and in many cases appeared to derive personal satisfaction from what they did.

 On February 3rd, 1947, the verdicts were delivered without ambiguity. Dorothea Binz, death. Grete Bosel, death. Elisabeth Marschall, in Poland. The Gdańsk trials reached the same conclusion for Gertrud Heise. The path from the courtroom led in one direction only. The three women condemned by the British military court were transferred to Hameln prison under heavy guard.

A facility that had become Germany’s primary site for executing convicted Nazi war criminals in the post-war period. Thick stone walls, small cold cells, continuous guard presence outside every condemned door around the clock. On May 2, 1947, Dorothea Binz, Grete Bosel, and Elisabeth Marschall were taken from their cells one at a time.

 The executioner was Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most experienced and most precisely efficient executioner, who who traveled to Germany repeatedly in the post-war years to carry out sentences against convicted war criminals. Pierrepoint was defined by a single characteristic above all others. He wasted no time.

 From the moment a condemned prisoner entered the execution chamber to the moment it was over, under 15 seconds. No speeches. No final dramatic confrontations. No drawn-out theater. Just the swift, mechanical end of lives that had been used to end thousands of others. Outside Hameln’s walls, the streets were quiet. There was no public gathering.

Most local residents only learned executions had occurred when the prison bell rang once and then fell silent. In Gdansk, the approach was completely different. Polish authorities had made a deliberate decision crimes committed publicly, in front of thousands of forced witnesses, should be answered publicly.

What happened at Ravensbrück had not been hidden or private. It had been performed openly, staged as theater designed to be witnessed. Justice, they decided, should be equally visible. On July 4th, 1947, Gerda Bothe and several other convicted female guards were brought to a public square in Gdansk. Thousands of people had been gathering for hours before the proceedings began.

Crowds packed every available space, filling side streets, climbing onto rooftops, pressing against every window overlooking the square. Parents lifted children onto their shoulders. Police formed physical barriers to hold the mass of humanity back from the open gallows standing at the center of the square.

 Among those thousands were Ravensbrück survivors who had traveled specifically, deliberately, from across Europe for this single afternoon. They carried photographs, images of women who had entered Ravensbrück and never come out. Some held small personal items that belonged to the dead. They had waited years for something concrete, something final, something they could stand in front of with their own bodies and witness with their own eyes.

Others were family members, people who had received no body, no notification, no explanation of any kind, and who needed to see something real before they could begin the impossible process of understanding that their loss had not gone entirely unanswered. The atmosphere was dense with grief, fury, and an exhausted, desperate need for accountability that 2 years of waiting had only intensified.

 When the condemned were brought forward under heavy guard, the hostility radiating from the crowd was physical in its intensity. The gallows stood completely open and exposed. No walls, no barriers, no privacy of any kind. Every eye in that square and every face at every window above it had a clear, unobstructed view.

When the moment came, it was quick. But no one who stood in that square that afternoon ever forgot what they saw. By the time the executions concluded, more than 20 Ravensbrück female guards had been executed across multiple countries between 1947 and 1948. Dozens more received long prison sentences, but no verdict handed down in any courtroom could give back what Ravensbrück had taken.

 More than 130,000 women had entered through those gates. Tens of thousands had died from deliberate starvation, from disease, from medical procedures performed on living bodies, from arbitrary execution, from the frozen roads of the death marches. They were mothers, daughters, sisters, teachers, farmers, resistance fighters, women who had done nothing more than exist in a world that had decided certain human beings had no right to exist at all.

The guards who ran that place believed their power was permanent. They believed the uniforms they wore made them untouchable. They believed the system backing them would never fall. Every single one of them was wrong. Justice came, slowly and imperfectly, unable to fully account for the scale of what had been done inside those fences, but it came, and in a square in Gydansk on a summer afternoon in 1947, thousands of people who had every possible reason to lose faith in accountability stood together and watched it arrive.

Ravensbrück is a memorial now. Visitors walk through the surviving structures. They read names carved into stone. The names of women who went in and never came out. Those names deserve to be spoken. Those stories deserve to be told. Subscribe to Timelines of War. Share this video. Because forgetting is the easiest thing in the world.

 And these women, both those who suffered and those who were finally held responsible, must never be forgotten. We are not done telling these stories. Timelines of War, subscribe, notifications on, share this video.