Hitler's Witches: The Five Cruel Women Who Terrorized The World With Their Sadistic Crimes

Who were Hitler's witches?

What crimes did they commit?

Did they have another way out?

In the Nazi concentration camps, hundreds of faithful guards became the most ruthless torturers and murderers of the Second World War.

They are not as famous as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, or Mengele, but the most sinister History of Humanity has a place for these true harpies, the inhuman faces that left so many victims behind them.

As in the case of Hermine Braunsteiner, "The Mare of Majdanek," who enjoyed inflicting severe blows to the stomachs of her inmates.

Or Irma Grese, the "Angel of Auschwitz," whose favorite pastime was to set her dogs to devour the prisoners.

Five women actively participated in the National Socialist war machine and succumbed to power, blood, and death.

Did they have a choice?

Yes, but they chose to take the reins, follow orders and season their actions with heavy doses of humiliation, abuse, and sadism.

1. Irma Grese. "Blonde Devil."

The overseer of the Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen extermination camps went down in history with "Blond Devil" and "Angel of Death."

On October 7, 1923, I into an ordinary German peasant family.

At 15, the girl left school and pursued a German Girls' Union career.

She tried to become a nurse, but her career did not work out, and in 1942, 19-year-old Irma joined the SS auxiliary units, starting with a post in the Ravensbrück camp.

In 1943, she became a head guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

Heavy boots, a wicker whip, and a pistol: with the help of these things, the young woman enjoyed her power over the prisoners.

She beat women to death, personally selected people to send to the gas chambers, and randomized prisoners.

One of Grese's favorite pastimes was chasing prisoners by escort dogs, who previously starved.

On April 17, 1945, she was taken prisoner by British troops.

In September 1945, Grese became one of the defendants in the trial for the administration of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her last place of assignment.

Finally, in November 1945, the "blonde devil" got sentenced to death.

The 22-year-old Irma Grese experienced no remorse.

The night before the execution, she amused herself and sang songs.

The Nazis got hanged on December 13, 1945.

2. Ilsa Koh. "Frau Lampshade."

The wife of Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse Koch is known by the nickname “The Witch of Buchenwald”.

On September 22, 1906, in Dresden into a working-class family. In her youth, Ilse studied diligently and was a cheerful child.

However, as an adult, at 26, she joined the Nazis on the eve of their rise to power.

In 1936, Ilse began working as a secretary and security guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

In the same year, she married like-minded Karl Koch, who in 1937 was appointed commandant of Buchenwald.

When Ilse Koch appeared in Buchenwald, she became famous for her harshness towards the prisoners.

Surviving prisoners said that the "Witch of Buchenwald," walking through the camp, beat people she encountered with a whip and threw a sheepdog at them.

Another passion of Frau Koch's was original handicrafts made from human skin.

She especially appreciated the skin of prisoners with tattoos, from which gloves, book bindings, and lampshades got made.

Thus appeared the second nickname of Ilsa Koch: "Frau Lampshade."

In July 1942, when the Kochs were working in Majdanek, Karl Koch was accused of corruption and dismissed from his position.

In 1943, Ilse and Karl Koch got arrested by the SS.

In addition to bribery, Koch got accused of killing two prisoners who were secretly treating the concentration camp commandant for syphilis.

In April 1945, soon before the fall of Nazi Germany, Karl Koch was executed, and his wife got released.

Ilse Koch was arrested again by representatives of the U.S. Army in June 1945.

In 1947 she was sentenced to life sentence for crimes against concentration camp prisoners.

A few years later, the military commander of the U.S. occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius Clay, intervened in her fate, found her guilt unproven, and released Ilsa Koch.

This decision provoked widespread resentment in Germany, and in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested again and again sentenced to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Ilse Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in a Bavarian prison in Eichach.

3. Antonina Makarova. “Tonka the machine gunner”.

The woman who became the executioner of the so-called Lokot district received notoriety under the nickname "Tonka, the machine gunner."

She was born in 1920 in the Smolensk region into a large peasant family.

At 8, Tonya moved to Moscow with her parents, brothers, and sisters.

After graduating from school, she entered university and then technical school to become a doctor.

With the outbreak of World War II, 21-year-old Antonina Makarova went to the front as a nurse.

In October 1941, part of Makarova got surrounded near Vyazma.

After a long wandering in the German rear and living in several villages, Makarova voluntarily entered the service of the German invaders, becoming the executioner of the Lokotsky district, or the Lokot Republic, a puppet territorial formation of collaborators in the Bryansk region.

During her service as an executioner, Makarova shot about 1,500 people.

After the executions, for which the woman received 30 Reichsmarks, she took the clothes and belongings of the executed.

When Soviet troops liberated the territory of the Lokotsky district, Makarova managed to leave for the German rear.

In 1945, in Königsberg, with stolen documents, she got a job in a Soviet military hospital.

Having married a Soviet soldier Viktor Ginzburg and taking her husband's surname, Antonina Makarova dropped out of sight of the special services for many years.

It was only in 1978 that the machine gunner Tonka was discovered and arrested.

On November 20, 1978, the Bryansk Regional Court sentenced Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg to death. On August 11, 1979, she carried out the sentence.

4. Maria Mandel. "Meloman."

The woman who for three years headed the women's section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was known as a music lover.

She created a women's orchestra from the prisoners who had previously devoted themselves to music on her initiative.

At the doors of the concentration camp, she greeted the people who had come to die with joyful melodies.

Maria Mandel was born in Austria, in the town of Münzkirchen, on January 10, 1912.

In the 1930s, Maria joined the growing Nazi force and, in 1938, joined the SS auxiliary units.

She served as a warden in various women's concentration camps and established herself as a "committed professional" for several years.

The pinnacle of her terrible career was her appointment in 1942 to head the women's department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. She held this position for three years.

Mandel personally participated in the selection of prisoners sent to the gas chambers.

Having fun, the Nazis took some of the condemned under their protection, giving people hope for salvation.

After a while, when the game bored her, Maria Mandel sent the "rescued" ones to the gas chamber, recruiting a new group of "lucky" ones.

At one point, it was Maria Mandel who invented sponsorship for the promotion of another murderer: Irma Grese.

In 1944, Maria Mandel transferred to Dachau, where she served.

In May 1945, she tried to take refuge in the mountains near her hometown of Münzkirchen.

However, in August 1945, Maria Mandel was arrested by representatives of American troops.

At the request of the Polish authorities, Mandel got deported to Poland; the trial Auschwitz-Auschwitz workers was getting prepared.

At the trial, which took place at the end of 1947, Maria Mandel was found responsible for destroying 500,000 prisoners and sentenced to death.

The Nazis got hanged in Krakow prison on January 24, 1948.

5. Hermine Braunsteiner. “Mare stepping on”.

Deputy Commandant of the Majdanek women's section was born in Vienna on July 16, 1919, into a working-class family.

Hermine, the blue-eyed blonde, dreamed of becoming a nurse, but she got forced to become a housekeeper due to a lack of funds.

After the Anschluss of 1938, the native of Austria became a German citizen and moved to Berlin, where she got a job at the Heinkel aircraft factory.

Unlike many of her colleagues, Hermina went to the warden, not for ideological considerations but the money. The warden's salary was four times that of an aircraft factory worker.

Braunsteiner learned the "Elements of Mastery" in 1939 in Ravensbrück under the guidance of Maria Mandel.

A few years later, they fought on official grounds, Braunsteiner achieved a transfer to Majdanek.

Hermine Braunsteiner was nicknamed "The Trampling Mare" because of her fondness for trampling women with her boots.

She beat prisoners to death, took children from their mothers, and personally threw them into the gas chambers.

Surviving prisoners called her one of the cruelest guards.

The "Trampling Mare" work got awarded the "Iron Cross 2nd Class".

At the end of the war, Braunsteiner worked as a warden camp in Genthin, and with the arrival of the Soviet troops, she managed to escape Vienna.

Here she was arrested and brought to trial.

The court considered Hermine Braunsteiner's activities only in the last place of service, knowing nothing about the adventures of "Trampling Mare" in Majdanek.

As a result, she received only three years in prison and got soon released under amnesty.

Like Antonina Makarova, the marriage helped Hermine Braunsteiner later in life.

While in Austria, American citizen Russell Ryan met her, after which an affair began.

The couple went to Canada, wherein 1958 Hermine and Russell were married.

In 1959, Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan entered the United States and became a U.S. citizen.

In the United States, Mrs. Ryan was known as a sweet housewife, unaware of her former life.

In 1964, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal discovered the "Trampling Mare" in New York and informed American journalists.

At an interview with one of the reporters, Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan admitted that she was the same Majdanek director.

After years of litigation, U.S. authorities stripped Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan of her citizenship.

As a result, on August 7, 1973, she became the first Nazi criminal to be deported from the United States to Germany.

Hermine Braunsteiner became one of the defendants in the so-called "Third Majdanek Trial" between 1975 and 1981.

She got accused of involvement in the murder of 200,000 people.

But, lack of evidence, the court found the Nazis responsible only for the murder of 80 people, complicity in the murder of 102 children, and assistance in the deaths of 1,000 people.

That, however, was more than enough to sentence her to life imprisonment.

But Hermine Braunsteiner was not destined to die in prison.

In 1996, she got released due to a severe illness (diabetes, which resulted in the amputation of her leg).

The trampled mare died in Bochum, Germany, on April 19, 1999.

Guardians today

The last trial of a female supervisor got held in 1996.

Former Aufseherin Luise Danz worked as a supervisor from January 1943 in Plaszow.

In Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the Ravensbrück secondary camp in Malchow as Oberaufseherin, she was tried in the first Auschwitz trial and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947.

In 1956, she got released for good behavior. In 1996, she tried the murder of a young woman in Malchow at the end of the war.

The doctor supervising the trial confirmed to the court that the proceedings could not sustain due to the defendant's advanced age, and all charges went down.

From 2011, Danz is still alive at 94.

In 1996 a story was published about Margot Pietzner (surnamed Kunz), a former Aufseherin of Ravensbruck, the Belzig sub-camp, and a sub-camp of Wittenberg.

Initially, she was sentenced to death by a Soviet court but was sentenced to a life sentence and lastly released in 1956.

In the early 1990s, at seventy-four, Margot received compensation of 64,350 marks (32,902 euros) for being considered a "victim of Stalin."

However, some historians argue that she lied and is undeserving of such financial compensation and recall that she brutally served as staff in three concentration camps.

The only guard who has told her story in public was Herta Bothe.

She served in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942, then in Stutthof, in the secondary center of Bromberg-Ost, and finally in Bergen-Belsen.

She was convicted to ten years in prison and released in the mid-1950s.

In a 2004 interview, Bothe asked if she regretted being a concentration camp guard.

Her response was,

"What do you mean? I committed a mistake. The error was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go; otherwise I would be inside myself, that was my mistake."

It has not got proven, but in 2006, 84-year-old San Francisco resident Elfriede Lina Rinkel hid her secret from her family friends for more than 60 years, and the U.S. Department of Justice deported her German-Jewish husband named Fred.

She had worked in the Ravensbrück concentration camp from 1944 until April 1945 and had used an SS-trained dog in the center.

Rinkel migrated to the United States in 1959 at the end of World War II in search of a better life and omitted Ravensbrück from the list of places of residence on his visa application.

In Germany, Rinkel does not face criminal charges as only allegations of murder can be sustained after this time, although the case continues to get investigated.

Sources:

https://actualidad.rt.com

https://es.wikipedia.org