When Allied forces liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, they uncovered a scene of unspeakable horror—piles of emaciated corpses, disease-ridden survivors barely clinging to life, and the stench of death choking the air.
Among the perpetrators captured on site were not just male SS officers, but also several female guards, some of whom would soon face justice in one of the first postwar war crimes trials. Their executions would send a chilling message to the world: gender was no shield from accountability.
Bergen-Belsen had not originally been a death camp like Auschwitz, but by the war's end it had become a dumping ground for prisoners evacuated from the East. With overcrowding, starvation, and typhus rampant, tens of thousands died in the final months alone. Many of the guards transferred to Belsen had previously worked at extermination camps—and brought their cruelty with them.
Among them was Irma Grese, a former guard at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, who had quickly gained a reputation for her sadistic brutality. Known for her striking appearance and cold detachment, she carried a whip and allowed her dogs to maul prisoners. At Bergen-Belsen, witnesses described how she continued her reign of terror, beating inmates and overseeing selections with a chilling lack of remorse.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was another senior female guard, having worked at Auschwitz before becoming the chief wardress at Belsen. She was responsible for enforcing camp rules and assisting with the transportation of prisoners to their deaths. Like Grese, her participation was not passive—she actively embraced her role in the Nazi killing machine.
These women were among those tried in the Belsen Trial, held at Lüneburg from September to November 1945. The trial was a landmark moment, one of the first times female concentration camp guards were held publicly accountable for their crimes. British military prosecutors presented harrowing evidence, including eyewitness testimony from survivors, showing that these women had taken part in torture, murder, and other atrocities.
The court found both Grese and Volkenrath guilty. Their sentences: death by hanging.
On December 13, 1945, in the early hours of the morning, Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and another female guard, Juana Bormann—nicknamed “the woman with the dogs” for her role in prisoner killings—were led to the gallows at Hamelin Prison. British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentences. Grese, just 22 years old, reportedly walked to the gallows without emotion.
Their executions were widely reported in the postwar press, generating a mix of grim satisfaction and shock. For many, they symbolized the collapse of the Nazi regime and the world’s first attempts to reckon with the scale of its evil. But they also shattered conventional beliefs about femininity—showing that women, too, could be perpetrators of monstrous crimes.