5 cases · Historical
Convicted: Maria Mandl
She held orphaned children from Soviet transports in her arms, sang to them, gave them cookies and chocolate. Then, after a few days, she personally escorted some of them to the gas chambers. This was Maria Mandl: Lagerführerin of Auschwitz II-Birkenau's women's camp, the highest-ranking woman in the entire Nazi concentration camp system, and the figure prisoners knew only as 'The Beast.' Death lists bearing her signature implicate her in approximately 500,000 murders. She organized a prisoner orchestra that played during selections and executions. She rode a bicycle along prisoner lines and struck faces as she passed. And yet, on the morning of her hanging in January 1948, she knelt on a prison floor before a woman she had once held power over, wept, and begged for forgiveness. Her last words were spoken in Polish, a language not her own, in a country she had helped to destroy. Her execution received almost no coverage in the Austrian press. Her death certificate was not amended to reflect her Holocaust role until 2017. The first biography of her life was not published until 2023. This is the story of how a shoemaker's daughter from a small Catholic village in Upper Austria became one of history's most prolific female killers, and how the world spent eighty years looking away.
Convicted: Irma Ilse Ida Grese
Irma Ilse Ida Grese, widely known as the 'Hyena of Auschwitz' and the 'Beast of Belsen', was a Nazi concentration camp Helferin at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen. Her atrocities committed in Birkenau during the Holocaust period made her one of the most notorious female Nazi war criminals. Grese was convicted for crimes against humanity at the Belsen Trial in 1945 and was sentenced to death.
Convicted: Biljana Plavšić
Biljana Plavšić is a former Bosnian Serb politician, university professor, and scientist who notably served as President of Republika Srpska, a region within Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Bosnian War, she was accused of participating in the planning, instigation, ordering, and execution of crimes against humanity, including genocide, extermination, murder, and other severe violations of international law. In 2003, Plavšić pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 11 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She was released in 2009 after serving two-thirds of her sentence.
Convicted: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was a Rwandan politician who served as the Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women. She was tried and convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for inciting troops and militia to carry out rape during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This makes her the first woman to be convicted of genocide by the ICTR and the first woman ever to be convicted of genocidal rape. In June 2011, she was sentenced to life imprisonment on seven charges.
Convicted: Ilse Koch
Ilse Koch, a German war criminal, committed horrific acts during World War II while her husband Karl-Otto Koch was the commandant at Buchenwald concentration camp. Though she had no official position in the Nazi state, she became one of the most infamous figures after the war due to her involvement in atrocities. She was known as the 'Kommandeuse of Buchenwald' and was accused of taking souvenirs from the skin of murdered inmates.
