5 cases from Germany
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: Gudrun Ensslin
Gudrun Ensslin was a German far-left militant and founder of the Red Army Faction, a West German terrorist group. She was involved in several bombings, robberies, and other violent actions against the West German government and capitalist institutions. She was arrested in 1972 and was imprisoned until her death in 1977, which was ruled a suicide.
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.
Convicted: Clara Hamilton Harris (later Clara Hamilton Harris Rathbone)
She survived the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. She held her fiancé's arm together with her bare hands while his blood soaked her white dress from collar to hem. She stayed until dawn with a screaming, inconsolable Mary Todd Lincoln, absorbing the widow's grief alongside her own. Clara Harris endured all of that — and still, eighteen years later, she never saw her death coming. On the night of December 23, 1883, in a consular residence in Hanover, Germany, her husband Henry Rathbone shot and stabbed her to death in their bedroom while their three children slept nearby. He then turned the knife on himself five or six times. He survived. She did not. A German court found Henry guilty but criminally insane. He was committed to an asylum, where he lived another twenty-seven years, apparently never fully comprehending what he had done. The children were shipped back across the Atlantic. Clara was buried in a foreign city cemetery and eventually disinterred when no family came to tend her grave. This is the story of a woman who sat two feet from history's most famous assassination, and lived to describe it — only to become the victim of a quieter, more intimate one. It is also the story of what trauma does to the people left alive in its wake: how it metastasizes, quietly, over years, until it destroys everything it touches.
