1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - warden of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Irma's nicknames included "Blonde Devil", "Angel of Death", and "Beautiful Monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, beat women to death, and enjoyed arbitrarily shooting prisoners. She starved her dogs so she could set them on victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Grese wore heavy boots and, in addition to a pistol, she always carried a wicker whip.

The Western post-war press constantly discussed the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen Joseph Kramer (“The Beast of Belsen”).
On April 17, 1945, she was captured by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Joseph Kramer, warden Juanna Bormann, and nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang songs with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese’s neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was “Faster,” addressed to the English executioner.

2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. She is best known by her pseudonym as “Frau Lampshaded.” She received the nickname “The Witch of Buchenwald” for her brutal torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. However, a few years later, American General Lucius Clay, the military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of ordering executions and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused public protest, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in the Bavarian prison of Eibach.

3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - matron of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said they were abused by Danz. She beat them and confiscated the clothes they had been given for the winter. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners, not giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed a minor girl.
Danz was arrested on June 1, 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 due to health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said Dantz would be too hard to bear if she was imprisoned again. She lives in Germany. She is now 94 years old.

4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) From 1940 to December 1943 she worked as a fashion model. In January 1944, she became a guard at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel but also very beautiful that the female prisoners nicknamed her “Beautiful Ghost.”

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the police officers guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed great pleasure, and pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged at Biskupka Gorka near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned and her ashes were publicly washed away in the latrine of the house where she was born.

5) Hertha Gertrude Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - warden of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942, she received an invitation to work as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp located near the city of Gdansk. In it, Bothe received the nickname "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her cruel treatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a guard during the death march of prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a detachment of 60 women engaged in wood production.

After the liberation of the camp she was arrested. At the Belsen court she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than stated on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she was directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Mandel was described by fellow employees as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. Auschwitz prisoners called her a monster among themselves. Mandel personally selected the prisoners, and sent thousands of them to the gas chambers. There are known cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when she got bored with them, she put them on the list for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and creation of a women’s camp orchestra, which greeted newly arrived prisoners at the gate with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, personally coming to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of warden of the Muhldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown of Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request as a war criminal. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia - ?) - senior guard at the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.

Hildegard Neumann began her service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming chief warden. Due to her good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all the camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, with another 55,000 dying in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and faced no criminal liability for war crimes. The subsequent fate of Hildegard Neumann is unknown.

This name became a symbol of the brutal attitude of the Nazis towards captured children.

During the three years of the camp’s existence (1941–1944), according to various sources, about one hundred thousand people died in Salaspils, seven thousand of them were children.

The place from which you never return

This camp was built by captured Jews in 1941 on the territory of a former Latvian training ground 18 kilometers from Riga near the village of the same name. According to documents, initially “Salaspils” (German: Kurtenhof) was called an “educational labor” camp, and not a concentration camp.

The area was of impressive size, fenced with barbed wire, and was built up with hastily constructed wooden barracks. Each was designed for 200-300 people, but often there were from 500 to 1000 people in one room.

Initially, Jews deported from Germany to Latvia were doomed to death in the camp, but since 1942, “undesirables” from a variety of countries were sent here: France, Germany, Austria, and the Soviet Union.

The Salaspils camp also became notorious because it was here that the Nazis took blood from innocent children for the needs of the army and abused young prisoners in every possible way.

Full donors for the Reich

New prisoners were brought in regularly. They were forced to strip naked and sent to the so-called bathhouse. It was necessary to walk half a kilometer through the mud, and then wash in ice-cold water. After this, those who arrived were placed in barracks and all their belongings were taken away.

There were no names, surnames, or titles - only serial numbers. Many died almost immediately; those who managed to survive after several days of captivity and torture were “sorted.”

Children were separated from their parents. If the mothers were not given back, the guards took the babies by force. There were terrible screams and screams. Many women went crazy; some of them were placed in the hospital, and some were shot on the spot.

Infants and children under six years of age were sent to a special barracks, where they died of hunger and disease. The Nazis experimented on older prisoners: they injected poisons, performed operations without anesthesia, took blood from children, which was transferred to hospitals for wounded soldiers of the German army. Many children became “full donors” - their blood was taken from them until they died.

Considering that the prisoners were practically not fed: a piece of bread and a gruel made from vegetable waste, the number of child deaths amounted to hundreds per day. The corpses, like garbage, were taken out in huge baskets and burned in the crematorium ovens or dumped in disposal pits.

Covering my tracks

In August 1944, before the arrival of Soviet troops, in an attempt to erase traces of the atrocities, the Nazis burned down many of the barracks. The surviving prisoners were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp, and German prisoners of war were kept on the territory of Salaspils until October 1946.

After the liberation of Riga from the Nazis, the commission to investigate Nazi atrocities discovered 652 children's corpses in the camp. Mass graves and human remains were also found: ribs, hip bones, teeth.

One of the most eerie photographs, clearly illustrating the events of that time, is the “Salaspils Madonna”, the corpse of a woman hugging a dead baby. It was established that they were buried alive.

The truth hurts my eyes

Only in 1967, the Salaspils memorial complex was erected on the site of the camp, which still exists today. Many famous Russian and Latvian sculptors and architects worked on the ensemble, including Ernst Neizvestny. The road to Salaspils begins with a massive concrete slab, the inscription on which reads: “Behind these walls the earth groans.”

Further on a small field rise symbolic figures with “speaking” names: “Unbroken”, “Humiliated”, “Oath”, “Mother”. On both sides of the road there are barracks with iron bars, where people bring flowers, children's toys and sweets, and on the black marble wall, notches measure the days spent by innocents in the “death camp.”

Today, some Latvian historians blasphemously call the Salaspils camp “educational-labor” and “socially useful,” refusing to acknowledge the atrocities that occurred near Riga during the Second World War.

In 2015, an exhibition dedicated to the victims of Salaspils was banned in Latvia. Officials considered that such an event would harm the country's image. As a result, the exhibition “Stolen Childhood. Victims of the Holocaust through the eyes of young prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Salaspils” was held at the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Paris.

In 2017, a scandal also occurred at the press conference “Salaspils camp, history and memory”. One of the speakers tried to present his original point of view on historical events, but received severe rebuff from the participants. “It hurts to hear how today you are trying to forget about the past. We cannot allow such terrible events to happen again. God forbid you experience something like this,” one of the women who managed to survive in Salaspils addressed the speaker.

The Second World War was fought using all-out methods. The warring parties used all available means to inflict the greatest damage on the enemy. The fight against partisans in the rear of German troops was not limited by any moral standards; the most inhuman methods of interrogation were used in it.

In the occupied settlements on the territory of European countries, including the USSR, in the very first days of the occupation, Gestapo branches deployed their work. The torture to which all those suspected of underground work were subjected became a special article in the investigation of the crimes of the Nazi regime in Nuremberg.

Considering the mass atrocities of the occupiers on the territory of the Soviet Union, one can understand the reasons why their cruelty towards citizens of other countries, including the torture of women by the Gestapo, remained a little-known page of history. But even in countries such as Holland, Denmark, and France, the fascist executioners showed zeal, mercilessly dealing with patriots.

In 1940, the Nazis captured the northern country of Norway. The city of Kristiansad, from the beginning of 1942, became the place where they located the “House of Horror,” the headquarters of the secret state police of the Reich, the main function of which was to suppress the underground activity of local anti-fascists and impede sabotage operations carried out by British intelligence. The Gestapo tortured women with particular sadistic sophistication, using numerous ingeniously designed devices. After the war, a museum was opened in the house of the former city archive, where the torture chambers were located, in memory of the events of the war.

Beating with chains, passing electric current, unbearably heating the head with electric reflectors - these methods of interrogation were used mainly in relation to men. Torture of women by the Gestapo usually consisted of mutilation of their hands; for this purpose, special machines were made that pulled out nails or crushed joints. The exhibition presents these mechanisms, they are authentic and captured after the liberation of Norway by Soviet troops and patriots in 1945.

In the museum of the city of Kristiansad, some scenes of the “work” of the Gestapo have been reconstructed, and photographs of torture are also presented. Here is a married couple, suspected of collaborating with the anti-fascist underground, being interrogated with bias. The husband was chained to the wall so that he could see his wife being beaten. Torture of women by the Gestapo often combined methods of physical and psychological pressure on prisoners in the hope that someone would break down and start talking. Beating children in the presence of their mothers also became a cruel ordeal. In fact, even the executioners themselves could not stand their nerves; in order to maintain their “performance”, they used drugs and strong alcoholic drinks.

In Norway, the death penalty was used extremely rarely, but the Nazi punishers paid for their crimes with their lives. During the trial, three hundred witnesses testified incriminating the methods of work of the Norwegian Gestapo department. The criminal code was temporarily changed, and in June 1947, the Nazis responsible for the abuse and execution of prisoners of war and civilians were hanged.

During the occupation of the territory of the USSR, the Nazis constantly resorted to various types of torture. All torture was permitted at the state level. The law also constantly increased repression against representatives of the non-Aryan nation - torture had an ideological basis.

Prisoners of war and partisans, as well as women, were subjected to the most brutal torture. An example of the inhuman torture of women by the Nazis is the actions that the Germans used against the captured underground worker Anela Chulitskaya.

The Nazis locked this girl in a cell every morning, where she was subjected to monstrous beatings. The rest of the prisoners heard her screams, which tore their souls apart. They carried Anel out when she lost consciousness and threw her like garbage into a common cell. The other captive women tried to ease her pain with compresses. Anel told prisoners that they hung her from the ceiling, cut out pieces of her skin and muscles, beat her, raped her, broke her bones and injected water under her skin.

In the end, Anel Chulitskaya was killed, the last time her body was seen was mutilated almost beyond recognition, her hands were cut off. Her body hung on one of the walls of the corridor for a long time, as a reminder and warning.

The Germans resorted to torture even for singing in cells. So Tamara Rusova was beaten for singing songs in Russian.

Quite often, not only the Gestapo and the military resorted to torture. The captured women were also tortured by German women. There is information that talks about Tanya and Olga Karpinsky, who were mutilated beyond recognition by a certain Frau Boss.

Fascist torture was varied, and each of them was more inhumane than the other. Often women were not allowed to sleep for several days, even a week. They were deprived of water, the women suffered from dehydration, and the Germans forced them to drink very salty water.

Women were very often underground, and the struggle against such actions was severely punished by the fascists. They always tried to suppress the underground as quickly as possible and for this they resorted to such cruel measures. Women also worked in the rear of the Germans, obtaining various information.

Most of the torture was carried out by Gestapo soldiers (the police of the Third Reich), as well as SS soldiers (elite soldiers subordinate to Adolf Hitler personally). In addition, the so-called “policemen” - collaborators who controlled order in the settlements - resorted to torture.

Women suffered more than men, as they succumbed to constant sexual harassment and numerous rapes. Often the rapes were gang rapes. After such abuse, girls were often killed so as not to leave traces. In addition, they were gassed and forced to bury corpses.

As a conclusion, we can say that fascist torture affected not only prisoners of war and men in general. The Nazis were the most cruel towards women. Many Nazi German soldiers frequently raped the female population of the occupied territories. The soldiers were looking for a way to “have fun.” Moreover, no one could stop the Nazis from doing this.

“Skrekkens hus” - “House of Horror” - that’s what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the city archive building has been the headquarters of the Gestapo in southern Norway. Those arrested were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, and from here people were sent to concentration camps and executions.

Now in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where prisoners were tortured, a museum has been opened that tells about what happened during the war in the state archive building.
The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. Only new lights and doors appeared. In the main corridor there is a main exhibition with archival materials, photographs, and posters.

Thus, a suspended prisoner was beaten with a chain.

This is how they tortured us with electric stoves. If the executioners were especially zealous, the hair on a person’s head could catch fire.

I have already written about waterboarding before. It was also used in the Archive.

Fingers were pinched in this device and nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in place and was preserved.

Nearby are other devices for conducting interrogation with “bias.”

Reconstructions have been carried out in several basement rooms - how it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous prisoners were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

In the next room there was a torture chamber. Here, a real scene of torture of a married couple of underground fighters, taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with the intelligence center in London, is reproduced. Two Gestapo men torture a wife in front of her husband, who is chained to the wall. In the corner, suspended from an iron beam, is another member of the failed underground group. They say that before the interrogations, the Gestapo officers were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.

Everything in the cell was left as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool standing at the woman's feet, you can see the Gestapo mark of Kristiansand.

This is a reconstruction of an interrogation - a Gestapo provocateur (on the left) presents the arrested radio operator of an underground group (he sits on the right, in handcuffs) with his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I’ll tell you about him later.

In this display case are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo - the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.

System for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jew, political, gypsy, Spanish Republican, dangerous criminal, criminal, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.

School excursions are conducted to the museum. I came across one of these - several local teenagers were walking along the corridors with Toure Robstad, a volunteer from local war survivors. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum at the Archives per year.

Toure tells the kids about Auschwitz. Two boys from the group were there recently on an excursion.

Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.

In a separate showcase are things made by the hands of Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. The Russians exchanged these crafts for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand still had a whole collection of these wooden birds - on the way to school, she often met groups of our prisoners going to work under escort, and gave them her breakfast in exchange for these toys carved from wood.

Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted information to London about the movements of German troops, the deployment of military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Sea Fleet.

"Germany is a nation of creators."

Norwegian patriots had to work under conditions of intense pressure on the local population from Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of quickly Nazifying the country. The Quisling government made efforts for this in the fields of education, culture, and sports. Even before the war, Quisling's Nazi party (Nasjonal Samling) convinced the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was the military power of the Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed greatly to intimidating the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. Since coming to power, Quisling only intensified his propaganda with the help of Goebbels' department. The Nazis in Norway convinced the population that only a strong Germany could protect the Norwegians from the Bolsheviks.

Several posters distributed by the Nazis in Norway. “Norges nye nabo” – “New Norwegian Neighbor”, 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of “reversing” Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.

“Do you want it to be like this?”

The propaganda of the “new Norway” strongly emphasized the kinship of the two “Nordic” peoples, their unity in the fight against British imperialism and the “wild Bolshevik hordes.” Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon and his image in their struggle. The king's motto “Alt for Norge” was ridiculed in every possible way by the Nazis, who inspired the Norwegians that military difficulties were a temporary phenomenon and Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.

Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are devoted to the materials of the criminal case in which the seven main Gestapo men in Kristiansand were tried. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes on Norwegian territory. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, and the Norwegian and foreign press participated in the trial. The Gestapo men were tried for torture and abuse of those arrested; there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russians and 1 Polish prisoner of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death, which was first and temporarily included in the Norwegian Criminal Code immediately after the end of the war.

Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker teacher. A notorious sadist, he had a criminal record in Germany. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, and was responsible for the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war discovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He, like the rest of his accomplices, was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He left for Germany, where his traces were lost.

Next to the Archive building there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, lie the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and British pilots shot down by the Germans in the skies over Kristiansand. Every year on May 8th, the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway are raised on flagpoles next to the graves.

In 1997, the Archive building, from which the state archive moved to another location, was decided to be sold to private hands. Local veterans and public organizations came out sharply against it, organized themselves into a special committee and ensured that in 1998, the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historical building to the veterans committee. Now here, along with the museum I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN.