Why the Female Belsen Guards Were Privately Hanged

Why the Female Belsen Guards Were Privately Hanged

When British troops entered Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945, they did not describe what they found as a prison, or even a camp. They called it hell on earth.

More than 13,000 corpses lay unburied. Survivors moved like shadows—starving, diseased, barely alive. In the weeks that followed liberation, thousands more died despite medical aid. By the end of the war, over 70,000 people had perished there, not in gas chambers, but through starvation, typhus, brutality, and neglect.

And among those responsible were SS guards—men and women—who had overseen this collapse into human annihilation.

Three of those women would become infamous: Irma Grese, Johanna Bormann, and Elisabeth Volkenrath. Young, uniformed, and in positions of authority, they would later stand trial before the world. They would be sentenced to death.

Yet when the sentence was carried out, there was no crowd.
No public gallows.
No spectacle.

They were executed quietly, behind prison walls.

The question remains: why?

The Shock of Female Perpetrators

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen horrified Allied soldiers, but what unsettled the public even more was who some of the perpetrators were.

Women.

Some barely in their twenties.

Figures like Irma Grese, dubbed by the press “the Blonde Beast,” shattered assumptions about gender and cruelty. Survivors testified that she beat prisoners, carried a whip and pistol, and participated in selections at Auschwitz that sent thousands to the gas chambers.

Johanna Bormann, known for unleashing dogs on prisoners, and Elisabeth Volkenrath, the senior female overseer at Belsen, had also served at Auschwitz. Their crimes were not abstract. They were personal, repeated, and remembered by witnesses who survived just long enough to testify.

The Belsen Trial, conducted by British military authorities in late 1945, became the first major war crimes trial to expose the inner workings of a concentration camp to the world.

The verdict was unequivocal.

They were guilty.

Sentenced to Die — But Not in Public

On 13 December 1945, the three women were executed inside Hamelin Prison.

The executioner was Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most experienced hangman, who had already carried out numerous executions of Nazi war criminals. He used the long-drop method, calculated to break the neck instantly.

The executions were efficient. Clinical. Final.

They were also deliberately private.

This was not an accident, nor an attempt to soften justice. It was policy.

British Law and the End of Public Executions

Unlike some Allied powers, Britain had abolished public executions long before the Second World War. The last public hanging in Britain had taken place in the 19th century. By 1945, public executions were seen as crude, destabilizing, and incompatible with modern legal standards.

The Belsen trials were conducted under the Royal Warrant of 1945, which governed British military justice in occupied Germany. Under this system, executions were to be carried out inside prisons, away from crowds, press, and spectacle.

From the British perspective, justice was not meant to be seen.
It was meant to be administered.

Preventing Martyrs in a Volatile Germany

There was another, more political reason.

Nazi ideology had not vanished in April 1945. Millions of Germans remained traumatized, resentful, or quietly sympathetic to the fallen regime. Extremist networks still existed. Weapons were still hidden.

British authorities feared that a public execution—especially of young women like Grese—could turn into a rallying point.

A spectacle might generate:

Sympathy among former Nazis

Morbid fascination in the press

Or even unrest, riots, or violence

A private execution denied all of that.

No cheering.
No chanting.
No shrine.

Even their bodies were buried quietly within the prison grounds to prevent graves from becoming sites of pilgrimage. Only years later were the remains moved to a nearby cemetery, where the graves remain unmarked.

Law, Not Revenge

The British were acutely aware of the contrast they wished to draw.

The Nazi system thrived on public humiliation, theatrical violence, and terror as spectacle. The Allies wanted to demonstrate something fundamentally different: law over vengeance.

By conducting executions privately, after formal trials with defense counsel and witness testimony, Britain emphasized that these deaths were:

Judicial penalties

Not mob justice

Not political theater

This distinction mattered deeply in the early postwar world, where legitimacy and moral authority were fragile commodities.

Why Hanging — Especially for Women?

Hanging itself carried meaning.

Under European legal tradition:

Soldiers were typically executed by firing squad

Criminals were hanged

By choosing hanging, British authorities made a statement: these women were not soldiers punished for wartime acts, but criminals convicted of murder and crimes against humanity.

Their uniforms did not protect them.
Their gender did not excuse them.
Their youth did not mitigate their guilt.

They were reduced, in legal terms, to what the court judged them to be: criminals.

The Fear of Sensationalism

Irma Grese, in particular, had become a media phenomenon. Her age, appearance, and cruelty created a disturbing narrative that newspapers were eager to exploit.

A public execution risked turning justice into spectacle—something that could overshadow the victims and distort the meaning of the trial.

A private execution ensured that the story ended not with a crowd, but with a sentence carried out quietly, decisively, and without ceremony.

Justice Without Applause

After the trapdoor fell, the bodies were left hanging for thirty minutes, as procedure required. Death was confirmed. The prison returned to silence.

No photographs were released.
No public announcements were made until afterward.

The moment passed almost unnoticed by the world.

And that, precisely, was the point.

A Deliberate Silence

The private execution of the female Belsen guards was not about mercy.

It was about control, law, and denial of symbolism.

The British wanted history to remember:

The crimes

The trials

The evidence

Not the spectacle of death.

In the end, the silence surrounding their executions stands in stark contrast to the noise of their crimes.

And perhaps that silence was the final judgment.