At the end of World War II, there were many questions as to what to do with those brutal SS concentration camp guards who had been captured by the Allies.

Some had been shot during the liberations of the camps, but there were examples of trials which took place.

These brought formal justice to the thousands of prisoners who had managed to survive World War II and the evils of these SS men and women.

But many of them were hanged in the months and years after the end of World War II.

This offered some form of closure directly to the sufferers and it also sufficiently punished men and women in line with military law for their crimes against humanity.

In this compilation documentary, we look at a number of different examples of concentration camp guards who were sent crashing through the gallows.

At the end of World War II, much horror and terror was discovered as the Allies came across the true evils of the SS and the concentration camps.

At sites such as Bookenvald and Bergen Bellson, they found camps in terrible states.

But within them, they discovered one of the most shocking parts, and that was the fact that many young women had worked as female guards and had been involved in the slaughterous nature of these facilities.

Women such as Irma Graaser and Jenny Wer Bachmann were in their early 20s when they were captured and the prisoners told of their horrific crimes which involved driving people into the gas chambers with their whips.

At the end of the conflict, there was a question that existed regarding the fate of these women and it was what should the Allies do to these women and what course of action should they subject them to? The Allies decided that their gender should not have any bearing on their fate and they were brought to war crimes trials and a number were sentenced to death and were then executed.

In this video today, we look at the reasons why these women had to hang at the end of the war.

Most women who worked in the concentration camps as guards were known as alsurins or female overseers.

They were given roles to primarily oversee the female prisoner population inside of the camps.

And with the expansion of these in the 1940s, many more German women were sought after for this line of work.

They were often trained at the all female camp of Ravensbrook close to Berlin before moving on to different places such as Ashvitz.

But thousands of women served as guards and they became important in the deafly operations of the camps.

Lots of them carried out jobs such as selections in which prisoners who are not fit enough to work were immediately sent to the gas chambers and were killed.

Often these women played God with people’s lives and some became known for having prisoners killed if they looked at them in the wrong manner.

When the camps were liberated in 1945, many of the female guards chose to remain at the sites and women such as Irma Graaser, Hera Bofa, and Elizabeth Falconra were found hiding out amongst the prisoner populations.

They were quickly handed over to the Allies as the truth about their crimes was told, and then the allies took these women to war crimes trials alongside ordinary male guards and those who were in charge of the camps.

Trials such as the Bellson trials took place and a number of female guards were executed following this by hanging on the gallows.

The fate of hanging took place inside Poland too as the polls punished women such as Maria Mandel for her work in Achvitz.

Now the gender of these women did not exempt them or excuse them from their criminal responsibility.

Female guards were prosecuted for their extreme crimes and what they did, not because they were women.

The Allied War Crimes Tribunals focused on individual criminal responsibility, and charges included murder and participation in mass killing, systematic physical abuse, which even included torture, beatings, and dog attacks, selections of prisoners for death inside the gas chambers, and sadistic cruelty beyond the following of orders.

Eyewitness accounts from prisoners told that these women often went further than what they were instructed to do.

In several cases, they were described as particularly violent as they may have tried to prove their authority in an environment which was dominated by male SS officers.

Let’s take Irma Graaser for example.

She was known for shooting prisoners who were working when she got bored.

This was something she wasn’t specifically ordered to do, but just did for the sake of it.

Now hanging as a method of execution was chosen for these women as it was often the standard method of execution under military law and it was also considered a civilian criminal punishment.

This signaled that the women were condemned as criminals and not as any form of military soldiers or officers who were usually shot.

It also was intended to reflect justice and not revenge.

A number of female guards were tried by especially British military courts and the executions took place after formal legal convictions and it was not summary punishment.

Hanging was also symbolically important as it reinforced that these women were criminals under law and were not soldiers or any members of the military who were dying because of their actions in combat or warfare.

It really was the Bellson trials which set the precedent for trying women and female defendants.

It was the first major Allied war crimes trial that included men and women, and the outcomes did vary.

11 were sentenced to death, including three women, and some were given long prison sentences.

A few defendants were acquitted due to a lack of action and evidence, but the tribunal made it clear that following orders was not a legal defense for the Nazi criminals, and that the guards were responsible for how they treated prisoners.

Also, deliberate cruelty was punishable by death.

Female defendants, for the first time in postwar proceedings, were judged by the same legal standards as men, and this continued around the world.

During the Ashvitz trials, many women were tried in the same manner, too.

And they were even executed alongside the male defendants inside of Montalupich prison.

One common misconception about the role of female concentration camp guards is that they were merely passive or powerless.

In reality, many held direct authority over the prisoners and had been given powers to do this.

They also issued punishments independently without orders and controlled work details, roll calls, and discipline.

At camps such as Ravensbrook, which was staffed by mostly female guards, survivors described how the guards beat inmates to death, starve them deliberately, and took personal pleasure in acts of humiliation and violence.

One particular harsh punishment saw many of the women forced to undress in the cold of winter and then stand outside the barracks for hours on end until a number died from hypothermia.

This level of active participation made the women legally accountable, especially as they often did this just because the circumstances of the concentration camps allowed it to happen and they thought they would get away with it.

Not all of the female guards were hanged, though.

A lot of their sentences depended on the strength of eyewitness testimony and evidence and also proof of direct killing or extreme abuses.

In the case of Irma Graaser, many people had on different occasions saw her in the selection yards and they’d seen her willingly shoot prisoners.

But in the case of let’s say Hera Bofa, another woman who was immensely cruel, she was not condemned to death because the eyewitness testimony against her when it came to shooting and stomping prisoners to death was, let’s say, rather shaky.

Also, she had not worked inside of Avitz, the deadliest camp, which carried the most notoriety, and she was spared the hangman’s noose.

There’s no doubt that her fab took lives, though.

At the Bellson trials, all of the free women executed had worked at Achvitz and that appeared to be the defining factor in sending them to the gallows or not.

There were also public executions of the female guards of Stutoff which were carried out.

This was done to shock the public as their reaction mattered.

Postwar society was deeply unsettled by women committing acts of extreme sadism and the contrast between their youthful looks and age and also the cruelty they carried out in Gdansk.

The public executions of the female guards on huge gallows amplified the public attention and it ensured that these cases were never forgotten.

And it also acted as an important message that the crimes of horrific war criminals regardless of their gender would be punished.

And for the people of Poland who witnessed these executions, many of them had suffered greatly and the executions were a sign of justice being carried out.

Now, female concentration camp guards were hanged after World War II because, well, they committed and facilitated murder.

They also abused prisoners systematically, and they were lawfully tried and convicted through proper ways and means.

The Allied courts rejected that just because of their gender, they should have been given some form of leniency, and hanging was also the standard legal punishment at the time.

The postwar trials established a principle that crimes against humanity should be dealt with in exactly the same manner regardless of gender, background, or military rank.

At the end of World War II, a German prison saw over 250 Nazis being sent through the gallows with the executioner releasing the trapoor after he secured the noose around their necks.

The executions didn’t always go well and often botches took place.

But Lansburg prison is best remembered throughout history as the very place where the later dictator of the Third Reich was locked up within the walls of the site.

As the German surrender came into force, the Americans needed a place where they could bring justice for the millions who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

Lansburg prison became that place.

And so many executions took place there at the end of the conflict that a number of gallows had to be created within the prison courtyard.

But why specifically did this all happen at Lansburg? And why was hanging used as a way of bringing deaths to the majority of the 252 Nazis who were all condemned by the American courts? Lansburg prison opened in 1910 and its most infamous prisoner wouldn’t enter the site until 1924.

Adolf Hitler spent 264 days locked up within Lansburg as he had been convicted of treason following his Munich push.

His failed attempt to seize power inside of Bavaria.

Of course, the result of all this was that Hitler gained infamy in the eyes of the world’s media and press and his profile was raised heavily.

Inside of the site, he also wrote his book, Mine Conf, My Struggle, alongside Rudolph Hess and other Nazis.

And his imprisonment was rather comfortable, lapse, and easy.

During the Third Reich’s time in power, the Nazis locked up many foreign prisoners within the prison, and around 210 of them died inside the site because of execution, beatings by the guards, and also poor treatment.

But as World War II was coming to an end, the Americans and specifically the US Army occupied the region where the prison was and Lansburg was taken by them and it became designated as war criminal prison number one.

It had inside of its walls many Nazi war criminals who had been arrested in the final days of the war and many of these would later be brought to trials such as the Nuremberg trials.

Within months of the end of the war, Nazis were being sent crashing through the gallows there, and the first condemned prisoners arrived in December 1945.

These had been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity at the Dhau trials.

The executions would then be carried out within Lansburg.

But why did so many executions specifically happen at Lansburg? The American military ran their own war crimes trials and many of these were not as high-profile as the Nuremberg trials.

These courts prosecuted SS camp personnel, Einat Griffin members, Vermacht officers who were implicated in atrocities and war crimes and also regular German civilians who had committed specific crimes such as murder against Allied soldiers during the war.

Now thousands of people were tried and hundreds received the death penalty.

Some of them of course were commuted though.

Rather than executing prisoners locally across Germany in specific places, the US Army centralized executions at Lansburg for security, administrative ease and control, and also for symbolism.

Anyone sentenced to death by US tribunals was sent there.

Security-wise, it allowed the US guards to control things very well and also they could quietly carry out their executions and work.

They also managed to keep sympathetic people out of the prison too.

By being in one place, it allowed the Americans to keep track with their executions and also to carry out the executions in a very routined way.

But the symbolism of some of Hitler’s worst Nazis and criminals actually being hanged and executed inside the site where Hitler was locked up was also rather important for the Allies.

Those who were executed at Lansburg were convicted of many, many serious crimes.

This included mass murder inside the extermination and concentration camps, participation in death marches, systematic torture and starvation of prisoners, mass executions of civilians and prisoners of war, and atrocities during many campaigns and battles.

Some who were executed there even included SS doctors and some of the most senior medical officials and officers, including Hitler’s own escort doctor, Carl Brandt, a man who signed off on the Action T4 extermination program that resulted in a quarter of a million deaths and murders.

There was also Carl Ghart, Hinrich Himmler, the head of the SS’s own private doctor, who carried out horrific medical experiments within the concentration camps.

The Dow trials were one of the largest sources of the Lansburg executions.

These were military commissions and were operating under American occupation law and they focused on patterns of criminal conduct rather than single isolated acts.

A guard did not have to personally kill someone to be sentenced to death.

The tribunal accepted that service in an extermination system, knowingly participating in mass murder and enforcement of lethal conditions, constituted criminal responsibility.

This legal standard delivered many death sentences.

Now, hanging specifically was used at Lansburg for a number of reasons.

There were a few firing squad executions, but this was in fact rather rare.

Hanging followed the US Army execution protocol and it was chosen and used as it was a standard punishment for war crimes under a military law.

It was also considered more fitting for criminals than using a firing squad which was deemed at the time to have been a soldier’s death and the Americans were keen to ensure that the Nazis were not condemned as soldiers but as criminals.

It also echoed the later executions of the Nuremberg defendants, showing that Nazis were executed in the same manner.

The gallows were multiple, so simultaneous executions could be carried out, and there wouldn’t be a delay either, and these were Americanbuilt and were operated by American army executioners and hangmen.

Some of these men were more skilled than others.

John C.

Woods.

The Nuremberg executioner and hangman also operated at Lansburg and he was known for continuing his bungling and botching streak there with many who plunged through the gallows being left kicking and struggling and their necks were not successfully snapped, meaning that death took some time to occur.

The Americans also executed far more Nazis than the British or the French in their occupation zones after the end of the war.

The Soviets executed many more.

However, the Americans emphasized individual accountability for crimes.

They wanted to deter the German population from rising up and they also had clear sentencing outcomes.

Also, with them being based in places such as Bavaria, the home of Nazism, they wanted to ensure supporters of the Nazis were stamped out and were not a threat in their region.

British courts tended to eventually commute death sentences more readily and the French courts focused more on collaborators.

American investigators seized camp records, personnel rosters, transport logs, and SS correspondents, and the huge amount of evidence they had allowed them to build massive cases against selected Nazis.

Lansburg was also deep inside the US occupation zone, meaning it was easy to secure.

Prisoners could be moved without crossing allied borders and there was zero jurisdiction from the other allied forces.

Security decisions therefore could be made by US commanders and the executions that took place at Lansburg required absolute legal and physical control which the prison also helped to provide.

It was also somewhat close to Dao where the convictions occurred and it’s roughly 40 mi from this camp.

This meant that prisoners could be rapidly transferred to Lansburg and that there was minimal risk when prisoners were being transported.

Lansburg was also not a small local county jail.

It was a large castle-like prison which was enclosed within thick stone walls and it had multiple secure cell blocks.

Internal courtyards shielded anyone from looking in and they could construct a permanent gallows.

It allowed the Americans to build standardized execution routines and facilities, and they could execute many condemned prisoners on the very same day.

The site was also relatively isolated from German society, meaning executions could be invisible to the public.

The location made it easier to restrict access roads, control witnesses, and deal with the bodies quietly and quickly after.

Lansburg was also chosen over many other sites to execute war criminals.

The city of Munich would have been too public and too politically volatile in the years after the war.

Nuremberg prison was associated only with the Nuremberg defendants and it had somewhat limited capacity.

Dhau itself was rather impractical for executions and could have attracted criticism from former prisoners and also many other Bavarian prisons had been damaged by bombing and they could not provide sufficient security guarantees.

Lansburg checked every box for the Americans.

Their execution procedure was also rather swift, too.

The condemned Nazi was brought from their prison cell.

They were accompanied by a priest and many military policemen.

They were then taken towards the wooden gallows that stood in the courtyard and their identity was then confirmed before they climbed up the 13 steps onto the scaffold platform.

After this, they were led over to the trap door.

Their hands were tied behind their backs and their legs were also tied so they couldn’t kick and struggle as they fell through the gallows.

Their final photograph was then taken after the death sentence was read out and the executioner then passed a black hood over the head of the condemned before he secured the noose.

When everything was ready, the trapoor was then released and the condemned plunged through the gallows and they were then after some time left so death could be finally confirmed.

Inside Lansburg prison over 250 Nazis were executed.

It was a place where the American army decided to execute large numbers of people quietly, legally, and repeatedly.

Every death sentence in the American zone flowed there, and the executions were not random, neither were they improvised.

Lansburg was selected precisely because it could handle industrial scale punishment in response to industrial scale murder and crimes which were committed during the Second World War.

On the 4th of July 1946, some of the most notorious and shocking executions of World War II criminals took place inside the city of Gdansk.

On a huge set of gallows, the female guards of Stuttov concentration camp.

Women who had ordered innocent men, women, and children into the gas chamber within the camp nearby took place.

These women were hated by the thousands of people who turned up to see them meet their fate.

And many cried out for vengeance for their family members and neighbors who had suffered at their hands.

Amongst the women strung up from the gallows that day was Jenny Wonder Bachmann, who became known as the beautiful spectre for her brutal crimes.

The women were hanged in front of the eyes of thousands who watched, and for many, it helped them gain a form of closure from the suffering of World War II.

The executions wouldn’t bring back their family members, but the crowd enjoyed seeing these hated women suffer.

But why was it so public? And why was everything about the execution of the female guards designed to inflict humiliation? In the final months of the Second World War, huge evacuations had taken place inside the concentration camp of Stutoff.

And with this, thousands were marched into the sea and were then machine gunned in the water.

Thousands more died in executions by the side of roads during the death marches.

But before this, the camp was known for its brutality.

The conditions of the site were incredibly harsh and thousands of prisoners died from starvation and disease.

Those inmates whom the guards thought were too sick or weak to work were killed inside the small gas chamber there.

Around 65,000 inmates died at the camp and at the hands of many of the evil guards.

When the camp was actually liberated, there were very few prisoners actually there, roughly around 100, who had managed to hide out.

But they then told the evils of the guard force who had overseen their imprisonment and captivity.

And this included many female guards.

At the end of the war, a number of female guards who worked at Stuttoff concentration camp were captured.

This included Jenny W Barkman, Elizabeth Becka, Wonder W, Eva Parades, and Gersteinhoff.

These five women were sentenced to death at the Stutoff trials.

And the courtroom heard about their brutal actions and their crimes, which included selecting inmates to be sent to the gas chamber and also inflicting unbelievable amounts of violence.

But the executions of these women were rather shocking even by the standards of the Second World War.

And they took place in July 1946 in front of a crowd of at least 20,000 people.

The executions occurred on Biscupia Gorka Hill in Gdansk and specifically a number of large gallows were created.

They were massive and this was done to ensure that everyone in the area was able to see the women hanging from the gallows.

The condemned were brought out one by one in front of the crowds and they were then helped onto the back of a truck which was parked under the gallows.

On this stood a number of officials, including an executioner who was actually a former prisoner of Stut.

This even included a female prisoner who secured the noose around the necks of one of the condemned female guards.

When on the truck, the women had their death sentences read out, and the crowd were reminded of their crimes and what they had done.

And then after this, they were helped onto a stall, and they then had the news secured around their necks.

This was also placed over a cross beam on the gallows.

When this was secured and everything was ready, the truck slowly drove forward, leaving the female guard on the gallows hanging by their neck.

The method of death did not involve a sudden drop, aimed to snap the neck, but instead was slow strangulation, and for many agonizing minutes, the crowds witnessed these women kicking and struggling as the air was choked out of them.

But why were these executions so very public? Well, the first reason this happened was because the courts, especially in Poland, wanted to demonstrate justice to the people who had suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis.

The scale of the wartime crimes and the crimes of these women created a fear amongst the Polish that conventional justice such as a prison sentence or a private execution would be inadequate.

Public executions were used to make punishments visible and immediate and also undeniable.

In many countries, especially those like Poland, the public had endured years of secret arrests, roundups, deportations, and extrajudicial killings.

The authorities post war believed justice had to be seen to be done and the visible hangings of the female guards reassured the people especially in the town near to camp that the war criminals were genuinely punished and that the rule of law had returned and also that the oversight and power of the Nazis was finished.

Also the public execution functioned as an inversion of power during World War II.

The individuals who had once wielded power, as in the female guards who had once wielded power, were now powerless before the very people they had terrorized.

The Nazis themselves had conducted public hangings, and civilians had been forced to witness these inside of the camps, and the executions of the female guards deliberately reverse that logic.

The condemned were displayed as defeated criminals who needed punishing and it was an important way that local governments could gain more power and favor by punishing the criminals of Stut.

Also in Poland after 1945 there was a significant amount of instability and members of the public were actually also armed having found weapons used by the different armies.

Governments feared vigilante justice, the lynching of collaborators without due legal process, and also that revenge killings would take place.

Public executions like that of the female guards of Stutoff were intended to channel popular anger into state controlled punishment rather than mob violence.

By punishing the war criminals openly, the local government signaled that retribution would be handled through the courts and through the proper means rather than by mobs.

In the case of the Schlutoff executions, these prevented the female guards being lynched and there were cases of retribution being taken against individuals where this did happen.

The female guards and especially women war criminals unsettled postwar society and also the allied forces who liberated the camps.

Many expected that women would be the victims and not the executioners or beasts.

The evidence against the female strut guards was profound that they had beaten prisoners with whips and clubs had taunted the starving and dying and also participated in violence and this caused outrage.

The public nature of the hanging was meant to tell the people who witnessed the executions that no one was exempt from responsibility regardless of their identity or gender.

Specifically, hanging was chosen for the execution of the women as it was also the standard legal method of execution in Poland.

It was seen as civilian punishment rather than a military one, meaning that the condemned were seen just as criminals and not members of any military or force.

With the executions also being carried out in the large open space in front of thousands, it reinforced a message that these women had committed crimes against society itself.

The fact they also took place relatively close to the former camp of Stutoff and many of the women’s hometown deliberately linked punishment to place and the location reminded onlookers that these women had once exercised absolute power over helpless prisoners in a place not far away at all and that people from the local area would have been affected by their actions.

Today, public executions like the ones that occurred involving the female guards of Stutoff would be condemned and they would be seen as brutal justice.

But in 1946, survivors lived alongside former perpetrators and they were owed a degree of justice for the treatment they received.

Public hanging was seen as a necessary, if brutal, assertion of the moral order.

But the female stuttoff guards were executed because they were convicted of extreme acts of cruelty and because Polish society demanded visible justice after years of occupation and genocide.

Also, the gender of the condemned did not take away from their criminal responsibility and the public execution was meant to show people that moral reckoning was here.

Incidentally, after their executions, by the way, the five women were cut down and their bodies were allegedly given to medical science.

She was one of the most shocking and disgusting war criminals of the Second World War.

And when she was arrested inside of Bergen Bellson concentration camp, the allies and the world could not believe how such a young woman with the world at her feet could become such a monster.

Irma Grazer was known as a beautiful beast for a number of reasons.

When the prisoners inside the camps where she worked saw the flash of her blonde hair, they knew that terror was going to come.

When she was brought to trial, Graza openly conducted herself callously, and she tried to lie about what she had been doing inside camps such as Ashvitz.

But the evidence was stacked against her, and former prisoners testified about her cruelty and her deathly reputation.

She was a woman who forced innocent civilians into the gas chambers and she was someone who brought people’s lives to an abrupt end whenever she felt bored, firing her pistol into the back of them whilst they were working.

At the end of her trial, she was sentenced to death and the British executioner Albert Peer point expertly brought her life to a quick end on the gallows.

But why specifically did Irma Graaser have to hang? M Grazer was sentenced to death and was hanged in December 1945.

She had been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by a British military court and she was found personally responsible for extreme sadistic and systematic crimes which she committed as a female concentration camp guard.

On the 13th of December 1945, she was the second woman to be hanged inside Hamlin Prison’s execution chamber and her final words were allegedly quick or schnell in German as she wanted her ordeal to come to an end quickly.

Now, other accounts do exist claiming she went kicking to the gallows, but within seconds of entering the chamber of death, the noose was quickly secured around her neck and she then went plunging through the gallows and her neck was then snapped.

But Irma Graaser, as soon as she was arrested, was destined for the hangman’s gallows for many different reasons.

She was, in her role, not a minor member of staff who was drafted into work inside of Ashvitz.

She was an active perpetrator in the terrible crimes.

She was someone who voluntarily sought a career inside the SS and in the concentration camp industries.

She was not a clerical worker or a coerced or conscripted worker.

She was an SS alserin, a female guard and overseer of the female prisoners.

She worked inside different camps including Ravensbrook, Achvitz and Bergen Bellson.

And Graaser would find herself transferred to different sites when it was required.

At Ashvitz, she rose rapidly despite her youth and she exercised direct authority over prisoners.

She participated in roll calls, punishments, torture sessions, and also witnessed horrific medical experiments.

She was also present at selections and personally chose those prisoners who were sent straight to the gas chambers.

Now, Irma Graaser was an enforcer, not a passive observer.

She wasn’t someone who just turned up to work, and her actions led to many thousands of deaths.

One former prisoner claimed about her, and I quote, “She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

Her body was perfect in every line, her face clear, and angelic, and her blue eyes the happiest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine.

And yet, Irma Graaser was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative pervert I ever came across.

” Witness testimony at the Bellson trials described Grazer engaging in repeated personal acts of violence, including beatings with whips, sticks, and her boots, often without provocation.

She also deliberately attacked starving and sick prisoners, and used her dogs to terrorize and injure inmates.

She also targeted women and children, including those who were already weak or dying.

The court found that these acts were not required by the regulations and rules of the camp and that Graasa exceeded orders which reflected her own Nazi beliefs and her own personal sadism.

At Ashvitz, Graaser was accused of assisting in the selections and this was a crime in which was one of the deciding factors in execution or not.

Some of the guards who were also brought to trial were not condemned and were given prison sentences because the evidence about their involvement in sending people to the gas chambers specifically was, let’s say, rather sketchy.

While she was not a doctor, those who were supposed to be the ones who sent people to their deaths, Graaser helped assemble the inmates for selection and then drove the terrified inmates to the gas chambers with violence, cracking her whip and brandishing her pistol.

She issued threats to them and she knew exactly that these selections resulted in immediate death.

Under international law at the time, knowingly facilitating mass murder constituted a capital offense, even if no one pulled a trigger.

At trial, she tried to claim that she was ignorant.

But this was a complete lie.

By 1943 and 1944, no Ashvitz guard could plausibly claim that they did not know what happened to selected prisoners or that they did not know what starvation, disease, and forced labor was doing to them.

The killings were systematic and intentional and also were the policy of the Nazis under the final solution.

The court found that Graaser understood the lethal nature of the system and she very much embraced her role within it.

Unlike some defendants, she did not manage to successfully argue that she was acting under immediate threat of her own life.

At the end of the day, Irma Graaser volunteered for camp service and she could have requested transfer to factory or hospital work.

Witnesses also testified that her cruelty went beyond what was expected or enforced.

She was technically not forced to do anything by the Nazis, but would have just been encouraged to become a mother.

But strikingly during the trial and after her conviction, Emma Graaser denied any wrongdoing, and she showed no remorse or repentance.

She also did not dispute much of the factual evidence against her, and British courts did place weight on the idea of remorse.

Under British military law in 1945, war crimes involving murder, torture, and participating in mass killing carried a mandatory death sentence in severe cases.

Now Graaser’s case that was deemed to be severe.

Now one of the worst parts of her work which is often not spoken about is her involvement in some medical procedures.

She brought prisoners to have terrible and sadistic operations performed without anesthetic and she loved watching the prisoners in pain.

She also kicked them throughout their procedures and Grazer kept a number of slaves too but they would then be sent to the gas chambers when she became tired or bored of them.

Now, all of her crimes shock the world, but in particular, what made them more harrowing was the fact that she was just 22 years old at the time of her execution.

Meaning that when she worked inside of Ashvitz, she was roughly 19 years old, a teenager who had the world at her feet.

But the Nazi regime and the Second World War allowed her to be transformed into a complete monster.

The fact she was just 22 had no bearing on her fate.

The court explicitly stated that the severity of her crimes outweighed her age and also as she was a woman this did not matter too as female defendants were treated no differently under law.

Even older male defendants and older women were executed or imprisoned for life because of their crimes.

Her sentence of death was based on her actions, not her identity.

Now, what might actually shock you is that Irma Graves’s grave does technically still exist on Earth.

She was buried inside of Hamlin Prison’s courtyard to begin with and was actually later re-eried inside the local cemetery in the small German town.

But Graves was executed because the court determined that she was an active and willing participant in a system of mass murder and she was also personally responsible for torture, violence, and selections for death.

She was also fully aware of the consequences of her actions and was very unrepentant.

Her crimes met the highest of thresholds for capital punishment even after World War II.

And for this she was sent crashing through the gallows.

On the 20th of August 1948, one of the most disgusting war criminals of the Second World War was taken to the gallows in Zagreb.

He was a man who had tried to escape any form of punishment at the end of the war, but eventually his immense cruelty and barbaric treatment of prisoners inside of the Asanovac concentration camp came back to haunt him.

Jubo Milos was the commodant of a site which the Nazis and the SS believed was so disturbing and disgusting that the treatment of victims there turned their stomachs and made them feel sick.

The Ustasha, the paramilitary group inside of the independent state of Croatia, were completely horrific in the way they dealt with their enemies and Milos was one of the worst of them all.

But his execution by hanging was, let’s say, completely justified.

So what specifically did Milos do that led to his notorious reputation and ultimately his execution? Jubo Milos was born in 1919 and he attended a local school.

This was of course all normal and there was nothing in his early life to suggest that he would become one of the most evil murderers and monsters of the 20th century.

He worked as a town official, a civil servant, but under the cover of the Second World War, he transformed into a sadistic and savage beast like many people did.

On the 6th of April 1941, the Axis forces invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and it did not take long before the army was defeated.

The Yugoslavs didn’t have the greatest of equipment and were very unprepared and the country after the invasion was carved up and in Croatia a virulent paramilitary and nationalist organization led by Ante Pavilich known as came to power and prominence.

The Ustasha were said to have been more terroristic in their actions than even the Nazi SS and they wanted to slaughter onethird of their enemies, convert one/3 to their religion and also deport another third.

They would do all of this with immense brutality.

They rounded up those who they wanted to execute and would then hack their heads off, stab their victims repeatedly, and commit many inhumane and shocking crimes.

Juba Milos was relatively a nobody when the invasion took place and he arrived in Zagreb in June 1941.

His first cousin was a powerful commander in the paramilitary group and he then became his cousin’s assistant and Milos used this opportunity to grow in his own power and influence.

He wanted more power of his own and he was later named the commodant of the concentration camp known as Yasanovak.

Yasanovac was a terribly tr Yasanovac was truly a terrible site and it was one of the largest established in Europe.

Despite not being overseen by the SS but the Ustasha, the Nazi collaborators opened up their own form of extermination camp.

During its time in operation, around 100,000 people were killed within the barbwire fences, and the conditions were truly awful.

Women and children made up around half of the total victims and the living conditions were shocking.

There was dirt and filth everywhere and disease spread around the site.

One former victim who later testified about Yasanovatch stated, and I quote, “When I entered the room, I had something to see.

One child was lying with his head in feces.

The other children in urine were lying on top of each other.

I approached one of the girls with the intention of lifting her out of the pool of dirt and she looked at me as if smiling.

She was already dead.

One 10-year-old boy was standing by the wall because he could not sit down.

Out of him hung his gut covered in flies.

The aim of the camp was to kill through systematic starvation and the restriction of water and of resources needed to survive.

Prisoners conducted 11 hours of hard labor a day and a stash of guards would execute anyone who they wanted to when they felt like it.

There was a constant fear of death and this was psychological terror for the victims.

Often public executions were carried out too to terrorize the other inmates.

One prison guard later claimed he had cut the throats of 1,360 new arrivals at the camp using a special blade adapted to kill quickly.

The Ustasha even tried to use poison gas to kill prisoners, too.

Jubo Milos oversaw the site on a number of occasions, and he was also transferred to other camps, too.

One prisoner later claimed that Milos, before he went to bed one evening, made the sign of the cross, and he was asked if he feared the wrath of God for his actions, and Milos claimed, I quote, “Say nothing to me.

I know I will burn in hell for what I’ve done, but I will burn for Croatia.

He was the one responsible for setting the conditions of the camp, and he was one of the most evil murderers.

He was in competition with other commodants and commanders in the camp to see who could actually kill the most prisoners and torture the most, too.

One former inmate claimed that he saw Milos stab a man twice with a huge knife as he was accused of concealing valuables and money.

In another incident, Milos grabbed 25 inmates and took a rifle and personally shot each of them at point blank range.

He was often seen parading around Yasanovach in a white robe.

And he acted as if he was a doctor.

He would promise medical care and would appear to take prisoners to the hospital, but instead he ordered sick inmates to stand by a wall and he then slit their throats.

He was proud of what he was doing.

One man who witnessed his true evil claimed, I quote, “As soon as the 17 of us arrived at Yasanovatch, whose stasher beat us with rifle butts and took us to the brick factory where Zubo Milos had already lined up two groups while we arrived as a special third group.

” Marisich asked Jubo Milos, “Who should I aim at first?” And Milos replied, “Where there’s more of them?” and both of them pointed automatic rifles at the 40 men from the first group and shot them all.

After that, he asked the first man from our group why he came here.

And when that man replied that he was guilty of being born a Serb, he shot him on the spot.

Then he picked out Laa, a lawyer from Zagreb, and asked him what he was.

And when he replied, he called him out like this.

I like lawyers very much.

Come closer.

And killed him right away.

Then he found out that a third man was a doctor from Zagreb and he ordered him to examine the first two men to establish whether they were dead.

When the doctor confirmed that they were, he turned to the fourth man and when he found out that he was too a doctor, he forgave the whole group.

Another witness claimed about another incident involving the comedant that I quote, “Another guard pushed the prisoners towards Milos with a bayonet.

Their hands were tied behind their backs.

Each and every one of them Milos stabbed with a strong swing of a large butcher knife and slit their throats.

One of his most disturbing killing methods involved using his wolf hound to maul inmates to death.

He was also involved in ordering a number of local villages to be raised to the ground and his men rampaged and looted in the nearby area.

He did find himself arrested for this and was later released before being made the commander of a prison.

At the end of World War II, inside of the Ustacha, Milos had become a major and was regarded as very senior.

But he knew he would be hunted as a war criminal as the Stashia would be ousted from power.

He decided in May 1945, as the war in Europe came to a conclusion, to try and flee.

He traveled through Austria and allied controlled northern Italy, sheltered by the Catholic Church.

But he then went back to Austria and had a network of former members and he hid out with them.

But when he illegally crossed the border, he was arrested in July 1947, having successfully hid out for 2 years.

He was brought to trial and Jubo Milos was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

At his trial, the courtroom were disturbed about the true evils of his actions as a comedant of Vasanovich concentration camp.

He confessed at trial to his murderous actions and he tried to claim that he was just following the orders that had been given to him and plans that were drafted up by more senior members.

But there was absolutely no way that Milos was going to avoid the most serious punishment of death.

He was found guilty on the 20th of August 1948 and was sentenced to death.

There was little wait to execute such a monster.

Within a matter of hours of being condemned, Jubo Milos was led out into an execution chamber and he was taken onto the gallows.

An executioner approached him quickly and he then secured a noose around the crossbeam of the execution structure and then helped Milos onto a stool.

This would be execution by slow strangulation.

He was not to have his neck snapped.

His death would take many agonizing minutes.

As the noose was secured around his neck, the executioner kicked the stool from underneath him and the noose snapped tort and slowly the former comeant of one of the most disturbing concentration camps of World War II strangled to death.

Yasanovatch concentration camp became a site which represented true hell on earth.

Inside of the camp, thousands of people died through unspeakable acts of cruelty carried out by men under the control and command of Juba Milos.

Milos himself enjoyed getting his hands dirty and slaughtered hundreds, possibly thousands of people with his bare hands.

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