The night of 22-23 July 1944.

Soldiers
of the Red Army come upon Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp to be liberated,
located in German-occupied Poland.

This event becomes one of the most significant
moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust as only after the liberation of
the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi crimes is finally exposed to the world.

Soviet officials invite journalists to inspect the camp and to see for themselves the evidence
of the horrors that have occurred there.

One of the perpetrators responsible for
these atrocities is Elsa Ehrich.

Else Lieschen Frida Ehrich was born on 8 March
1914 in the town of Bredereiche, then part of the German Empire.

Her parents, Anna and Albert,
had her baptized as a Protestant on 1 June 1914, and her name in the church records was
spelled as “Elsa”.

Elsa´s father worked as a skipper and Elsa, after finishing
school, began to work in a slaughterhouse.

From 1930 to 1933, the global economic depression
had ravaged Germany, leaving millions without work.

The economic misery, fear of a worsening
future, and frustration with the government’s failure created a fertile ground for
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party’s rise.

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed
Chancellor of Germany and soon after the Nazi authorities established concentration camps
all over the country to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives.

These concentration camps as well as the German police forces were controlled by the SS.

From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question
and after 1941, its leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called
Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

This “solution” was the annihilation of the European
Jews, which we now refer to as the Holocaust.

The Second World War began on 1 September
1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

On 15 August 1940, Elsa Ehrich volunteered
for service in the Ravensbrück concentration camp as an SS guard, becoming
a part of the Nazi camp system.

Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only
major women’s camp established by the Nazis.

The camp was staffed both by SS men, who served
as guards and administrators, and by 150 women, who served as supervisors.

These female
supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good pay
and working conditions.

The main camp contained 18 barracks.

Two of these barracks served as a
prisoners’ sickbay, two served as warehouses, one served as a penal block, and one
functioned as the camp prison until 1939 when a separate prison was built.

The remaining
12 barracks served as the prisoners’ housing, in which prisoners slept in three-tiered wooden
bunks.

Each barrack had one washroom and toilets, but the sanitary conditions were poor and
greatly deteriorated after 1943.

Food rations for prisoners were meager at the outset, and the
amount and quality of food the camp authorities allotted each prisoner decreased further
after 1941.

The SS required Ravensbrück prisoners to perform forced labor, primarily in
agricultural projects and local industry.

By 1944, Germany increasingly relied on forced labor
for the production of armaments.

In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe
passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others.

Of
that number, over 92,000 women perished.

At Ravensbrück, Ehrich, through the eager
performance of her responsibilities, rose rapidly in the overseer hierarchy and from 1941,
she worked as a SS-Rapportführerin – a Report Leader.

Most Report Leaders in the SS were known
for their brutality and their primary duty was to conduct daily and evening camp roll call, which
was usually a long and gruelling process involving prisoners sometimes standing for hours on end in
all types of weather conditions.

The Report Leader also oversaw camp discipline of the prisoners
as well as the training for junior SS personnel.

In mid-October 1942, Ehrich was transferred
to the Majdanek concentration camp, where she became the head female
overseer in charge of the women’s camp.

Directly upon arrival at Majdanek, prisoners were
subjected to the camp admission process – their personal belongings and clothes were taken away,
their personal data was written in the camp files, and they were assigned with prisoner numbers
that were meant to replace their identities.

The children deported to Majdanek were
registered together with their mothers under the exact same number.

All the newcomers
were also subjected to the brutal and humiliating bathing and disinfection.

In her testimony, former
Majdanek prisoner Jadwiga Węgrzecka described her traumatic experience of bathing: “One of the
first things that shocked us entirely was the necessity to strip, right under the eyes of
that whole personnel.

They were all males, mostly the Germans.

Resistance was our first,
automatic reaction – we did not want to strip, though we had to do so eventually,
because they started to yell and beat us.

” Women had to get dressed very rapidly after.

The clothing taken from the camp storehouses were distributed randomly, with no attention paid
to sizes or the current weather conditions.

Then, the SS-men would escort the newly admitted females
to the field of the women’s camp.

All prisoners were forced to attend the everyday roll-calls
and were exploited in the exhausting obligatory labour.

Living conditions inside the barracks were
poor.

When the first females arrived at Majdanek on 7 October 1942, the barracks in their part of
the camp were still under construction and they lacked even the most basic sanitary appliances.

Although Elsa Ehrich was formally subjected directly to the camp commandant, her duties and
tasks enforced close cooperation with Political Department and Prisoner Camp.

Ehrich and her
deputy Hermine Braunsteiner were responsible for the daily roll calls and assignment of
the female prisoners to the labour groups.

In the winter of 1941-1942, Majdanek authorities
began to use Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber.

Mass
murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the
end of 1943.

There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek; at least two were shower
rooms reconfigured for the use of Zyklon B gas.

At least one of these two was used to kill human
beings.

The two smaller chambers could hold 150 people, the larger one 300.

All three used Zyklon
B and at least two could also use carbon monoxide.

Ehrich took part in the selection for the gas
chamber and she is believed responsible for the death of thousands of women and children.

One Majdanek survivor later recalled: “To lure them, she brought cocoa and
candy to the children’s barracks, and a moment later the trucks showed
up.

Jewish children got on them smiling, still with candy in their hands.

The
cars drove straight to the crematorium.

” Ehrich, once a butcher’s shop assistant was
depicted as “primitive” by her former female inmates.

However, at Majdanek she had the power
to decide about matters of life and death.

In the camp, Ehrich would become infamous for
slapping and kicking the prisoners for no reason and enjoyed brutally harassing as well
as beating up especially weak, emaciated and old women.

She had a habit of hitting women in
the face with her fist until the blood showed.

She did not spare even children whom she
beat and killed in front of their mothers.

In the midst of this terror, brutality, sadism
and killing, there were people who made efforts to help their fellow prisoners.

Doctor Stefania
Perzanowska, who was trying to improve medical care for prisoners, once asked Elsa Ehrich for an
allowance of milk for her patients’ babies.

Upon hearing this, Ehrich slapped her face, yelling:
“This is not a sanatorium, but a death camp!” Perzanowska also recalled: Everyone would
beat us, from the camp commandant to the camp charges and officers.

The camp commandant
Anton Thumann would even come to the hospital at 2 in the morning while intoxicated, just
to beat us in the face.

But no one beat us as much or as painfully as Elsa Ehrich.

She beat
with passion and cold cruelty in her eyes.

No SS woman did it as hard and as severely as she
did, and she referred to female prisoners with contempt and hatred.

On any pretext, she slapped
and kicked them.

She also selected children and elderly and weaker women for the gas chambers with
great zeal and she never showed mercy to anyone.

” In early 1943 Ehrich made an attempt
to launch a Nazi brothel in the camp, but the project was abandoned after one
of her slave sex-workers was diagnosed with typhus.

Ehrich herself became
ill due to typhoid in February 1943.

The same year, uprisings at the Treblinka and
Sobibor killing centres and the Warsaw, Bialystok, and Vilna ghettos had led to increased concerns
about Jewish resistance.

To prevent further resistance, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered
the killing of surviving Jews in the Lublin District of German-occupied Poland.

Most of the
remaining Jews in this area were employed in forced-labor projects and were concentrated
in the camps of Trawniki (at least 4,000), Poniatowa (at least 11,000), and Majdanek (about
18,000).

They were killed on November 3 and 4.

In all three camps, Jews were forced to strip
naked and walk into the previously dug trenches, where they were shot.

At Majdanek, the
SS shot the Jews near the crematorium.

Jews from other labor camps in the Lublin
area were also taken to Majdanek and shot.

Music was played through loudspeakers at both
Majdanek and Trawniki to drown out the noise of the mass shootings.

Approximately
42,000 Jews were killed during the “Operation Harvest Festival,” the largest
German-perpetrated massacre of the Holocaust.

When the evacuation of the Jewish
prisoners to be killed during the Operation Harvest festival had started,
the SS guards went through the barracks, dragging out anyone who was hiding.

Anyone
who was sick was loaded onto trucks.

Because the sick were only wearing underwear, the
aforementioned prisoner Stefania Perzanowska, threw blankets over them.

Elsa Ehrich, who
was supervising the loading – noticed this, pulled them off, lashed Peraznowska with a whip
and told her: “Do not waste hospital property.

” After the “Harvest Festival” killings, the
Lublin-Majdanek no longer had a majority of Jews among its prisoners.

At the end of 1943, of 6,562
prisoners registered at Majdanek, approximately 71 were Jews.

In mid-March 1944, as surviving Jews
from various subcamps of Majdanek were brought to the main camp for eventual evacuation west to
Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the Reich, 834 Jews were imprisoned in Majdanek.

Some were killed in the gas chambers between March and July 1944 and the SS transferred
the rest to Auschwitz and Plaszow camps.

According to the most recent research,
over the course of three years among an estimated 130,000 prisoners who entered
Majdanek, 80,000 people perished at the camp.

When the Majdanek concentration camp was
evacuated, Ehrich was transferred to the Plaszow concentration camp in German-occupied Poland
and, after its evacuation in September 1944, to the Neuengamme concentration camp in
Germany, where she worked until April 1945.

In May 1945, shortly after the end of the war,
Elsa Ehrich was arrested by the British occupation authorities in Hamburg and transferred to U.

S.

custody in the camp for war criminals in Dachau.

Before being transferred to Poland, Ehrich
shared her cell in Dachau with Maria Mandl, her equally sadistic Nazi comrade from
the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

In 1948 justice finally caught up with Elsa Ehrich
when she stood before the District Court of Lublin at the second Majdanek Trial.

She was accused of
committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On 10 June 1948 Ehrich was found guilty of all
charges and sentenced to death by hanging.

After the announcement of the judgment, she asked
Polish President Bolesław Bierut for clemency, on the grounds that she had a small son
and wanted to atone for her guilt.

However, President Bierut rejected the request.

Elsa Ehrich was 34 years old when she was executed in the Lublin
prison on 26 October 1948.

There were no tears shed for Elsa Ehrich.

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