Painful Execution of Psychopathic Nazi "Mad Jenny" of Stutthof - Jenny Wanda Barkmann

The 1st of September 1939. Nazi Germany invades  Poland which marks the beginning of the Second World War. After defeating the Polish army, the  Germans ruthlessly suppress the Poles whom they consider to be racially inferior and, in the  weeks, following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military units  shoot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility,  clergy, and intelligentsia.

The Nazis seek to destroy Polish culture and the Polish  nation, and eliminate any resistance, by arresting and murdering Poles. The Germans mean  for Poland to be an endless supply of slave labor, and a site for the mass extermination of  the European Jewry. On 2 September 1939, the Nazis set up the first German concentration  camp outside German borders in World War II.

The camp’s name is Stutthof, and one of its most  infamous guards will become Jenny Wanda Barkmann. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was born on the 30th of  May 1922 in Hamburg then part of the Weimar Republic which was the name given to the  government of Germany from 1918 to 1933. Barkman's family was poor - Jenny's father  worked as a dock worker and her mother was a housewife.

As a child, Jenny was no  different from other girls her age; she played with dolls for hours and dreamed  of becoming a famous actress or model one day. Barkmann was only 10 years old when Adolf Hitler  and his Nazi party came into power in January 1933. As Hitler rose to power, Nazi propaganda  became inescapable in Germany.

Joseph Goebbels, the head of the new Propaganda Ministry,  created a cult of personality that glorified Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior.  Nazi propaganda dominated the press, film, radio, and public spaces. Portraits  or statues of Hitler appeared everywhere, and every city and town renamed a street  or public space to honor him.

In public, Germans were expected to praise Hitler and  give the so-called German greeting "Heil Hitler! ". Propaganda permeated school  curricula as well and schools played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to  German youth.

From their first days at school, German children were imbued with the cult of Adolf  Hitler and his portrait was a standard fixture in all classrooms. While censors removed some books  from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for  Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism. Jenny, who grew up in  an evangelical family, was also influenced by Nazi ideology and when she finished elementary  school, she started working in a pastry shop.

Jenny Wanda Barkmann was 17 years old when the  Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939. The same month, the Germans  established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof, a  town about 22 miles east of Danzig, today’s Gdańsk in Poland. The original  camp, known as the old camp, was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and 8 barracks for  the inmates built by prisoners in 1940.

The camp was established in connection  with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites such as members of the intelligentsia as well  as religious and political leaders. Even before the war, the Germans had created lists  of people to be arrested, and the Nazi authorities were secretly reviewing suitable places to  set up concentration camps in their area. Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment  camp under the Danzig police chief, before its subsequent massive expansion.

In November  1941, it became a "labor education" camp for political prisoners and persons accused of  violating labor discipline, administered by the SD - German Security Police. Finally, in January  1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp under the jurisdiction of the SS. In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new camp was constructed alongside the earlier  one.

It contained 30 new barracks and was surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences. A  crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943, just in time to start mass executions when  Stutthof was included in the "Final Solution" in June 1944. The maximum capacity of the  gas chamber was 150 people per execution.

Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became  a vast network of forced-labor camps. 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout  northern and central German-occupied Poland. Tens of thousands of people, perhaps  as many as 100,000, were deported to the Stutthof camp.

The prisoners were mainly  non-Jewish Poles. Conditions in the camp were brutal. Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics  that swept the camp in the winter of 1942 and again in 1944.

Those whom the SS guards judged  too weak or sick to work were gassed in the gas chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in  June 1944. 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in a gas  chamber before the evacuation of the camp.

Camp doctors also killed sick or injured  prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections of phenol. More than 60,000 people died  in Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps. The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after  1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries.

Some sources claim that when Jenny Wanda Barkmann became a guard  at Stutthof in January 1944, she was the mother of a child that was born out of wedlock.  The child’s father was a German soldier, and it was Jenny’s mother who took care of the  child while Jenny served as a guard at Stutthof. Barkmann later recalled that during  a ten-day training course for female concentration camp supervisors, the SS captain  who supervised the course told his trainees: “Don't feel sorry for the  prisoners, they are Slavs.

” Before she became a guard, Barkmann  hoped to use her beauty to become a model. Because of the combination of her  attractiveness and her cruelty, the prisoners nicknamed her the ‘Beautiful Spectre’.  The others called her simply “Mad Jenny.

” She brutalized prisoners and was known  for beating inmates, some to death, either with her bare hands or with her  whip. Children were also among her victims. She would not only beat them  but together with their mothers she would select them and then  send them to the gas chamber.

One of Barkmann’s favorite methods for torturing  the female prisoners was to beat them with a stick or thong. Later she also confessed: "We in the  SS, used to hold specially long open-air roll calls in the winter so that the female prisoners  would freeze…and indeed many of them died. We were dressed warmly, so we endured the harsh frosts.

" Though she worked in the camp for a short time, the prisoners remembered her well. Former Stutthof  prisoner - Maria Szenberg - testified that she saw Barkmann beating the female prisoners  while they were bathing. Another Stutthof survivor named Sawicka recalled: "I once  asked her if I could take a potato lying on the floor of the barn with me.

I should add  that she was off duty that day. In response, she hit me in the face with her hand and  beat me over the head with a stick. She also beat into unconsciousness my friend  Juta who wanted to take some potatoes from the basement.

Juta died the next day.  There were hundreds of such examples. " During a typhus epidemic in 1944 which reached its  peak in December that year, the number of victims equaled 9 % of the total prison population. 

Barkmann recalled: "Before the typhus epidemic, in the part of the camp where I worked, about  15-40 women died every day. Later, there were so many corpses that the crematorium couldn't  keep up and the corpses were burned on piles. " The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp  system in northern Poland began in January 1945.

When the final evacuation began, there were nearly  50,000 prisoners in the Stutthof camp system, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. About 5,000  prisoners from Stutthof subcamps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water,  and machine gunned. The rest of the prisoners were marched in the direction of Lauenburg in  eastern Germany but after they were cut off by advancing Soviet forces, the Germans forced the  surviving prisoners back to Stutthof.

Marching in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by  the SS guards, thousands died during the march. In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were  removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof was completely encircled by Soviet forces. Again,  hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea and shot.

It has been estimated that over 25,000  prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps. When Soviet forces  liberated Stutthof on the 9th of May 1945, they found only about 100 prisoners who had managed  to hide during the final evacuation of the camp. Altogether, some 100,000 prisoners passed  through Stutthof; 60,000 of them perished, while another 22,000 were transferred  to other concentration camps.

Barkmann fled/had fled Stutthof camp already  in January 1945 and was in hiding for 4 months. In the last phase of the fight for Danzig, Barkmann tried to escape from  the advancing Soviet troops, but she was eventually arrested by the Polish  militia in May 1945 at the Danzig railway station. At the first interrogation, Jenny stated that  she had always treated Jews well and had never bullied prisoners.

She also said that she had  secretly helped the unfortunate prisoners and even saved them from death. However, her  lies did not help her escape justice. Barkmann was tried at the First Stutthof trial  which began on the 25th of April 1946.

Though dozens of survivors of Stutthof  testified against her in court, Barkmann, not particularly worried about  life, was rather concerned about her appearance. When the survivors described  the brutal atrocities she had committed, even Barkman’s defense attorney admitted she  was guilty, but argued that it was because she was mentally ill saying that no one sane could  commit such atrocities as she did. Nevertheless, Barkmann wore stylish clothes and  the different hairstyle every day and reportedly flirted with the prison guards.

Barkmann and her former female colleagues were also said to have behaved insolently,  giggling and joking during the proceedings. When the trial ended on the 31st of May 1946, 11  defendants, convicted of crimes against humanity, were sentenced to death by hanging. Among them  were 5 women.

While 4 of them – Wanda Klaff, Gerda Steinhoff, Elisabeth Becker and Ewa  Paradies cried and pleaded for their life, only one, Jenny Wanda Barkmann, who  celebrated her 24th birthday the day before, remained calm. After being found guilty, she did  not beg for forgiveness, nor shed tears or show remorse. She only remarked: "Life is indeed  a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short.

" Her execution was held publicly and became a  theater of horror which was recorded by official press photographers. After World War II, only  three public executions of war criminals were carried out in Poland. One of them took  place at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk, former Danzig.

When on the 4th of July 1946, the  11 Nazi Criminals from the Stutthof concentration camp including the 24 year old Jenny Wanda  Barkmann were hanged from the gallows, 200,000 people were watching. On that day Biskupia Górka Hill experienced a real siege. Three days earlier,  the newspapers had reported the date of the execution.

Workplaces announced a day off and  provided employees with transport to the event. Everyone could come to witness the execution. The security forces feared that a lynching might occur at any moment and the militia and  army had difficulty controlling the huge crowd.

The 4th of July was very  warm, the sun was shining. Punctually at 5 PM, eleven open trucks  brought the prisoners to the execution ground, their hands and legs tied with cords. On the  platform of each of the eleven trucks stood a convict, six men and five women in total.

The trucks were backed under the gallows and the condemned made to stand on the tailboards  or on the chairs on which they had been sitting. Former Stutthof prisoners,  dressed in striped uniforms, volunteered to serve as executioners and put  a simple cord noose around convicts’ necks. The execution was planned in such a way that  after each truck would be driven forward, the 11 convicts were left suspended,  and their bodies would not fall from too great a height.

As a result, the nooses  did not break their necks and did not cause an instant death. This short-drop method  of hanging resulted in a torturous death by strangulation of each of the criminals  lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 long minutes. When the driver of the first truck carrying Johann  Pauls, the former commandant of the guards in Stutthof, started the engine and moved slowly  forward, Pauls, before sliding off the platform and hanging from the rope, managed to shout "Heil  Hitler!

". He was answered by the insults of the crowd. As Pauls' body went still, another truck  started moving and another criminal began what those present at the execution described as  a "rope dance".

As each truck moved forward, the other convicts had the opportunity to  take a good look at what awaited them in a next few moments. When one truck driver  failed to start the engine several times, the former Stutthof prisoner pushed the convict  off the platform. The crowd waved and the people shouted "For our husbands, for our children".

When the last convict died, the security forces allowed the crowd to the gallows.  People ripped off buttons, cut off pieces of fabric and kicked and smashed the corpses. The gathered people were then chased away, and the bodies were removed from the gallows.

There were also some unfortunate side effects of this theater of horror. Some children  started hanging their toys and there were cases in which one child hanged  another after seeing a public hanging. After the execution it was rumored  that once Barkmann’s body was cremated, her ashes were taken to Hamburg and dumped  into the toilet of the apartment where she had been born.

However, this was not true. Instead, the bodies of those executed were taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk to  be used as a teaching aid in anatomy classes. There were no tears shed for Jenny Wanda Barkmann.

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