Execution of Elisabeth Volkenrath - Brutal Nazi Guard at Auschwitz & Bergen Belsen - Holocaust. Elisabeth Volkenrath, one of 6 children of the forest worker Josef Mühlau and his wife, was born on the 5th of September 1919 in Schönau an der Katzbach, then part of the Weimar Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933.
In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power, Elisabeth was only 13 years old. Soon after she became a member of the League of German Girls, which was the female section of the Hitler Youth. These organizations, led by Baldur von Schirach, were the primary tools that the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, thus shaping the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth. While in January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, by the end of the year this figure had increased to over 2 million. Jews were not allowed to join these organizations.
In 1941 Volkenrath was conscripted into the SS and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was trained as a guard.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis. 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.
In March 1942 Volkenrath was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp located in German occupied Poland where at first, she worked in a sort of tailoring shop where the prisoners mended the uniforms of their fellow inmates. The majority of the inmates employed in this workshop were elderly women and Volkenrath regularly stroke them with her fists, sometimes so hard that they fell to the ground. She would later claim that it was often necessary to slap their faces because they tried to steal bread which did not belong to them.
From December 1942, she was responsible for a parcel store where she supervised a group of 25 – 30 prisoners. According to her statements, these inmates had to open and hand out all the parcels which came either from relatives of the prisoners or Red Cross. The prisoners in question then came there to receive their parcels.
She was also in charge of the distribution of bread to the prisoners, which was done from the same office. The block leaders of all the blocks came with one or two other prisoners and then fetched the bread for their block.
Elisabeth Volkenrath left Auschwitz on the 18th of January 1945 when Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as the death marches. The prisoners had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
On the 5th of February 1945 she arrived in Bergen Belsen concentration camp.


Sanitary conditions at Bergen Belsen were terrible and there was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945 when the prisoners were sent on death marches from the other concentration camps, about one-third of the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station as they were too week and sick to walk. On one occasion out of a transport of 1,900 inmates over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during the winter months when it was freezing cold, the prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands of prisoners. Due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of prisoners was between 250 and 300.

Yet even in such harsh conditions, Volkenrath enjoyed beating half-starved prisoners.

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