Execution of Johanna Bormann
- Bestial Nazi Guard at Auschwitz & Bergen Belsen Concentration Camps

15 April 2022

Category: Female Nazi Guards

Before Johanna Bormann started her criminal career in concentration camps, she was looking after the sick in a lunatic asylum where she was earning no more than 20 marks a month. She took a job as a guard in concentration camps because of the money – for mistreating poor female prisoners she was earning almost 10 times as much as she did in the asylum. In 1939 she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she remained until March 1942 when she was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Bormann’s nickname was " "the woman with the dogs" because she tortured her prisoners with her dog which she used as a murder weapon. She used to call her German Shepard “ the Big Bad Wolfhound” and one of the orders she would give the dog was “bite the throat “. She stripped women prisoners and beat them with a rubber truncheon or enjoyed submitting them to punitive physical exercises in which the poor women would have to march, run or do frog jumps until exhaustion.

Arrival in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

When she arrived in Bergen Belsen concentration camp in the middle of February 1945, it was already apparent that Germany had lost the war. At Bergen Belsen, her job was overseeing a pig-sty of 52 pigs. While the thousands of prisoners were dying of starvation, her pigs were well fed with potatoes and turnips. And when starving women prisoners stole some vegetables, she beat them immediately.

After Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Johanna Bormann was captured by the British forces together with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues such as Elisabeth Volkenrath – her former supervisor at Auschwitz or Josef Kramer, the last commandant of Bergen Belsen concentration camp. At the Belsen Trial, Bormann claimed she did not know the reason why there were so many gruesome testimonies brought against her. The British Military tribunal sentenced Johanna Bormann to death by hanging. She was 52 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on 13 December, 1945.

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