Nazi Guard Hilde Lisiewicz
& Her Crimes at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp -Holocaust- World War 2

20 September 2022

Category: Female Nazi Guards

Hilde Lisiewitz was born on the 31st of January 1922 and she was one day short from her 11th birthday when Adolf Hitler was appointed the Chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933. 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.

When the Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939, Hilde Lisiewitz was working as a gardener. From October 1940 to March 1941 she did her 6 months with German national labor service which was the official state labor service, divided into separate sections for men and women. After the start of the war, it was compulsory also for young women and its objective was to provide support for the Wehrmacht armed forces.

From February 1943 until November 1944 she worked at a munition factory in Grünberg then in Lower Silesia, and in late 1944 she was conscripted to SS. She was sent to Langenbielau for training until the 29th of December when she returned to the factory in Grünberg. Grünberg was a sub camp of the larger concentration camp system known as Gross-Rosen. Because in early 1945 the bombing from the Allied powers was getting closer, the female inmates of Grünberg were taken on a death march on the 29th of January. 1,400 of the 2,000 women died during this particular death march.

In Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

From Guben, Lisiewiz was ordered to Bergen-Belsen where she arrived on the 3rd of March 1945 and became a supervisor in one of the cookhouses. At Belsen, Lisiewitz became known as a deprived vicious sadist. One Russian inmate, Alexandra Siwidowa, then a 21-year-old, how Hilde had treated other prisoners who were dying of hunger and tried to get some food. Hilde Lisiewitz was seen beating prisoners with a rubber truncheon for trying to steal extra food. Another witness named Dora Almaleh, then 21 years old, also described details of Lisiewitz’s sadist behavior.

Lisiewitz’s reign of terror ended on the 15th of April when the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen and she was arrested. Lisiewitz was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17th of September 1945 and was sentenced to one year imprisonment. She was released from prison on the 16th of November 1946 and soon after she married and took the name of Michnia. The former SS guard had 3 children, settled in Hamburg and became a devout Catholic and a regular attender of mass.

Confrontation with Tomi Reichental

But in 2015 her dark past caught up with her once again. On one occasion she had confided to an Irish neighbor about her past and her nightmares about her time working in Bergen-Belsen. In the meantime, Slovak-born Tomi Reichental, a Bergen-Belsen survivor living in Ireland and active in Holocaust education work, gave a radio appearance in 2012 and soon after he was contacted by a woman who said that she had lived in Hamburg, where a neighbor admitted she was a former guard in the camp where Tomi was once imprisoned. Tomi then travelled to Hamburg and tried to contact Lisiewitz in order to reconcile with the former camp guard and offer her a chance to repudiate her past. But Lisiewitz declined. Tomi’s unsuccessful trip to Hamburg attracted the attention of media, partly because he created a documentary name ‘Close to Evil’ about his intention to meet Lisiewitz.

In addition, in 2015 state prosecutors through an informant were looking into whether Michnia participated in guarding the death march from Gross-Rosen to the labor camp in Guben, during which 1,400 of the 2,000 women died as she could face charges as an accessory to murder.

To this day, Hilde Lisiewitz, today known as Michnia, insists that she was not involved in any atrocities, she never saw any corpses lying around Bergen Belsen camp while working there and prosecutors should leave small ‘fry’ like her alone. When a former SS guard, a convicted war criminal and nowadays regular church-goer was asked about her feelings towards Tomi Reichental and his documentary, which displayed her dark past to general public as well as to the prosecutors she answered in a split second: ‘he should be ashamed of himself’!

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