The Last Words Of The Ravensbrück Female Guards Before They Were Hanged Together

Hours before she died, a 27-year-old woman locked herself alone in a cell inside Hameln prison, found whatever sharp edge she could reach, and opened both of her own wrists. She was not trying to escape her sentence. She already knew there was no escaping it. She was trying to choose the manner of her own death rather than let a British hangman choose it for her.

The guards found her slumped against the wall, blood pooling on the concrete floor, and they got to her in time. They stopped the bleeding, bandaged both arms, and led her—still weak, still pale, still wrapped in gauze—to the gallows anyway, only a few hours later than originally scheduled. And when she finally stood in front of the man who was about to execute her, she said something that has followed her name for 80 years, a single sentence historians still argue about today.

“I hope you will not think we are all evil people.”

Her name was Dorothea Binz, and for years she had been one of the most feared women inside a camp built specifically to hold other women. In a matter of minutes, she would be dead. But to understand why those words landed the way they did, and why almost nobody who heard them believed her, you have to go back to a camp most people have never even heard of, inside a system designed quietly and deliberately to make ordinary women extraordinarily cruel.

Ravensbrück sits north of Berlin in a patch of Germany that looks, even today, almost peaceful. Lakes, pine forests, a small lakeside town nearby that still exists, still has people living ordinary lives within walking distance of the old camp gates. There was nothing about the landscape that suggested what the SS built there in 1939.

It became the largest concentration camp created specifically for women in the entire Third Reich. And over the course of the war, more than 130,000 female prisoners passed through it. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 of them never left. Those numbers alone put Ravensbrück in a category most people only associate with the men’s camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald.

But this camp ran almost entirely on female labor, guarded almost entirely by female staff, a detail that changes very little about the outcome and almost everything about how this story gets told afterward. Because here is the thing this case keeps circling back to: when people picture a concentration camp guard, they picture a man. Ravensbrück forces you to picture something else entirely.

Ordinary German women recruited through newspaper classifieds and local labor offices, many of them barely into their twenties, given a few weeks of training and handed near-total power over the lives of other women. The recruitment itself is worth pausing on because it wasn’t targeted at committed ideologues. Labor offices across Germany simply needed women for a job description that, on paper, sounded almost administrative.

Camp supervision work, decent pay, housing included. Some of the women who answered those ads had no particular history with the Nazi party at all. They needed work. The war economy had absorbed most other options, and this is what was available. What they became once they walked through those gates is the real subject of this story.

And Dorothea Binz became one of the worst of them. Binz was born in 1920 in a small forestry settlement, the daughter of a forester. Nothing marked her out early. There was no documented cruelty as a child, no criminal record, and no history of violence before she arrived at Ravensbrück’s gates as a teenager looking for work.

She joined the camp staff in 1939, the same year the camp itself opened, which means she did not inherit an already established culture of brutality. She helped build that culture from its very first days, learning the job as the job itself was still being invented in real-time by women figuring out exactly how far they could go.

Within a few years, she had risen to become the camp’s assistant chief warden, one of the highest-ranking women in the entire facility, answering only to the commandant himself. What she did with that rank is the part survivors remembered longest decades later in interviews and depositions given long after the war had ended. Binz ran what prisoners called the punishment block, and she ran it with a level of personal, hands-on cruelty that went well beyond simply enforcing camp rules.

Survivor testimony describes her beating prisoners herself, repeatedly, sometimes until they lost consciousness, and doing it in front of other inmates as a demonstration rather than a private punishment carried out behind closed doors. She was known to set attack dogs on prisoners. She was known to select women for the camp’s whipping post, tie them down herself, and then simply stand and watch the punishment unfold.

And she did all of this not from a distance, the way some camp officials managed their cruelty through subordinates and paperwork, but directly with her own hands in full view of the people she supervised. That detail matters enormously because it is exactly the detail that would come back around at her trial.

And exactly the detail that separates women like Binz from the ones sitting beside her in that dock. Binz was not alone in facing that reckoning, and she was not even the highest-ranking defendant. Sit with that for a second because it tells you something about how deep this particular system actually went.

Standing trial alongside her was Johann Schwarzhuber, the camp’s deputy commandant, a man who had previously served at Auschwitz-Birkenau before being transferred to Ravensbrück, carrying with him the exact same selection methods that had sent hundreds of thousands to the gas chambers in Poland. There was Ludwig Ramdohr, a Gestapo inspector whose specialty was interrogation—torture disguised as investigation, extracting confessions from women who very often had nothing to confess to in the first place.

And there was an entire cluster of camp doctors, men and women whose medical degrees should have meant something and instead meant almost nothing at all once they walked through Ravensbrück’s gates wearing an SS uniform underneath a white coat. Because Ravensbrück was not only a labor camp in its final years of operation, it became something else entirely, a site of documented Nazi medical experimentation run by a group of physicians who had previously worked together at an SS sanatorium, and who arrived at the camp specifically to test wound treatments on living, unwilling human subjects.

The lead figure was Karl Gebhardt, Heinrich Himmler’s own personal physician. Working alongside a young camp doctor named Herta Oberheuser, between 1942 and 1943, this group performed a series of experiments on 86 women, most of them Polish political prisoners, deliberately cutting wounds into their legs and then packing those wounds with bacteria, ground glass, wood shavings, and dirt, recreating what battlefield injuries looked like so the doctors could test whether a drug called sulfonilamide could actually treat the resulting infections.

There was no anesthesia in many of these procedures. Survivors described the doctors and nurses referring to them openly not as patients but as “rabbits,” a word that stuck to the case for the rest of its history. Five of the 86 died directly from what was done to them.

Most of the rest were left permanently crippled, walking with damaged legs for the remainder of their lives, carrying visible scars into courtrooms years later as evidence because a photograph or a document could never quite capture what a jury needed to see with its own eyes. One survivor, a Polish woman named Jadwiga Dzido, would eventually stand in front of judges at Nuremberg and simply lift her skirt to show them her leg, wordlessly, because at a certain point testimony runs out of language and evidence has to speak for itself.

A gas chamber was added to Ravensbrück in its final months of operation, built specifically to kill prisoners deemed too sick, too old, or too weak to keep working. A chilling admission that by early 1945 the camp’s function had shifted from exploitation toward outright extermination on an industrial timetable.

And a nearby satellite site called Uckermark, originally built as a youth detention facility for teenage German girls considered wayward or delinquent, had its infrastructure repurposed for exactly that same task in the camp’s final weeks. A detail that should stop you for a moment before you keep reading. A facility meant for troubled teenagers became a killing site for exhausted adult women, run by staff who had only months earlier been supervising truant schoolgirls.

Here is a detail worth pausing on before we go any further because it complicates the story rather than simplifying it. Some of the women who ran this system were barely older than the prisoners they were guarding. Ruth Neudeck, who commanded the Uckermark extermination site in its final phase, was in her twenties. Vera Salvequart, a prisoner herself who worked as a nurse and was later convicted of assisting in the selection of women for death, was in her twenties, too.

This wasn’t a system staffed exclusively by hardened career ideologues who had spent a decade climbing through the ranks of the SS. Some of it ran on young women who had only a few years earlier been ordinary civilians with no documented history of violence at all. What does it actually take to turn an ordinary twenty-something into someone capable of walking a selection line and deciding in seconds who lives and who doesn’t? That’s not a rhetorical flourish.

It’s the exact question this camp forces you to sit with, and there is likely no comfortable answer waiting for anybody. As Soviet forces pushed west through early 1945, Ravensbrück’s collapse followed the same brutal pattern seen across the entire camp system that same winter.

In March, thousands of prisoners were transported out to other camps. Some of them were funneled straight into Bergen-Belsen, which was already collapsing under its own weight by then, arriving into a crisis rather than escaping one. In late April, the SS forced roughly 20,000 remaining prisoners onto a death march north on foot with almost nothing to eat through a landscape already crumbling under the weight of a losing war.

Soviet troops intersected that march before it could finish killing everyone still stumbling along it, and by May 1st, 1945, the last prisoners still inside Ravensbrück itself were finally liberated. What Soviet soldiers found inside the camp gates, according to their own written reports, was a facility holding over 2,000 sick men, women, and children barely alive, abandoned in place by the guards who had already run for their own lives days earlier.

And that’s exactly what most of the staff did. They ran. Binz fled the camp during the chaos of the evacuation, but she did not get far at all. British forces captured her in Hamburg on May 3rd, 1945, just two days after the camp’s liberation, and from there she was funneled into the same post-war detention system being used to process thousands of former camp staff scattered across a collapsing Reich.

Unlike some of her co-defendants who managed to disappear entirely, sometimes for years, sometimes forever, slipping into new names and new towns while the chaos of 1945 swallowed their trail, Binz was caught almost immediately with almost no time to build a cover story or a new life. The trial that followed her capture was not held in some symbolic location chosen for its history.

It was held in a building called the Curio House in a residential quarter of Hamburg, a venue repurposed by British occupation authorities specifically to try war crimes cases inside their zone of control. This became the first of what would eventually grow into seven separate Ravensbrück trials, stretching from December of 1946 all the way into the autumn of 1948.

As British military courts worked their way through camp staff at every level—doctors, wardens, Gestapo officers, and even a handful of former prisoners accused of abusing other inmates on the camp’s behalf—the first trial alone put 16 defendants in the dock at once, and it ran for nearly two months from December 5th, 1946 to February 3rd, 1947.

The very first witness to take the stand was a Norwegian resistance member named Sylvia Salvesen, who had survived the camp herself and spent three full days on the stand describing in specific and often unbearable detail exactly what she had witnessed inside the camp’s medical block: induced abortions, newborn infants left to die through deliberate neglect, and the selections that decided on any given morning which women would be marched toward the gas chamber and which would live to see the following week.

After her came witnesses from Poland, from the Netherlands, from France, women who had crossed borders again years after their liberation specifically to sit in a room with the people who had once held their lives in their hands and say out loud exactly what those people had done. They described Binz’s beatings in detail.

They described the doctors’ experiments, the rusty nails, the ground glass, the amputations performed to study how bone and nerve tissue would try and fail to heal. They described selections for the gas chamber carried out with the same bureaucratic detachment as a shift change ending on schedule. Now, here’s a twist in the story that even the Belsen trial or the Płaszów case never quite produced in the same way, and it’s worth sitting with before we get to the verdict.

Nearly all of these Ravensbrück defendants, the doctors especially, spent their entire time on trial insisting they had simply been following medical protocol, running legitimate research under wartime pressure, nothing more sinister than that. It’s the exact same defense you’d expect from a bureaucrat two ranks removed from the killing floor, and it might have worked or at least muddied the waters enough to create doubt if not for one specific piece of evidence prosecutors kept coming back to again and again.

A photograph taken during the war for the doctors’ own internal records showed a nurse actually mid-procedure, wide awake, no anesthesia visible anywhere in the frame, and a patient’s face frozen in an expression no medical journal would ever publish voluntarily. The doctors had documented their own atrocity meticulously because they believed, right up until the moment Germany lost the war, that this was legitimate science worth preserving for the historical record.

That photograph did more damage to their defense than almost any single piece of witness testimony managed to do across the entire trial. That’s worth sitting with for a moment because it’s part of what makes this case different from almost every other major war crimes trial of the era. This wasn’t primarily a case about a distant chain of command issuing orders from an office in Berlin.

It was a case about people standing directly in front of their victims day after day, making choices that had nothing to do with orders passed down from above and everything to do with how they personally chose to wield the power they had been handed. When the verdicts finally came down on February 3rd, 1947, every single one of the 16 defendants was found guilty of something, with the exception of one doctor who had died partway through the proceedings before a verdict could even be reached against him.

Death sentences went to seven of them outright: Johann Schwarzhuber, the deputy commandant; Gustav Binder, a warden; Ludwig Ramdohr, the Gestapo inspector; doctors Rolf Rosenthal and Gerhard Schiedlausky; a nurse named Elisabeth Marschall; Greta Bösel, who had overseen labor assignments and selections for months at a stretch; and Dorothea Binz herself.

Two more defendants, Percival Treite and a former inmate named Carmen Mory, were also sentenced to death, but neither of them would ever actually face the gallows. Another woman, Vera Salvequart, received the same sentence, but on a delayed timeline that would separate her execution date from all the others by almost a full month.

Once Binz’s sentence was formally confirmed in April of 1947, she made her decision within hours. Alone in her cell with no one to talk her out of it. That’s the moment we opened with, the wrists, the blood on the concrete, the prison staff finding her before it was too late to reverse. She was determined that if she was going to die, it would happen on her own terms, in her own way, rather than at the end of a rope chosen and tied by someone else.

Percival Treite, the half-British doctor who had actually been defended at trial by several former prisoners grateful for the limited kindness he had shown them inside the camp, succeeded where Binz failed. He took his own life on April 8th, 1947, and Carmen Mory did the exact same thing in her own cell the very next day. Two death sentences quietly erased from the execution list, not through mercy, not through appeal, but through the condemned choosing the manner of their own ending rather than accepting the one the court had already handed them.

That leaves the ones who didn’t manage to escape it. On the morning of May 2nd, 1947, at Hameln prison, the same facility that had already hosted the mass execution of the Belsen defendants roughly a year and a half earlier, Dorothea Binz was led to the gallows, bandaged wrists and all, walking slower than the guards around her, weakened from blood loss that had nearly killed her days before.

The hangman was Albert Pierrepoint, the same British executioner who carried out Josef Kramer’s execution at that same site, and who would go on to become the most prolific hangman in his country’s history by the time his career finally ended. And it’s here, at the very last moment available to her, that Binz spoke the words this story opened with.

According to Pierrepoint’s own later account, she looked at him directly and said she hoped he wouldn’t think all of them—all the women who had worked at that camp—were evil people. It’s worth being honest about the historical record here rather than presenting this as settled fact. That quote comes down to us second-hand through the account of the man who executed her, recorded years afterward in his own memoir, rather than transcribed in the room at the moment it happened.

Historians treat it as broadly credible, given Pierrepoint’s documented habit of recalling specific details from his executions with unusual precision across dozens of cases, but it is not a court-verified transcript, and it deserves exactly that level of caution rather than being repeated as settled gospel. Whatever she actually meant by it, it wasn’t an apology, it wasn’t a confession, it was, if anything, a request. A plea for how she wanted to be remembered, offered in the final seconds available to her by a woman who had spent years deciding, without ever once being asked, exactly how other women would be remembered, or whether they would be remembered by anyone at all.

She was hanged that morning. The following day, May 3rd, 1947, six more of her co-defendants followed her to the same gallows, one after another, in a grim procession through the same mechanism. Schwarzhuber, Binder, Ramdohr, Rosenthal, Schiedlausky, Marschall, and Bösel. Seven executions across two consecutive days, the largest cluster of hangings to come out of any single Ravensbrück trial.

Vera Salvequart, whose sentence had been delayed, was not executed until June 2nd, a full month after the others, alone, on a gallows that had already claimed seven of her co-defendants before her.

None of the others left behind anything resembling Binz’s final statement—no recorded confessions, no documented last words that survived in any reliable form through any witness account close enough to trust. Most of them went to the gallows the way most condemned people from this era did, quietly, without theater, their final private thoughts unrecorded by anyone with the means or the interest to write them down for history.

That silence is its own kind of statement, if you actually think about it. A room full of survivors had just spent two months describing, in exhaustive and specific detail, everything these people had done to them. When it finally came time for the condemned to speak for themselves, one final time, almost none of them apparently had anything left to say at all.

And this is where the story leaves you with something harder to resolve than a simple “villain gets what they deserve” ending. Because the Ravensbrück trials were never really about seven or eight individually monstrous people standing in one dock. They were about an entire staffing structure built almost entirely out of ordinary German women recruited through classified ads and labor offices, given a few weeks of training, and handed the kind of unchecked power over other human beings that almost nobody in any system, in any country, has ever proven capable of handling well.

Some of them, like Binz, clearly relished it. The beatings, the punishment block, the personal hands-on cruelty carried out with her own two hands. None of that reads like a woman simply following procedure under duress from above. But others sitting in that same dock had, only a few years earlier, been nurses and secretaries and factory workers with no documented history of violence at all, until the labor office sent them north to a camp in the countryside and told them this was simply their new job.

So, here’s the question worth actually arguing about, not the easy version, the one you actually sit with after everything you just read: When a 27-year-old woman spends years personally beating prisoners with her own hands, builds a documented reputation for cruelty that has outlasted her by 80 years, and then, in her final moments, asks the world not to think of her and the other women like her as evil, does that request deserve even a moment’s consideration? Or does the specific, personal, repeated nature of what she chose to do strip her permanently of any right to shape how she gets remembered?

And if you think the system itself—the recruitment, the minimal training, the total absence of oversight—deserves some share of the blame for what ordinary women became once they walked through those gates, where exactly does that reasoning stop protecting the ones who chose, every single day, to go further than the system even required of them?