The Brutal Execution of Jenny-Wanda Barkmann: A Former Super Model Turned Nazi Camp Guard JJ

The SS processed her paperwork the same way they processed applications for postal supervisors. A form, a physical check, an assignment. Jenny Wanda Barkmann was 21 years old, had been doing fashion modeling work in Hamburg before the war made that largely irrelevant, and her application to the SS Aufseherin in program moved through without complication. She was posted to Stutthof, a camp on the [music] Baltic coast east of Danzig. She arrived in the summer of 1944 and was given charge of women prisoners in the barracks. The

camp’s gas chamber had been operational for roughly 6 [music] weeks by the time she got there. Barkmann was conducting selections for it within weeks of settling in. Hamburg in 1944 was still running in most practical senses, [music] industry, transport, food distribution. Allied bombing had been hitting the port for years, but the city hadn’t stopped. Barkmann had worked in fashion modeling before wartime conditions made steady work in that industry difficult to sustain. Her pre-1944 life isn’t well

documented. >> [music] >> Records are sparse and she didn’t offer much of it at trial. The prosecution didn’t need it. What she did at Stutthof was sufficient for the verdict without a personal history. The Aufseherin program recruited women between 17 and 45. It wasn’t primarily ideological in its selection. The camp network had been expanding steadily since 1942 and demand for female overseers to staff women’s sections outpaced the supply of ideologically motivated volunteers. Some

recruits were committed party members. Some came for the salary, which was higher than most civilian work available to women at that stage of the war, and for the food rations, which mattered in a country where civilian supply chains were under strain. The SS trained roughly 3,500 women as Aufseherin across the full course of the war and posted most of them within a year of application. Barkmann’s specific motivation for applying isn’t in the surviving record. She didn’t explain herself at [music] trial and the

prosecution didn’t press for it. Training ran through Ravensbruck concentration camp in Brandenburg. New overseers were taught camp administration, the internal SS hierarchy, prisoner classification, and authorized methods of [music] control and punishment. Several weeks, then an assignment. Stutthof had been running since September 1939, one of the first camps established after the German invasion of Poland. It sat on low, marshy ground near the mouth of the Vistula east of Danzig. [music]

Originally built for Polish political prisoners, clergy, and intellectuals, it had expanded substantially by 1944 and was connected to the broader killing infrastructure. A gas chamber was constructed [music] and put into operation in June 1944, the same period Barkmann was finishing her training at Ravensbruck. By the time she arrived, large transports of Jewish prisoners were coming in from the east, evacuated from camps as Soviet forces advanced. The population was swelling. The emissions from the crematoria were

an inescapable presence at the barracks on most days. Stutthof wasn’t a large facility. The gas chamber and the women’s barracks weren’t separated by any distance that allowed for plausible ignorance among staff working there daily. The system was too compact for that. She was in the role for roughly 6 months, from mid-1944 to late January 1945, [music] when Soviet forces approached and the camp began to be evacuated. Many prisoners who couldn’t be moved were killed on site. Those who could walk

were marched west through winter conditions. Thousands died. Barkmann survived the collapse of the camp and was apprehended in the period [music] after. The gas chamber at Stutthof wasn’t built for the scale of operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was utilized for smaller groups. >> [music] >> Estimates of those killed there specifically in the gas chamber run around 1,000. The total [music] camp death toll sits between 65,000 and 85,000 across its full period of operation, with starvation, disease,

[music] execution, and the death marches of early 1945 accounting for the rest. An overseer conducting a selection wasn’t [music] at a desk with a list. She walked the barracks, down the rows, past women and children, stopping, pointing, designating those who would be directed [music] toward the facility. It happened at close range, indoors, face-to-face. Survivors named Barkmann [music] at the Danzig trial consistently across multiple separate testimonies. One account described her isolating a child

from its mother during a selection and directing the child toward the transport group. The testimony didn’t describe chaos or uncontrolled scenes. It described specific individual decisions made calmly, one after another. She was also identified for routine physical mistreatment in the barracks, striking prisoners with her hands and a stick, or directing a dog toward inmates she considered too slow. That kind of guard conduct was common across the camp system and wasn’t the primary focus of

the charges. The selections were. Her defense argued partial ignorance of where the selected prisoners were taken. The camp’s physical layout made that argument difficult to sustain. [music] Survivors contradicted it directly. The court found her guilty of crimes against humanity with the selections cited specifically in the verdict. She was 23 when the sentence was read. The Gdansk trial ran in April and May 1946. It was among the first major war crimes proceedings held under Polish jurisdiction rather than Allied

authority. Polish prosecutors built the case on survivor testimony, camp documentation recovered after the Soviet liberation of Stutthof in late January 1945, and physical evidence gathered at the site. [music] More than 40 witnesses testified during the proceedings. 12 defendants were tried in the main case. 11 received death sentences. One received a long prison term. The executions were scheduled for July and Polish authorities decided to hold them publicly. The reasoning was stated explicitly. This was a Polish trial on

Polish territory for crimes committed against Polish and Jewish prisoners on Polish soil under German occupation. Biskupia Gorka is a low hill at the southern edge of Danzig with a broad slope visible from much of the surrounding city. Polish authorities chose it deliberately. Making the executions public was a decision, not a default. Danzig had been Danzig until 1945, a German city for centuries. The Stutthof trial was part of how the new Polish state was establishing legal authority over what had happened during

the occupation. A public execution on a visible hill was a statement about that authority. Around 200,000 people came on July 4th, 1946. Danzig’s own resident population in 1946 was between 100,000 and 150,000, still rebuilding from the fighting and displacement of the war’s end. The crowd at Biskupia Gorka exceeded the full city [music] population. People had come in from surrounding regions. Polish state channels had publicized [music] the date and the transport options for reaching the site. Families brought food. Period

accounts described people spread across the slope in groups with provisions arranged as they might be for a long outdoor event. Children were present. Some accounts mention vendors working the crowd. What contemporary observers described wasn’t a solemn ceremony. It was closer to a festival in atmosphere, even if what was being observed was 11 people being put to death. Barkmann was the only woman among those hanged that day. The others included Johann Pauls, the Stutthof commandant, >> [music]

>> and several other convicted camp staff. The hangings were to be carried out in sequence on the platforms erected for the occasion. Before she was brought to the gallows, Barkmann reportedly said, “Life is truly a pleasure.” The record doesn’t explain it. Contempt for the proceedings, a final statement delivered for the crowd watching, or a personal philosophy spoken at its most ironic possible moment. She was 24 years old. The remark entered the documentation. The hangings proceeded one after

another. What the period accounts convey about the crowd isn’t silence or mourning. A very large crowd assembled in the open air, watching something significant happen in front of it in sequence. The hills around the city were visible in the background. Public executions in post-war Poland weren’t without precedent. Polish courts and military tribunals had been conducting war crimes proceedings since 1945 and some sentences had been carried out publicly in other cities, but the scale of the Stutthof execution, in terms of

attendance and the choice of location, was unusual even in that context. Once the bodies were cut down, part of the crowd moved on the gallows. This detail gets compressed or omitted from most brief retellings. The attendance figures get noted. The unusual atmosphere sometimes gets described. What happened to the gallows immediately after the hangings ended tends [music] to disappear from the account, but it’s documented. People pushed forward once the executions were complete. They claimed pieces of clothing as the

proceedings ended. The hanging ropes were cut apart and sections were taken. Polish authorities on site couldn’t prevent it. The crowd was too large and moved too fast. Clothing and rope sections were gone before any effective response was possible. Taking pieces of a hanging rope has a specific [music] documented history in European public executions. Early modern folk tradition [music] held that sections of the rope used to execute a criminal carried protective properties connected to ideas about the

weight of state sanctioned death and something transferred from the condemned. >> [music] >> The practice was centuries old by 1946. Not everyone in the crowd was thinking in those terms. Some acted on impulse. Some knew exactly [music] what the historical gesture meant. Gdansk in July 1946 wasn’t a stable city socially. Its population was a volatile mix. >> [music] >> Returning Poles who had been displaced during occupation, new settlers brought in from territories ceded to the Soviet

Union in the east, former residents [music] of uncertain status, and people still assembling the basic conditions of life after 6 years of war. For many of them, the Stutthof executions were a specific kind of closure. The camp had [music] killed tens of thousands of Polish and Jewish prisoners from the region. The rope taking [music] was part of how some people marked it. That’s not a full explanation. It’s just what the evidence shows. Polish authorities documented everything. Photographs were taken

throughout the day of the crowd on the slope, the platforms, [music] and the aftermath. The documentation entered the post-war records of the Stutthof proceedings and has been cited in historical work on the camp and the trial since. The seven executed on Biskupia Gorka weren’t the only convicted Stutthof staff. Four others sentenced to death were executed separately in the weeks that followed. Smaller proceedings against additional Stutthof personnel continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s with further

prison terms handed down. The full accounting stretched out for years after the main trial. Barkmann had been at Stutthof for approximately 6 months. She had been an overseer in total from first training to arrest for less than a year. The trial ran several weeks. The sentence took a morning. After the crowd dispersed, Biskupia Gorka returned to ordinary use over time. The infrastructure erected for the hangings was removed. It’s a park now at the southern edge of the city with a view over Gdansk. A small memorial marker

stands near the site where the platforms were built on July 4th, 1946. The pieces of rope the crowd took that afternoon were never recovered or cataloged. No one tracked where they went.