Stutthof concentration camp, which was located about 20 miles from Danzig, was a forced labour camp; it was not an extermination camp.
Elisabeth Becker was born on 20 July 1923 in Neuteich, a small town near the Free City of Danzig.
The Free City included the city of Danzig and other nearby towns, villages, and settlements that were primarily inhabited by Germans. With a population of 410,000, the Free City was 98% German, 1% Polish and 1% other.
Becker's family were German and in 1936, aged 13, she joined the BDM, also known as the League of German Girls.
In 1938, aged 15, she got her first job as a cook in Danzig. In 1940 she began working for a company called Dokendorf in Neuteich, her home town. She remained there until 1941, when she became an agriculture assistant in Danzig.
In 1944, the SS needed more guards at the nearby concentration camp at Stutthof, and Becker was called up for service. The shortage of women guards was caused by the setting up of the subcamp of Bromberg-Ost, in the city of Bydgoszcz. in 1944.
Becker did not choose to become a concentration camp guard. If she had wanted to become a guard she could have joined Stutthof at any time from 1942 onwards, when they first started to take in female prisoners.
Becker arrived at Stutthof on 5 September 1944 to begin training as an SS Aufseherin. After she finished training, she worked in Stutthof women's camp 3 until 15 January 1945, when she went back home to Neuteich.
She served as a Camp Wardress (Aufseherin) in Stutthof for just over three months. It was the only concentration camp she ever worked in.
On 13 April 1945, Polish police arrested her and placed her in prison to await trial.
At Becker's trial she was charged with personally selecting women and children for the gas chamber.
Delousing chamber at Stutthof - Soviet photo taken in 1945
The Stutthof gas chamber was used to disinfect prisoner's clothing. It's claimed that between June and November 2, 1944, it was also used to gas human beings. Between August and November 2, 1944, more than 1,450 victims, most of them Jewish women, are alleged to have been gassed.
If Becker did not arrive at Stutthof until 5 September 1944, she presumably spent the next few works undergoing training. This means her training ended towards the end of September/early October. If she was involved in gassing human beings it could only have been during the period October 1944 to November 2 when the gassings stopped.
Would the SS give a 22 year old girl, who had just finished her training as a wardress, the responsibility of selecting women and children for the gas chamber? It is extremely unlikely.
No documentation exists for the alleged gassings at Stutthof, only conflicting eyewitness statements which are in themselves extremely scarce. The main source of information for the mass gassings comes from a former camp inmate, Aldo Coradello.
The first Stutthof trial was held in Danzig, Poland, from April 25 - May 31, 1946 under joint Soviet/Polish jurisdiction. The 16 defendants, including Elisabeth Becker, all pleaded "not guilty" to the general charge of war crimes.
A star witness at the Stutthof trial in 1946, Aldo Coradello was an Italian diplomat working in Danzig during WWII. He was imprisoned in KL Stutthof from 12 June 1944, until the camp's evacuation in January 1945, for his consistently "anti-German attitude".
Coradello submitted a 60 page report to the Criminal Court in Danzig on May 21, 1946. Coradello was not an eyewitness, since everything he relates about the homicidal gassings in his report is from hearsay. This fact alone decisively diminishes the value of his testimony. The written report was accepted by the court in place of oral testimony. He wrote the report in German, which was not his native language, and the report was translated into Polish at the trial in real time by a translator. A word, here or there, mistranslated, could mean the difference between life and death for those on trial.
In his report he states:
"Even in Berlin they immediately recognized the possibility of doing something to save German food by provisionally approving the gassing of 4,000 women as the first contingent. Work began thus immediately. (Ewald) Foth, the SS women’s guards and the criminal block elders, sometimes also supported by SS Doctor Heidl, now picked out the victims.”Coradello's report does not mention any of the women guards by name. This flimsy piece of evidence seems to be the only evidence used to prove Elisabeth Becker selected women and children for the gas chamber. It was this evidence which led to her receiving the death sentence.
Most of the witnesses, in the trial against members of the Stutthof Camp personnel in 1946, knew nothing at all about any gassings. For example, former inmate Paul Wiechern, who was assigned to the crematorium crew on January 3, 1945, never even mentions them in his witness statements.
Becker sent several letters to Polish President Bolesław Bierut requesting a pardon. No pardon was issued, nor was it likely to be. Bolesław Bierut was a hardline communist with a direct telephone line to Stalin. Before the war, Bierut was frequently arrested by the Polish authorities for illegal political activity.
Elisabeth Becker was publicly hanged (by the short drop method) on 4 July 1946 at Biskupia Górka along with ten other SS supervisors and kapos. From the pictures of her hanging, it appears her neck was broken by the fall and her death would have been instantaneous. The other condemned guards choked to death on the end of the rope.
There were at least 70 different female guards working at Stutthof from 1942 until the camp was evacuated in January 1945. The SS-Oberaufseherin (Chief Wardress) in 1944, when Becker was there, was Anna Scharbert (born, September 25, 1919, Bytom, Silesia, Poland). She was an experienced wardress who had served at Ravensbruck (1942-1943), Majdanek-Lublin (1943-1944), Auschwitz-Birkenau (1944), Kauen (1944), Praust (1944) and lastly Stutthof (1944-1945). She was never put on trial and her fate remains unknown.
The Commandant in 1944 was Paul Werner Hoppe. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment by a court in Bochum, Germany in 1955, released in 1966 and died in July 1974. After the war, he stated about the Final Solution, “All this never happened. It’s all lies.”
A West German court that heard "eyewitness testimony" about homicidal gassings at Stutthof declared in its 1964 verdict that "with regard to the gassings a positive determination was likewise not possible." Evidence given by several supposed witnesses of gassings was found to be dubious or not credible.[1] Raul Hilberg makes no mention of homicidal gassings at Stutthof in his detailed three volume Holocaust work. Two other prominent Holocaust historians, Lucy Dawidowicz and Nora Levin, likewise said nothing about the camp's alleged extermination facility.
References:
1. Justiz und NS-Verbrechen (Amsterdam), vol. 20, page 615.
Stutthof: An important but little-known wartime camp by Mark Webber
Concentration Camp Stutthof—Its History & Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy: Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno - Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
Museum Stutthof - Aldo Coradello
The Extermination of the Stutthof Concentration Camp Prisoners Using the Poisonous Cyclone B Gas: Oranienburg 2008—Ebook by Marik Orski
