1948: Ruth Closius-Neudeck
July 29th, 2019 Headsman
A notoriously brutal guard at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp named Ruth Closius-Neudeck was hanged on this date in 1948.
With impeccable timing she exited a life of proletarian obscurity by applying for a gig as a camp warden in July 1944, right when the Third Reich’s prospects for surviving the war went terminal.
That left her scant few months to stack up fodder for the eventual war crimes tribunals but Neudeck had a knack for making hay in the twilight.
Almost immediately earning promotion to barracks overseer, she earned a reputation as one of the cruelest guards at the camp that once cultivated Irma Grese. (They didn’t overlap.) One prisoner would later describe seeing her “cut the throat of an inmate with the sharp edge of her shovel.”
She was subsequently detailed to the nearby Uckermark satellite camp, smaller and more lethal — as it was converted for the Third Reich’s final weeks into a killing center for inmates whose bodies had been broken at slave labor in Ravensbrück or elsewhere. She acknowledged sending 3,000 women to the gas chambers as Uckermark Aufseherin.
She was one of five camp guards charged in the Uckermark trial (also known as the Third Ravensbrück trial) in 1948, and the only one of those five executed.
On this day..
- 1869: Katkeena and John Anayitzaschist, Glyphs and Gallows - 2020
- 1566: Agnes Waterhouse, the first witchcraft execution in England - 2018
- 1598: Lucas, waterboarded Guale - 2017
- 1741: Not Sarah Hughson, "stubborn deportment" - 2016
- 1629: Louis Bertran, martyr in Japan - 2015
- 1938: Janis Berzins, Soviet military intelligence chief - 2014
- 1879: Kate Webster, of the Barnes Mystery - 2013
- 1969: Joseph Blösche, Der SS-Mann - 2012
- 1947: Three Jewish terrorists and two British hostages - 2011
- 1936: Aboune Petros, Ethiopian bishop - 2010
- 1600: The Pappenheimer Family - 2009
- 1747: Alexander Blackwell, who left them smiling - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Germany,Hanged,History,War Crimes,Women
Tags: 1940s, 1948, july 29, naziism, nazis, ravensbruck, ruth closius-neudeck
