On April 15th, 1945, British troops passed through the gates of Bergen Bellson. Before them was a vast chaos of death. About 13,000 bodies lay scattered across the camp, unburied and uncovered. They were everywhere, along the paths, inside the wooden barracks, and against the barbed wire fences. Here, death was not hidden.

 It occupied the entire space. Among those motionless bodies were people still alive, but no longer resembling healthy human beings. Their bodies were reduced to skin and bone. Their movements were broken and uneven. Many could not stand when soldiers approached. Reports from the time described bodies that were little more than skin and bone, surviving on the last remnants of strength.

 And even after the camp was opened, thousands continued to die in the days that followed because the damage had exceeded any possibility of recovery. Over the course of its operation, more than 70,000 people died at Bergen Bellson, most of them in the final two years of the war when the camp was overcrowded and all standards of control collapsed.

This was not a random breakdown. It unfolded under a notorious guard system where discipline was maintained through coercion and repeated violence day after day. It is precisely here that a troubling paradox emerges. Crimes carried out openly on a massive scale and over a prolonged period were brought to an end by sentences carried out in absolute silence.

 No crowds, no images, no space for public outrage. Was this simply a legal choice by the British military? Or was there something sensitive that had to be concealed in the way justice was carried out? The female devils of Bergen Bellson. When Bergen Bellson entered a phase of severe overcrowding in the final stage of the war, real power inside the camp no longer lay in documents or distant orders.

 It rested in the hands of those standing closest to the prisoners. That power belonged to the SS guard staff, and among them, the role of the female guards became particularly prominent, not because of their numbers, but because of their direct contact. They supervised daily life, assigned labor, and enforced discipline under conditions of extreme deprivation.

 Most were very young, just in their early 20s. Yet, they were not inexperienced. Many had previously served at other camps before being transferred to Bergen Bellson. The three names that later appeared at trial all came from this group. Wana Borman was remembered by witnesses for using dogs as a tool of control. This was not an impulsive act during the chaos at the end of the war.

 It was repeated many times functioning as a method of maintaining order through fear. In testimony, this image appeared as a familiar part of daily life in the camp. At the command level was Elizabeth Vulcanrath, the highest ranking supervisor of the female guard staff. In this position, Vulcanrath not only enforced discipline but also organized and coordinated the entire control apparatus of the women’s section.

 Her responsibility was not tied to a few isolated acts, but to the way discipline was maintained as a system. The figure that shocked the public most was Irma Graaser. Attention did not stem from her administrative role, but from the contrast between her youth, her appearance, and the testimony of witnesses.

 Grazer did not emerge from nowhere. Before arriving at Bergen Bellson, she had served at Avitz, where the system of classification and selection of prisoners had long been tightly organized. Her transfer to Bergen Bellson showed that she was familiar with the logic of the camp apparatus, not someone newly swept up in the final chaos. The key point is this.

 The acts being prosecuted were not confined to the final weeks of the war. Trial records show a continuous period of service within the same system, moving from one camp to another. That continuity stripped the argument of temporary loss of control of any credibility. When Bergen Bellson was liberated and witnesses began to speak, the role of these female guards could not be ignored.

 From there, individual responsibility was gradually established, directly paving the way for the Bellson trial. There is one detail, however, that makes this section especially disturbing. It lies not in isolated acts of violence, but in the normalization of power within the camp’s daily life. When control is placed in the hands of those standing closest to the victims, crimes no longer require grand orders.

 They operate on their own as habit, repeated steadily until no one questions where the boundary between right and wrong truly lies. The Bellson trial, death sentences and a controversial silent ending. After Bergen Bellson was liberated, the British military did not view it merely as a humanitarian disaster that needed to be addressed, but as a criminal case requiring clear accountability.

Investigations began almost immediately. Witnesses were interviewed and their testimonies recorded. Personnel files of the camp were collected. Individual responsibility was gradually separated from the overall chaos. From September to November 1945, the Bellson trial was held in Lunberg under the authority of a British military court.

 This was one of the earliest trials to directly prosecute concentration camp personnel, taking place even before the major proceedings in Nuremberg. The aim of the trial was not to judge the entire Nazi system, but specific individuals for specific actions at a specific location. For the female guards, the focus of the prosecution was not ideology or doctrine, but what they had actually done in the daily life of the camp.

Prosecutors relied heavily on the testimonies of surviving prisoners, describing the enforcement of discipline through coercion, physical punishment, and direct participation in the chain of control. The argument of just following orders was not accepted, especially in cases where the defendants had actively carried out and repeatedly committed the acts in question.

 During the proceedings, Huana Borman, Elizabeth Vulcanrath, and Irma Greg were all found to have played roles that went beyond that of passive functionaries. In Vulcanrath’s case, command responsibility was the decisive factor. For Borman and Gre, the evidence showed direct and repeated involvement rather than isolated actions.

The verdict was delivered without hesitation. All three were sentenced to death. There was no division of responsibility and no mitigation based on age or gender. The executions were scheduled for December 13th, 1945 at Hamlin Prison. It was at this point that a detail began to attract attention in the postwar period.

 There were no plans for a public execution. No broad announcements were made. The press was not granted access. No space was prepared for the public. Everything was confined strictly within the walls of the prison. This secrecy stood in stark contrast to the notoriety of the case and the scale of the crimes that had already been exposed. It raised an obvious question.

Why was one of the most prominent postwar death sentences carried out in complete silence? The answer does not lie in emotion, but in how the British understood and administered justice. To understand that choice, it is necessary to examine the reasons behind the decision to conduct the executions in private.

The reasons behind British secrecy at Bergen Bellson. The decision to carry out the executions discreetly was not improvised. It stemmed from a legal framework, moral outlook, and security calculations that were clearly established in the British approach to postwar justice. First was the legal basis.

 The trials and executions following the Bellson trial were conducted under the British military legal system based on the royal warrant of 1945. Within this framework, death sentences were required to be carried out inside prison facilities and not in public spaces. This was not an exception made for the female guards of Bergen Bellson, but a consistent legal standard in Britain.

 In fact, Britain had ended public hangings decades earlier, viewing the spectacle of punishment in public squares as contrary to the principles of the rule of law it sought to uphold. Alongside the law was a moral view of justice. In the thinking of British authorities after the war, public executions were not seen as expressions of order, but as displays of violence intended to intimidate.

 They did not want executions to become events for crowds to witness where emotion could overwhelm procedure. Justice in this view had to be carried out coldly under strict control and without theatrical display. Another key factor was the risk of creating symbols. The case of Irma Gres was particularly sensitive. Her youth and appearance drew intense media attention during the trial itself.

British authorities feared that a public execution could be exploited by remaining extremist groups, turning the condemned into martyrs within distorted post-war narratives. To eliminate that possibility, every detail was minimized, from denying press access to the decision to bury the bodies within the prison grounds rather than in local cemeteries in order to prevent the formation of gathering places or sites of remembrance.

 Finally, there was the issue of security and resources. In December 1945, Germany remained unstable. Weapons were still circulating among the population. Social order had not yet been fully restored. Organizing a public execution in a recently defeated German town would have meant serious security risks and the need to deploy significant forces to control crowds.

 For the British military authorities, this was an unnecessary and potentially dangerous option. All of these factors converged into a single decision to carry out the executions in silence, not to diminish the crimes, but to assert a new legal order in which justice was enforced through procedure rather than public outrage.

 That choice created a stark contrast between crimes committed in full view and a conclusion carried out behind closed doors. A contrast that continues to shape how post-war justice is understood. The post-war message from Bergen Bellson. In other words, the silence was not meant to conceal anything. It was meant to reshape how justice was understood within an emerging postwar order.

 The executions were carried out on December 13th, 1945 inside Hamlin prison. The executioner was Albert Pier Point, Britain’s official hangman. The long drop method was applied according to the legal standards of the time to ensure the process was swift and controlled. The bodies were left for the required period to confirm death before burial.

Initially the remains were buried within the prison grounds avoiding any form of gathering or commemoration. Later they were transferred to Amvil Cemetery. The graves bear no names, no headstones, no identifying markers. Their locations may be known, but they are not marked. The legacy of this story does not lie in the details of the executions, but in the way it ended.

 The crimes at Bergen Bellson were exposed to the world. Justice was carried out. But there was no spectacle to be remembered through images, no crowds to shout or react, only a deliberate silence reflecting the choice of a new order. Punishment through law, not through outrage. That silence forces later generations to ask a difficult question.

 Should justice be seen or should it be controlled? In this case, the answer was delivered behind closed doors. From the perspective of a historian, I believe the greatest value of this case lies not in the sentence itself, but in the discipline of justice. Justice does not need to be loud to be effective. It needs to be precise, consistent, and placed within a framework strong enough to prevent collective emotion from pulling it off course.

 When punishment turns into spectacle, the boundary between the rule of law and retaliation begins to blur. History shows that when that boundary disappears, violence is likely to return in another form. For later generations, the lesson here is not about learning when to be outraged, but about learning how to control outrage.

 Individual responsibility must be clearly defined. Procedures must be transparent. But punishment should not become a tool for satisfying collective emotion. A mature society is one that knows how to keep distance between painful memory and the way it enforces justice. My advice as a historian is to always ask not only who was wrong, but also how we choose to end that wrongdoing.

because the way it ends will determine whether history is used to educate or repeated in another form. The aftertaste of this story, therefore, lies not in death, but in a conscious choice. And that is the lesson every generation must learn if it hopes to step out of the shadow of the past without carrying it forward.