They wore the same uniform, followed the same orders, ran the same camps, but when the war ended and the world finally saw what had happened inside those gates, people struggled with one question more than any other. How do you judge a woman [music] who chose to become a monster? Not a woman who was forced, not a woman who looked away, but a woman who volunteered, who applied for the job, who showed up on day one, learned the system, >> [music] >> and then, in many documented cases, went further than the system required. What happened to those women when the Allied forces arrived is one of the most disturbing, most debated, [music] and most deliberately forgotten chapters of the entire Second World War. And it starts, [music] not at a courtroom, not at a gallows, but at the gates of Bergen-Belsen. >> [music] >> April 1945,

and the smell that hit British soldiers from half a mile away >> [music] >> when British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15th, 1945, [music] they were prepared, or thought they were, for what they might find. They were not [music] prepared. 60,000 living prisoners, 13,000 unburied [music] corpses, typhus spreading through the camp like wildfire, children who weighed less than [music] 20 kg, adults who had forgotten what it felt like to be spoken [music] to like human beings. The soldiers who walked through those gates that day, hardened combat veterans, men who had fought from Normandy to northern Germany, broke down. Some vomited. Some wept openly. Some stood completely still, unable to process what their eyes were telling them. And standing among [music] the chaos, still in uniform,

still present, not yet fled, were the female guards, the Aufseherinnen, women who had been recruited, trained, and deployed by the SS specifically to guard and control female prisoners. At its peak, the Nazi concentration camp system employed over 3,500 female guards across its network of camps. >> [music] >> They were not rare.

They were not an accident. They were a system, >> [music] >> and some of them, when British soldiers arrived, were still giving orders. That detail has never stopped being shocking. If you’re watching [music] this for the first time on X History, this is what we do here. We go into the rooms history [music] is uncomfortable entering.

We don’t sensationalize. We don’t simplify. We find the truth and we sit with it, even when it’s difficult. [music] Subscribe right now if that matters to you. Hit the bell, because [music] the next few minutes are going to challenge everything you think you know about who commits atrocities [music] and why.

Now, back to Bergen-Belsen, because the British soldiers had a decision to make, and it was not a simple one. The most infamous name, the one that would define [music] the entire category in the public imagination, was Irma Grese, dot 22-years-old at the time of her arrest. Let that number sit for a moment. 22.

She had joined the SS auxiliary at 17. By 19, she was serving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the largest and most brutal killing operations in human history. By the time she arrived at Bergen-Belsen, she had been promoted to senior overseer. Survivors described her in terms that were almost impossible to reconcile with her age and appearance.

She was physically striking, blonde, tall, composed. She carried a plaited [music] whip. She kept two starved dogs that she used on prisoners. She made selections, pointing left or right, [music] deciding who went to the gas chambers with the casual efficiency of someone doing administrative paperwork.

She did not appear to struggle with any of it, but Irma Grese was not alone. Alongside her stood women like Elisabeth Volkenrath, the chief overseer [music] at Bergen-Belsen, who had built her career methodically through the camp system, rising through ranks the way any ambitious professional [music] might, and Johanna Bormann, small, quiet, unremarkable in appearance, who survivors called the woman with the dogs, [music] because she used her dog to maul prisoners to death and reportedly watched with visible pleasure. These were not women [music] driven by ideology they barely understood. These were women who had chosen this, who had stayed, who had, in documented testimony after documented testimony, gone beyond what was required of them. Dot the question of why would consume psychologists, historians, [music] and courts for

decades, but in April 1945, the British army wasn’t asking why. Yet, they were collecting names, dot building cases, dot, and preparing for something that had never quite happened before in modern legal history, the prosecution of women for war crimes on this scale. What happened inside that courtroom in Lüneburg would set precedents [music] that still echo through international law today, dot and it would begin with a trial that the entire world was watching.

[music] September 17th, 1945, Lüneburg, [music] Germany, dot a small courtroom, wooden benches packed with journalists from every [music] major newspaper in the world, military judges in uniform, translators [music] working in real time, and 45 defendants, men and women, seated [music] together, facing charges that had barely existed in legal language before this moment.

War crimes, crimes against humanity. The Belsen trial, >> [music] >> as it came to be known, was not Nuremberg. It didn’t have the same scale, the same [music] famous names, the same cinematic weight, but in many ways, it [music] was more raw, more immediate, because the witnesses walking into that courtroom had been inside Bergen-Belsen just months earlier, dot.

They were still recovering physically, psychologically. Some of them had to be helped to the witness stand, [music] dot, and across the room, the defendants watched them with expressions that survivors described in remarkably consistent terms, boredom, mild irritation, occasional contempt, almost no remorse. Irma Grese walked into that courtroom and did something that stunned observers.

She smiled, not nervously, not apologetically. She smiled the way someone smiles when they find a situation mildly amusing, and she maintained [music] a composure throughout the proceedings that prosecutors, judges, and journalists all noted [music] independently. She denied the worst accusations, admitted [music] to some physical punishments, framing them as within regulations, claimed she had no control [music] over selections, presented herself as a young woman following orders inside a system she did not design, dot. [music] It was a calculated defense, and it almost worked in the sense that it forced the prosecution to bring witness after witness to dismantle it, dot. Survivor after survivor took the stand. [music] Woman who had watched Grese shoot a prisoner who had fallen during roll call, not because the prisoner posed any threat, but because she was slowing things down. [music]

Former prisoner who described being beaten by Grese so severely she lost consciousness and waking up to find Grese had moved on to someone else, completely indifferent. A teenage girl who testified that Grese had specifically targeted younger prisoners, >> [music] >> that there was something in her behavior that went beyond enforcement, something that looked unmistakably [music] like enjoyment.

The courtroom grew quieter with every testimony. While Grese captured the headlines, Elisabeth Volkenrath’s trial revealed something arguably more disturbing, that she was not sadistic in the theatrical way Grese was. She was methodical, bureaucratic. She ran Bergen-Belsen’s female section the way a middle manager runs a department, efficiently, without apparent emotional engagement, making decisions [music] that resulted in deaths the way another administrator might approve budget cuts.

Her defense was essentially, >> [music] >> “I was doing my job.” The court’s response to that defense and the precedent [music] it set for the concept of following orders as legal protection [music] would echo directly into the frameworks used at Nuremberg and in international >> [music] >> law for generations afterward.

Johanna Bormann offered yet another variation, quiet, seemingly unremarkable. Her defense was partial denial. [music] She admitted presence, admitted some actions, denied the most extreme accounts, dot. Survivor [music] testimony demolished it. Three women, three completely different personalities, three different relationships to the violence they had participated in, and the court was now tasked with something unprecedented deciding not just guilt but degrees of guilt in crimes that had no proper legal precedent at the scale they were being judged November 17th 1945 [music] the verdicts came that Irma Grese guilty death by hanging Elizabeth Volkenrath guilty death by hanging that Wanda Bormann guilty death by hanging eight other defendants

also received death sentences that day the majority of them male guards but it was the sentences [music] on the women that stopped the room because in 1945 executing women was not something [music] British military courts did routinely it was not something that felt to many people watching like it fit within the normal boundaries of how justice [music] operated that there were appeals for clemency from unexpected [music] places from people who had no sympathy for what these women had done but who felt instinctively [music] that something different should apply the appeals were rejected every single one the courts [music] position was precise and deliberate gender was not a mitigating factor in crimes of this nature the women had not been coerced they had not been conscripted they had applied they had served voluntarily >> [music] >> they had in documented cases exceeded what was required of them that

[music] justice the court said did not have a different weight depending on who was holding the scales the executions were scheduled and the man chosen to carry them out was Albert Pierrepoint Britain’s chief executioner a man who had already hanged hundreds of convicted [music] criminals across his career he would later say that the Belsen executions were unlike anything else he had ever been asked to do that not because of the number not because of the gender but because of what happened in those final moments inside the execution chamber when he came face-to-face with Irma Grese what she said how she stood [music] what expression she wore that it stayed with him for the rest of his life Hameln prison northern Germany a cold gray morning the kind of morning that [music] feels deliberately quiet as if the world itself is holding its breath inside the prison >> [music]

>> 13 people were scheduled to die that day 10 men three women all convicted at the Belsen trial all sentenced by a military court that had [music] weighed the evidence heard the survivors and reached the same conclusion for each of them Albert Pierrepoint had arrived the night before he had inspected the gallows >> [music] >> measured the drops each one calculated precisely based on the weight and height of the condemned the way professional executioners were [music] trained to do too short and death was slow too long and decapitation [music] occurred the mathematics of execution were in Pierrepoint’s world a form of clinical mercy that he had done this hundreds of times that he told himself this morning would be no different he was wrong the executions began with Wanda Bormann small quiet the same unremarkable presence she had

maintained throughout the trial witnesses present that morning described her as composed not defiantly not dramatically but in the flat disconnected way of someone who had already processed what was coming and had nothing left to say about it she walked to the gallows without assistance >> [music] >> she did not speak that it was over in seconds and then the guards went to get Irma Grese Albert Pierrepoint wrote about this in his memoir [music] carefully with the precision of a man >> [music] >> who had spent decades trying to find the right words for something that resisted them that Irma Grese was 22 years old on the morning [music] she was executed the youngest woman hanged by British authority in the 20th century a record she still holds that p i e r r e p o i n t entered her cell to escort her to the

gallows she looked at him and she said one word that schnell [music] that quickly that not a plea not a breakdown not the desperate last [music] minute bargaining that Pierrepoint had encountered in condemned prisoners throughout his career just quickly an instruction almost impatient as if she had somewhere else to be and preferred not to linger that p i e r r e p o i n t a man not given to sentiment a professional who prided himself on emotional distance later admitted that single word unsettled him more than almost anything else in his career because it told him something about who Irma Grese was that no trial testimony had fully captured she was not afraid that she was not sorry she was simply done she walked to the gallows with the same composure she had carried into the courtroom

head up >> [music] >> expression neutral the plaited whip was gone the uniform was gone but the bearing remained right up until the moment the trapdoor [music] opened and then she was gone too Elizabeth Volkenrath was the final woman [music] executed that morning that if Bormann had been quiet and Grese had been composed Volkenrath was something in [music] between present aware moving through the process with the same [music] bureaucratic efficiency she had apparently brought to everything else in her life that no dramatic final statement [music] no collapse no moment of visible reckoning just the same woman who had run Bergen-Belsen’s female section like a department [music] walking through her final procedure with the same blank professionalism [music] Pierrepoint completed all 13 executions that morning

in under an hour he returned to England resumed his career hanged hundreds more convicted criminals over the following years but he kept returning to Hameln in his writing in his interviews in the quiet moments between cases specifically to Irma >> [music] >> Grese specifically to that one word that schnell that the Belsen trial established something that international law has built on ever since that gender is not a shield following orders is not a defense voluntary participation in a system of atrocity regardless of rank regardless of sex regardless [music] of age carries full moral and legal weight these principles sharpened that Luneburg in 1945 fed directly [music] into the frameworks used at Nuremberg they fed into the Geneva conventions they fed into the [music] international

criminal tribunals established after Rwanda after Bosnia after every subsequent atrocity the modern world has been forced to confront the women of Bergen-Belsen were not footnotes they were a case study that rewrote the rules but here is the [music] question that historians and psychologists have never fully stopped arguing about were Irma [music] Grese Elizabeth Volkenrath and Wanda Bormann extraordinary monsters rare aberrations in [music] human behavior or were they ordinary people who were placed inside an extraordinary [music] system and made choices that the system made easier but never made inevitable because survivor testimony is consistent on one point that gets overlooked in the dramatic retelling not all female guards behaved the same way some documented named remembered by survivors showed quiet acts of humanity inside the camps

look the other way at the right moment passed an extra piece of bread chosen not to report something they could have reported they were inside the same system wearing the same uniform following the same chain of command [music] and they made different choices that fact does not comfort us it is not supposed to that it is supposed to remind you asked that the system alone was never the whole explanation choices were always there and the people who [music] made the worst ones made them anyway Hameln prison was demolished in 1950 the gallows [music] were taken down the records were filed the world moved on to its next [music] crisis its next war its next set of impossible questions about [music] human nature but the names remain the testimony remains >> [music] >> the single word schnell remains

preserved in a dead man’s memoir still echoing that if this video made you [music] feel something complicated good history should the moment it [music] stops being complicated is the moment we’ve stopped paying attention that x history exists for the people who want to pay attention [music] that subscribe if you’re one of them share this with someone who takes the past seriously and drop a comment because I want to know what you think was justice served at Hameln or is justice always in the end insufficient for crimes of this scale >> [music] >> think about it. I’ll see you in the next one.