Hertha Ehlert

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Hertha Ehlert in August 1945

Hertha Ehlert (* 26. March 1905 in Berlin as Hertha Liess ; † 4. April 1997 ) was a German guard in concentration camps , as war criminal in the Belsen Trial was sentenced to a prison term.

biography

Ehlert was a saleswoman in a bakery before she was trained as a guard in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on November 15, 1939 through the placement of the employment office . There she was deployed, among other things, as head of external commands. At the beginning of 1943 she was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp and from there in the spring of 1944 to the Plaszow concentration camp . From November 1944 she worked as a guard in the garden detachment in Auschwitz in the Rajsko subcamp . In the course of the evacuation, Ehlert left the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 18, 1945 and was transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early February 1945 on an evacuation transport .

On April 15, 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British troops who found over 10,000 dead and around 60,000 survivors there. The SS camp personnel were obliged to remove all corpses and bury them in mass graves .

Ehlert was then arrested, taken to Celle prison and interrogated by British military personnel. In the Bergen-Belsen trial (September 17 to November 17, 1945) she was charged with the crimes she had committed in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, based on testimony from witnesses. During the trial, the sisters Inga and Jutta Madlung also testified as exonerating witnesses for Ehlert. Jutta Madlung was a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp from September 8, 1942 to August 13, 1943 because of telling political jokes, listening to English records and being friends with a Jewish woman. Together with her sister, she was in Ehlert's work detachment in the Siemens camp in Ravensbrück and described in court that Ehlert had been benevolent and helpful towards the prisoners. According to Jutta Madlung's testimony, Ehlert is said not to have hit any prisoners and was a positive exception among the guards.

8: Hertha Ehlert, 9: Irma Grese , Bergen-Belsen Trial (1945)

At the beginning of the hearing, Ehlert, like all the other defendants, pleaded “not guilty”. On November 17, 1945, she was found guilty of aiding and abetting manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison. She was acquitted on the Auschwitz count. On May 7, 1953, she was released early from custody in the Werl correctional facility . Subsequently, on May 8, 1953, she briefly came to the Fischerhof rehabilitation facility in Uelzen. There she was visited by Savitri Devi , with whom she had befriended in February 1949 in the Werl correctional facility. After her release from the Federal Republic of Germany, Ehlert received returnees compensation . After the first divorced marriage, she remarried, took the name Naumann and lived in Bad Homburg .

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • United Nations War Crimes Commission (Ed.): Law reports of trials of war criminals, selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. 3 volumes, William S. Hein Publishing, Buffalo (New York) 1997, ISBN 1-57588-403-8 (reprint of the original edition from 1947 to 1949)
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism , NYU Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0814731112

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karin Orth : The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 266f.
  2. ^ Claudia Taake: Accused: SS women in front of the court , Oldenburg 1998, p. 53f.
  3. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 102f
  4. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism , New York 2000, (e-book)
  5. ↑ Helmut Hammerschmidt , Michael Mansfeld : The course is wrong , Desch, Munich / Berlin / Basel 1956, p. 51
personal data
SURNAME Ehlert, Hertha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liess, Hertha (maiden name); Naumann, Hertha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German concentration camp guard in concentration camps
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 1997