Female Nazi Guard Feared by Prisoners at Stutthof: Ewa Paradies #ww2 #history #documentary

Ewa Paradies was one of the few female SS guards executed for World War 2 crimes committed during the Holocaust. Born in 1920 in Lauenburg, Germany, she came of age under the shadow of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. After working as a tram conductor, she was conscripted in 1944 to serve at the notorious Stutthof concentration camp and later at its subcamp, Bromberg-Ost. There, Paradies quickly earned a reputation for brutality. Survivors recalled how she forced naked women to stand in snow while pouring cold water on them—beating them viciously if they moved. Others testified she beat women to death in fits of sadism. Stutthof, near Gdańsk (formerly Danzig), was initially a civilian internment camp before being transformed into a full-fledged concentration camp by the SS. Equipped with a crematorium and gas chamber, it became part of the Nazi Final Solution. Over 100,000 prisoners passed through its gates, including thousands of Jewish women deported from Auschwitz. More than 60,000 perished, many from disease, starvation, or direct execution. As the Red Army advanced, the SS forced 50,000 prisoners on death marches, often shooting those who collapsed. Ewa Paradies accompanied a death march to the Lauenburg subcamp. Eyewitnesses claimed she killed women too weak to continue. Captured by Polish authorities in May 1945, she stood trial in the First Stutthof Trial beginning April 1946. Alongside ten others—including Elisabeth Becker, Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, and Gerda Steinhoff—she was found guilty of war crimes. Despite laughing through parts of the trial, she cried when sentenced to death. On July 4, 1946, before a crowd of over 200,000, she was publicly hanged on Biskupia Górka Hill in Gdańsk. The execution, carried out by former prisoners, was brutal. Using short-drop hangings, the convicts died by slow strangulation. Paradies was the last to be executed. Her corpse, along with the others, was later taken to a medical university for use in anatomy classes. Narrator: