⚠️ EXTREMELY SENSITIVE CONTENT – 18+ ONLY ⚠️
This post discusses crimes at Stutthof concentration camp and the public execution in 1946. Content is shared solely for historical education and remembrance of victims.
Gerda Steinhoff – From Block Leader to the Gallows on Biskupia Górka Hill
Gerda Steinhoff (1922–1946) was one of the most notorious female guards at Stutthof concentration camp. Born in a rural area near Danzig, she volunteered as an Aufseherin in 1944 at the age of 22. In less than a year she rose to Blockführerin in the Bromberg-Ost and SK-III subcamps, where thousands of female prisoners perished from starvation, forced labour and disease.
Hundreds of survivors later identified her as a woman who regularly used a whip, beat prisoners to death, selected victims for the gas chamber and personally oversaw shootings. Some witnesses at the trial testified that she laughed while prisoners were torn apart by dogs.
On 25 April 1946 the First Stutthof Trial opened in Gdańsk. Gerda Steinhoff was among the thirteen defendants. After five weeks of proceedings, on 31 May 1946 she and ten others were sentenced to death.
At dawn on 4 July 1946, more than 200,000 people (the actual figure) gathered silently on Biskupia Górka hill overlooking Gdańsk. Eleven gallows had been erected. Gerda Steinhoff, aged 24, was one of the five female guards led to the scaffold first. When the trapdoor opened, the crowd’s collective sigh mingled with the Baltic wind.
She was the fifth of the eleven hanged that morning, alongside Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, Ewa Paradies, Elisabeth Becker and Wanda Klaff – five faces that had once been the nightmare of thousands of Stutthof prisoners.
We recall Gerda Steinhoff’s final moments not to satisfy vengeance, but to honour the more than 65,000 who died at Stutthof and its subcamps, to recognise the survivors who found the strength to testify while still bearing the scars of whips and hunger, and to affirm that historical justice, however delayed and cold, must be served for crimes beyond forgiveness.
Official sources
Stutthof Museum – trial records and execution protocol 4 July 1946
Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Gdańsk
Marek Orski, “SS Supervision in Stutthof Concentration Camp 1939–1945” (2006)