⚠️ EXTREMELY SENSITIVE CONTENT – 18+ ONLY ⚠️
This post discusses the 1946 executions and the subsequent treatment of the bodies. Content is shared solely for historical education and remembrance of victims.
After the Gallows – What Happened to the Coffins on Biskupia Górka Hill
On the morning of 4 July 1946, eleven Stutthof staff members – including five female guards Ewa Paradies, Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff and Gerda Steinhoff – were publicly hanged before approximately 200,000 people on Biskupia Górka hill in Gdańsk.
After the bodies were cut down, they were not returned to families and received no religious burial. By order of the post-war Polish authorities, the eleven corpses were placed in plain wooden coffins bearing no names or dates and transported to Zaspa military cemetery.
That same night (4–5 July 1946), they were buried together in an unmarked mass grave – the same kind of pit they had once forced prisoners to dig for tens of thousands of victims.
Decades later, when part of Zaspa cemetery was cleared for housing, the burial site was rediscovered. In 1966–1967, during the relocation of old military graves, workers opened several decayed coffins. Only bones remained, along with scraps of prisoner uniforms some of the women had still been wearing.
There was no ceremony, no identification. The remains were collected and reburied in another anonymous mass grave at Łostowice cemetery in Gdańsk, in a section reserved for “persons executed for war crimes”.
To this day, the Stutthof Museum and Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) confirm: no headstone bears their names, and their exact location has been deliberately erased from cemetery maps – a final act of historical justice that denies them even the dignity of a named grave.
We share these details not out of morbid curiosity, but to:
Honour the memory of the more than 65,000 victims who perished at Stutthof.
Acknowledge that historical justice sometimes extends beyond the sentence to the refusal of honour for perpetrators.
Remind ourselves that “Never Again” also means never allowing the names of those who spread terror to rest in peace
Official sources:
Stutthof Museum (execution protocol 4 July 1946)
Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) – Zaspa and Łostowice burial files
Marek Orski, “Stutthof Concentration Camp” (2006)