Jenny Barkmann: The “Beautiful Spectre” of Stutthof Concentration Camp
- Daniel Holland
- 7 hours ago
- 8 min read
In the dark world of Nazi concentration camps, where cruelty was institutionalised and compassion almost unthinkable, a chilling detail emerged after the war, some of the most sadistic guards were not men, but women. Among the names that surfaced during post-war trials, few drew as much fascination and revulsion as Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, the young Hamburg woman who became known as “The Beautiful Spectre.”
When Allied forces began prosecuting the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the public was stunned by reports of women like Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Gerda Steinhoff, whose acts of barbarity often matched or even surpassed their male counterparts. In total, 21 women who served as concentration camp guards were executed after the war, and Barkmann was one of them.
Early Life and Nazi Indoctrination
Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was born on May 30, 1922, in Hamburg, Germany. Very little is known about her childhood, but she grew up in a country increasingly shaped by Adolf Hitler’s rise and the pervasive reach of Nazi ideology.
For many young Germans, especially those born in the 1920s, Hitler’s promises of national pride and renewal were intoxicating. The Hitler Youth and its female counterpart, the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), indoctrinated teenagers in notions of obedience, racial superiority, and unquestioning service to the state. As the Nazis consolidated power in the 1930s, children like Barkmann were drawn into a system that glorified discipline, hierarchy, and loyalty to the Führer above all else.
By the time Barkmann reached adulthood, Germany was already at war. When she was 22 years old, she began seeking employment within the Nazi administration, specifically as a camp guard. Why she would volunteer for such a post in 1944, when Germany’s defeat seemed inevitable, remains unclear. Historians suggest it may have been a mix of opportunism, indoctrination, and a misplaced sense of patriotism.
The Female Guards of the Third Reich
Of the roughly 55,000 guards who served across the concentration camp system, around 3,700 were women, many of them volunteers. The Nazi regime encouraged women to take on roles in female-only subcamps, particularly in places like Ravensbrück, which served as a training and holding camp for female SS personnel.
Recruitment was disturbingly casual. Job advertisements appeared in German newspapers inviting women to “show their love for the Reich” by joining the SS-Gefolge, a civilian auxiliary branch attached to the SS. Many of these recruits had little or no professional experience — they were waitresses, hairdressers, teachers, opera singers, or matrons. Some were even conscripted after their information was retrieved from SS files.
Training was short and often brutal. Initially, women were trained at Lichtenburg in 1938, but from 1939 onwards, Ravensbrück, located near Berlin, became the main training centre. Courses lasted from four weeks to six months and covered ideological indoctrination, discipline, and punishment.
According to former SS overseer Hertha Ehlert, who testified at the Belsen Trial, the training was “physically and emotionally demanding.” Trainees were instructed on how to identify “sabotage” and enforce punishments, often being encouraged to treat inmates as subhuman. One survivor recalled a chilling exercise in which “the Germans brought a group of fifty women to the camp to undergo training. The women were separated and brought before the inmates. Each was told to hit a prisoner. Only three asked the reason why, and only one refused, she was jailed. The rest quickly got into the swing of things, which they had been warming up for their whole lives.”
Uniforms gave these women a sense of authority they’d never experienced before. Heavy leather boots, starched blouses with ties, military-style hats, and tailored coats conveyed the illusion of status and control. One former prisoner, Kitty Hart, recalled that after her liberation from the Salzwedel subcamp, she took the coat of a captured SS woman and removed the buttons. When a U.S. officer asked where she got it, he reportedly said,
“All that time when we were freezing, some of us to death, we hated those vicious bitches in their windproof, waterproof coats. And now I have one for myself.”
For many of these women, the uniform became the only thing separating them from the very inmates they tormented.
Stutthof: The Camp of the “Beautiful Spectre”
The Stutthof concentration camp, located in a marshy forest near the village of Stutthof, east of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), was the first camp established outside Germany’s pre-war borders and the last to be liberated. Founded on 2 September 1939, the day after Germany’s invasion of Poland, Stutthof was initially intended to imprison Polish intelligentsia, politicians, and resistance members. Later, its population expanded to include Jews, Soviet POWs, and political prisoners from across Europe.
Conditions were appalling. Prisoners faced forced labour, starvation, disease, and mass executions. In total, over 65,000 people perished in Stutthof, including around 28,000 Jews, through shootings, gas chambers, and lethal injections.
By the time Jenny Barkmann arrived in 1944, she was assigned to Stutthof’s SK-III women’s subcamp, where she quickly developed a reputation for unprovoked violence. Eyewitnesses later described her as “beautiful, young, and completely without mercy.” She regularly beat prisoners, sometimes to death, and personally selected women and children for the gas chambers.
Because of her attractive appearance and her hauntingly detached demeanour, inmates began referring to her as “Die schöne Gespenst” — The Beautiful Spectre.
Her tenure at Stutthof lasted barely a year, yet her cruelty was such that her name would be remembered long after the camp’s liberation.
Life Behind Barbed Wire: The Culture of the Female Guard
The world of the female SS overseers was one of disturbing contradictions — a blend of privilege, brutality, and moral decay. At many camps, romantic and sexual relationships between SS men and female guards were common. Even married guards often had affairs, and drunken parties were frequent in the SS canteens. One former camp insider recalled, “The guards all had monstrous eating and drinking bouts in the SS canteens, after which they were so far gone that they could not recall in the morning who they spent the rest of the night with.”
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, reportedly told his male subordinates to regard female guards as comrades and equals. At the Helmbrechts subcamp in Germany, the commandant had an openly romantic relationship with the head overseer, Helga Hegel. In some cases, female guards even became pregnant within the camps.
Others, like Irma Grese, who served at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, were notorious for their sexual sadism. She was rumoured to have had relationships with Dr. Josef Mengele, Josef Kramer, and several prisoners, whom she later sent to their deaths.
Corruption was rife. Guards stole from prisoners’ possessions, sometimes amassing small fortunes. Ilse Koch, the infamous “Witch of Buchenwald,” and her husband, Commandant Karl Koch, looted millions of Reichsmarks. When they were caught, Karl was executed for corruption, but Ilse escaped conviction. In other camps, female guards were punished for theft but rarely for violence. One woman who beat a prisoner to death received one day’s imprisonment for the murder.
Yet not every female overseer was cruel. Post-war testimonies mentioned a few who showed moments of decency or compassion. Klara Kunig, who served at Ravensbrück and Dresden-Universelle, was dismissed in 1945 for being “too polite” to inmates. Another at Auschwitz was flogged by her peers for aiding prisoners. But these cases were rare, exceptions to an otherwise grim rule.
The Collapse of the Reich and Barkmann’s Arrest
As Soviet troops advanced toward the Baltic coast in early 1945, chaos engulfed the Stutthof region. Guards and administrators fled, destroying evidence of atrocities and forcing prisoners on brutal death marches through the freezing countryside. Barkmann fled too, disguising herself and using a false identity to hide in Gdańsk.
Her freedom was short-lived. In May 1945, she was recognised and arrested at a train station by Polish authorities. Eyewitnesses said she initially denied her identity, but survivors from Stutthof soon identified her. She was detained and interrogated for her role in the murders at the camp.
The Stutthof Trials
In 1946, the first trial of Stutthof concentration camp personnel took place in Gdańsk. The defendants included six female SS guards, among them Jenny Barkmann, Ewa Paradies, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff, and Gerda Steinhoff, as well as one male SS officer and six Polish “kapos” who had served as prisoner-overseers.
The courtroom atmosphere was charged. Survivors described the guards’ sadism in harrowing detail, recounting how they had beaten inmates, forced them into roll calls for hours, or selected children for gassing. Despite the gravity of the proceedings, Barkmann’s behaviour was disturbingly flippant. Witnesses said she giggled during testimony, preened before mirrors, and flirted with guards.
When the guilty verdict was read, Barkmann reportedly said, “Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short.”
She and ten others were sentenced to death by hanging. The executions were scheduled for 4 July 1946, to take place publicly at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk.
The Public Execution of the “Beautiful Spectre”
The executions at Biskupia Górka were intended as both punishment and warning. A crowd of approximately 200,000 people gathered to watch, including survivors of Stutthof who had volunteered to serve as executioners.
The condemned were lined up on wooden gallows for short-drop hangings, which caused death by strangulation rather than a quick neck break. Photographs from the day show five women standing in the front row, Barkmann, Ewa Paradies, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff, and Gerda Steinhoff, moments before their deaths.
Barkmann, calm and composed, reportedly said nothing as the noose was placed around her neck. She was 24 years old.
Because of the massive turnout and the macabre atmosphere, authorities decided against any further public executions, citing “humanitarian concerns.” For many Poles who had suffered under Nazi occupation, however, the moment marked a grim sense of justice served.
The Legacy of Jenny Barkmann
Jenny Barkmann’s story remains one of the most unsettling in the history of the Holocaust, not simply because of her brutality, but because of what she represented. She was young, attractive, and unremarkable in background, an ordinary person who embraced extraordinary cruelty.
Her case forces historians and the public alike to confront uncomfortable questions: How could someone so ordinary become an agent of mass murder? How could such sadism coexist with vanity, flirtation, and laughter?
Holocaust scholar Wendy Lower, in her book Hitler’s Furies, explores how the Nazi regime drew thousands of women into its machinery of death, as secretaries, nurses, and guards. Many, like Barkmann, were not coerced but volunteered, seeing it as an opportunity for advancement or patriotic duty.
The transformation of such women into killers, Lower argues, stemmed from ideological indoctrination and a social order that gave them unchecked power over others. In this system, cruelty was not only permitted but rewarded.
Barkmann’s final words, “Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short,” capture both her nihilism and her detachment. To the end, she appeared to view her life — and the lives she destroyed, as nothing more than fleeting moments in a pleasure-driven existence.
Sources
Brown, Daniel Patrick. The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System. Schiffer Publishing, 2002.
Stutthof Museum Archives, Gdańsk.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Holocaust Encyclopaedia: Stutthof Concentration Camp.
“Stutthof Trial, Gdańsk 1946.” Polish National Archives.
Lower, Wendy. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Photographic archives: “Public execution of Stutthof concentration camp personnel, July 4, 1946,” Wikimedia Commons.
Eyewitness accounts and post-war testimonies, cited in Brown (2002).
Wikipedia: “Jenny-Wanda Barkmann” (accessed 2025).
Ravensbrück Memorial Site documentation, Brandenburg, Germany.
Hart, Kitty. Return to Auschwitz: The Remarkable Story of a Girl Who Survived the Holocaust. Atheneum, 1981.
