Jenny-Wanda Barkmann (30 May 1922 – 4 July 1946) was a German overseer in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. She was tried and executed for crimes against humanity after the war.
Biography
Barkmann was born in 1922 and is believed to have spent her childhood in Hamburg.
In 1944, she became an Aufseherin, or overseer, in the Stutthof SK-III women's subcamp in Poland, where she brutalized prisoners, some to death. She also selected women and children for the gas chambers[1] and volunteered as a gunner in the camp.[2] She was so merciless that the women prisoners nicknamed her the "Beautiful Spectre".[1]
Barkmann fled Stutthof and hid out in Gdańsk, where she was arrested at a train station[2] in May 1945 for her criminal wartime acts. In 1946, she became a defendant in the first Stutthof Trial, where she and other defendants were convicted for their crimes at the camp.[1] After she was found guilty she declared, "Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short."[3]
Barkmann was publicly executed by short-drop hanging along with 10 other defendants from the trial on Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk on 4 July 1946.[4] Former Stutthof prisoners volunteered to conduct the executions. She was 24 years old.[5]
.jpg)
.svg){kind=small}