When Bergen-Belsen was liberated in April 1945, British forces found not only the dead and dying prisoners but also the people responsible for their suffering. Among those detained were dozens of female guards — women who had worked inside one of Nazi Germany’s most lethal camps. Held at Celle while awaiting trial, they were photographed. The resulting mugshots are among the most unsettling documents of the entire war.
Women made up a small but significant portion of the Nazi camp guard system. Of the roughly 55,000 guards who served across the concentration camp network, approximately 3,700 were women. They were known as Aufseherinnen. The first group arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek in 1942, transferred from Ravensbrück. By 1943, a worsening shortage of male guards — pulled into frontline military service — pushed the Nazi regime to begin conscripting women more aggressively.
Most of the women recruited were young and unmarried, drawn from lower- to middle-class backgrounds. Some volunteered for the financial pay. Others were motivated by nationalist ideology. Once trained, they were assigned to oversee prisoners — and many carried out their duties with documented brutality, participating directly in beatings, selections for the gas chambers, and forced marches.
The mugshots taken at Celle in 1945 show a range of faces — some blank, some hard-set, some that betray nothing at all. Each woman photographed had already been through the collapse of the Nazi regime and knew that legal proceedings were coming. What the images share is a kind of flatness, an absence of the emotion one might expect from someone facing a war crimes trial.
Irma Grese was 22 years old when she was captured. She had served at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and was known for extreme cruelty toward prisoners — including the use of a whip and the arbitrary selection of inmates for death. Guards and survivors alike testified to her conduct. She was tried at the Belsen Trials and sentenced to death, hanged on December 13, 1945.
Elisabeth Volkenrath served as the head wardress at Bergen-Belsen. She had previously worked at Auschwitz, where she participated in selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. Survivor testimony at the Belsen Trials described her as violent and actively involved in prisoner abuse. She was found guilty and hanged on the same day as Grese — December 13, 1945.
Herta Bothe led a death march of women from central Poland to Bergen-Belsen as the Soviet Army advanced westward. Death marches were deliberately brutal — prisoners who fell or could not keep pace were shot. Bothe was convicted at the Belsen Trials and sentenced to 10 years. She was released early on December 22, 1951.
The Belsen Trials, held in Lüneburg between September and November 1945, were among the first proceedings in which female concentration camp personnel were prosecuted for war crimes. Forty-five defendants stood trial in total. The court heard extensive survivor testimony detailing beatings, murders, and other abuse. Sentences ranged from one year in prison to death by hanging.
Juana Bormann, another of those sentenced to death, was described by survivors as one of the most feared guards at Bergen-Belsen. She was 52 at the time of the trial — the oldest of the women executed. She was hanged alongside Grese and Volkenrath.
Looking at these photographs today, what stands out is how ordinary each face appears. There are no visible markers of the violence these women took part in. That is precisely what makes this archive so important — it forces a direct confrontation with the fact that the perpetrators of mass atrocity were not monsters in any recognizable form. They were recruits, employees, and in many cases, volunteers.
