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Johanna Braach (born 16 May 1907 in Altenhundem; d. after 1972) was Chief Secretary in the "Reich Central Office for combating the juvenile delinquency" and Deputy Head of the girls' concentration camp at Uckermark.
Johanna Braach was a policewoman when she joined the Nazi Party (membership number. 3.926.001) in early March 1937. From 1934 to 1941, she was deployed in the female police in Berlin. She then worked in the "Reich Central Office for combating juvenile delinquency" under Friederike Wieking. Wieking was a female detective in Germany, and head of section V A 3 of the Reich Criminal Police Office (Amt V) in the Reich Security Main Office, as well as the Reich Central Office for combating the juvenile delinquency and truancy.
Together with Lotte Toberentz, Braach visited several camps in 1941. Braach served as Deputy Head of the Uckermark girls camp from mid-1942 until its dissolution in April 1945. Lotte Toberentz was her supervisor during this period. About 1,000 girls and young women were interned in Uckermark by early 1945.
Johanna Braach lived in Minden from 6 June 1946 to 16 May 1957, where she was head of the female police force from 1947. [1]
The build-up phase of the WKP fell within the period of national socialism. After 1935, the Prussian Landeskriminalamt had been converted into the Reich Criminal Police Bureau (RKPA). In 1937 the Nazis ordered the formation of a female police force, and further expanded it. Each major department of the judicial police was attached to a WKP Department. Their work was organized according to Nazi political principles.
Wieking, in June 1934 was a member of the National Socialist Women's organization or NS-Frauenschaft. She was also a member of the National Socialist Association of civil servants, where she led the activities of the WKP crime Director of Department I of the RKPA. On July 1, 1939 the WKP was attached to the "Reich Central Office for combating the juvenile delinquency". Since 1941 it had responsibility for the protection of youth camp of Moringen, and in May 1942 it was responsible for the Uckermark girls camp, near the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Fürstenberg/Havel. Wieking was imprisoned in 1945 for seven years by the Soviets.
During the war, however, the female police demonstrably participated in the so-called "deployment of Jewish transports" (der sogenannten bereitstellung von Juden transporten), as well as the establishment of National Socialist Youth Hostels in the occupied regions, for example in Poland and Latvia.
Amt V (Dept. V, crime - Kripo) was led by SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe. From 15 August 1944, after Nebe was executed, it was led by SS-Oberführer and Oberregierungsrat Friedrich Panzinger; Friederike Wieking was the forensic Director of group V A 3 (female police).
In the Third Ravensbruck Trial, also called the Uckermark process, (14th to 16 April 1948), Braach and Toberentz were indicted of being part of the SS female guardians, also called Wardresses (Aufseherinnen, SS-Gefolge). [2] They were tried under the British military penal code in the Hamburg Curiohaus, together with three other female relatives. The accused was charged with the following:
Braach's indictment included one to four points. For lack of evidence, she was acquitted, as was Toberentz, on April 26, 1948. The indictment included only crimes against Allied nationals, and since only German non-conformist girls and young women were under the girls camp, this was not the subject of the process.
After the trial, Braach worked again in a managerial capacity at the West German police. From 1952 until her retirement in 1972, Braach was head of the female criminal investigation department in Bielefeld as well as in Essen. [3]
Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese was a Nazi concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women's section of Bergen-Belsen. She was a volunteer member of the SS.
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in Nazi concentration camps. Of the 50,000 guards who served in the concentration camps, training records indicate that approximately 3,500 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of Aufseherin translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen, Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts.
Margot Elisabeth Dreschel, also spelled Drechsler, or Drexler, was a prison guard at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. For her role in the Holocaust, she was sentenced to death and hanged.
Arthur Nebe was a German SS functionary who held key positions in the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany and was, from 1941, a major perpetrator of the Holocaust.
Juana Bormann was a German prison guard at several Nazi concentration camps from 1938. She was executed as a war criminal at Hamelin after a court trial in 1945.
Dorothea "Theodora" Binz was a Nazi German officer and supervisor at Ravensbrück concentration camp during the Holocaust. She was known as one of the most brutal, ruthless and sadistic overseers and in the Nazi system. She was executed for war crimes on 2 May 1947.
Gerda "Jane" Bernigau was an SS Oberaufseherin in Nazi concentration camps before and during World War II.
Ruth Closius-Neudeck was a Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) supervisor at a Nazi concentration camp complex from December 1944 until March 1945. She was executed for war crimes for her role in the Holocaust.
Johanna Langefeld was a Nazi German guard and supervisor at three Nazi concentration camps: Lichtenburg, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. She was arrested and imprisoned for her role in the Holocaust, but she escaped prison and was never tried.
The Hamburg Ravensbrück trials were seven trials for war crimes during the Holocaust against camp officials from the Ravensbrück concentration camp that the British authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Hamburg after the end of World War II. These trials were heard before a military tribunal; the three to five judges at these trials were British officers, assisted by a lawyer. The defendants included concentration camp personnel of all levels: SS officers, camp doctors, male guards, female guards (Aufseherinnen), and a few former prisoner-functionaries who had tortured or mistreated other inmates. In total, 38 defendants were tried in these seven trials; 21 of the defendants were women. One of the defendants died during the trial. Twenty of the defendants received death sentences. One defendant was reprieved while two others committed suicide before they could be executed. The remaining 17 death sentences relating to these trials were carried out on the gallows at Hamelin Prison by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint.
Elfriede Hildegard Mohneke was a guard at two Nazi concentration camps in World War II.
Margarete Maria Rabe was a guard at two concentration camps from November 1944 until April 1945.
The Uckermark concentration camp was a small German concentration camp for young women near the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Fürstenberg/Havel, Germany and then an "emergency" extermination camp.
Karl Franz Gebhardt was a Nazi physician and a war criminal. Gebhardt was the main coordinator of a series of medical atrocities performed on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. These experiments were an attempt to defend his approach to the surgical management of grossly contaminated traumatic wounds, against the then-new innovations of antibiotic treatment of injuries acquired on the battlefield.
Lotte Toberentz, born Maria Charlotte Toberentz was the head overseer of the Uckermark concentration camp for girls, a subcamp of Ravensbrück concentration camp, in its early years. From December 1944 to April 1945 she was Lagerführerin of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Three concentration camps operated in succession in Moringen, Lower Saxony, from April 1933 to April 1945. KZ Moringen, established in the centre of the town on site of former 19th century workhouses, originally housed mostly male political inmates. In November 1933 - March 1938 Moringen housed a women's concentration camp; in June 1940 - April 1945 a juvenile prison. A total of 4,300 people were prisoners of Moringen; an estimated ten percent of them died in the camp.
In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps to increase productivity among inmates, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos, "prisoner functionaries" and the criminal element, because regular inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too debilitated and wary of exposure to Schutzstaffel (SS) schemes. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners' productivity levels, but instead, created a market for coupons among the camp VIPs.
Ravensbrück was a Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, almost 2,000 from Belgium, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave laborer by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Bernhard Wehner was a German criminal inspector, Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, and journalist. During the postwar period, he was a criminologist and writer for the news magazine Der Spiegel.
Johann Schwarzhuber was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer, who was in charge of various concentration subcamps during World War II. His positions included the Schutzhaftlagerführer of the Auschwitz-Birkenau men's camp, where he oversaw the selection process for the gassing of thousands of detainees. He was later transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where he held the post of the Lagerdirektor, second only to the overall camp commander Fritz Suhren. With Suhren on the run, Schwarzhuber was the highest-ranking defendant during the first Ravensbrück trial. In front of the British military tribunal he was indicted for war crimes for his role in the Holocaust, sentenced to death and subsequently executed in 1947.