Dorothea Binz
Dorothea (Thea) Binz (
March 16,
1920 â€"
May 2,
1947) was an
SS supervisor at
Ravensbrück concentration camp during the
Second World War. She is said to have been depraved and cruel.
Born to a
middle class German family in Dusterlake,
Germany (near Fürstenberg and Ravensbrück itself) Binz attended school until she was fifteen. Afterwards she spent time as a maid but disliked the job, applied at a local SS office and was sent to Ravensbrück on
September 1,
1939 to undergo training as a guard.
Binz served as an
Aufseherin under
Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld,
Maria Mandel, and
Erna Rose. She worked in various parts of the camp including the kitchen and laundry. Later she is said to have supervised the
bunker where women prisoners were tortured and killed.
In August
1943 Binz was promoted to
Stellvertretende Oberaufseherin (Deputy Chief Wardress). Her abuse was later described as
unyielding. As a member of the command staff between 1943 and 1945 she directed training and assigned duties to over 100 female guards at one time. Binz reportedly trained some of the cruelest female guards in the system, including
Ruth Closius. These SS Aufseherinnen went on to over 200 women's camps across Poland, Germany, Austria and eastern France. Eventually she was responsible for over 50,000 female and underage prisoners. Her superiors were Lagerleiterin
Erna Rose, Oberaufseherin
Johanna Langefeld and the commandant,
Max Kögel. In
1944 Ravensbrück received vast numbers of women and children from
Auschwitz Birkenau,
Majdanek,
Plaszow,
Stutthof and various slave labor camps in
Poland. Binz supervised mass shootings and killings in the
gas chambers as well as mass deaths by
starvation, neglect, severe abuse and cold.
At Ravensbrück, the young Binz is said to have beaten, slapped, kicked, shot, whipped, stomped and abused women continuously. Witnesses testified that when she appeared at roll call, "silence fell." She reportedly carried a
whip in hand along with a leashed
German Shepherd and at a moment's notice would kick a woman to death or select her to be killed. French prisoners nicknamed her
La Binz (The Binz).
Binz had a boyfriend in the camp, SS officer
Edmund Bräuning. The two are said to have gone on romantic walks around the camp to watch women being flogged, after which they would stroll away laughing. They lived together in a house outside the camp walls until late 1944 when Edmund was transferred to
Buchenwald. There is one report Binz used an
axe to chop a Polish prisoner to death during a wood chopping kommando (forced labour assignment).
Binz fled Ravensbrück during the death march, was captured on
3 May 1945 by the British in Hamburg and incarcerated in the Recklinghausen camp (formerly a
Buchenwald subcamp). She was tried with other SS personnel by a British court at the
Ravensbrück Trial and was
hanged at
Hameln,
Germany on
2 May 1947 for
war crimes.
Most of the information in this article comes from two sources:
*
The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System, page 42
* http://www.geocities.com/biskupia/dorotheabinz.htm (which has a few pictures of Dorothea Binz,
Eugenia von Skene,
Margarete Mewes and
Greta Boesel in it. Binz is number 5. Mewes is number 6. Boesel is number 7.)
* Other information was told by survivors after the war.
