Erika Bergmann

Erika Bergmann (3 January 1915 – 1996) was a German Nazi concentration camp guard at two labor camps during World War II. She was known as the "beast in human skin" for her cruel treatment of prisoners during her tenure as a warden at Ravensbrück concentration camp, according to a 1990 edition of the East German magazine Für Dich.

Biography Bergmann was born on 3 January 1915 in Neukölln, at the time an independent city near Berlin. In 1943 she arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp where she received her initial training and first assignment. In the same year, along with other female concentration guards she accompanied a transport of prisoners to the Genthin sub-camp where she remained until the end of the war.

After the war, Bergmann moved to East Germany, where she lived until her past was exposed in 1955. She was accused of acts of cruelty towards prisoners, including using a whip and inciting an attack by a dog on prisoners (killing six of them), as well as other crimes. Placed on trial in an East German court in Neubrandenburg, she was found guilty of six murders and sentenced to life imprisonment on 2 November 1955.

In one account of her crimes, she ordered a dog to attack two Gypsy women, who were then bitten by the animal in the ribs and feet. In another instance, after a Polish prisoner was seriously injured by Bergmann's dog during the fall of 1945, that woman was then ordered to work despite the wound, and was given no permission to be treated. A witness stated at the trial that the prisoner had been beaten by Bergmann because her hair had been too long and curly, adding that the beating was so vicious that the prisoner was blind for six months. Another time the same witness was beaten by Bergmann and kicked with her boots, because she had had worn a headscarf in the rain. Bergmann also reportedly shouted: "She who is a prisoner is not a person!" At the time of Bergmann's release, she was the longest serving Nazi war criminal tried under East German law. Bergmann died in 1996 in Guben, Germany.