March 6, 1922 - Wanda Klaff
Her own courtroom statement — boasting of intelligence and a self-imposed daily quota of beatings — distills something essential about how ordinary people could become instruments of systematic cruelty within the camp system. Klaff spent less than a year as an overseer at Stutthof subcamps before the collapse of the Reich ended her career, yet the record was sufficient for a Polish court to impose the death penalty. She was among the first concentration camp personnel to be tried and executed in the postwar reckoning, hanged publicly at Biskupia Górka Hill at twenty-four years old.
From Wikipedia
Wanda Klaff (6 March 1922 – 4 July 1946) was a Nazi concentration camp overseer. Klaff was born in Danzig to German parents as Wanda Kalacinski. After the war, she was executed for crimes against humanity.
Early life
Wanda Kalacinski was the daughter of railway worker Ludwig Kalacinski. The family name was changed to Kalden in 1941. She finished school in 1938 and worked in a jam factory until 1942. That year, she married Willy Klaff, then a streetcar operator, and became a housewife.
SS career, arrest, trial and execution
In 1944, Klaff joined the Stutthof concentration camp staff at Stutthof's Praust subcamp in present-day Pruszcz, where she abused many of the prisoners. On 5 October 1944, she arrived at Stutthof's Russoschin subcamp, in present-day northern Poland.
Klaff fled the camp in early 1945 but on 11 June 1945 was arrested by Polish officials; soon after, she fell ill from typhoid fever in prison. She stood trial at the first Stutthof trial with other former female supervisors and male personnel. She stated at the trial, "I am very intelligent and very devoted to my work in the camps. I struck at least two prisoners every day."
Klaff was convicted and received the death sentence. She was publicly hanged by short-drop method on 4 July 1946 on Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk, aged 24.
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