She Used Dogs to Torture Prisoners – The EXECUTION of Johanna Bormann

December 13, 1945, marked a grim morning at Hamelin Prison in occupied Germany. The morning chill seeped through the stone walls as a woman walked slowly toward the scaffold. She limped, weighed only 45 kilograms, and stood just over 1.5 meters tall, yet her apparent fragility concealed a terrifying past.

Her name was Johanna Borman, one of the main guards at N4zi concentration camps who became infamous as the woman with the dogs. She trained animals to tear apart defenseless female prisoners at the slightest command, and now she was about to face execution. The silence of the prison was broken only by the sound of her footsteps leading her to the noose of justice.

The origin of Johanna Borman began in a small rural village surrounded by forests and centuries-old traditions. In this humble setting, a child was born who would carry the seed of something dark. The world was still innocent of the horrors of the twentieth century, and no one could have predicted that this girl would one day become a prominent female face of Nazi terror.

Johanna Borman grew up in a deeply religious home where the precepts of the Catholic faith dictated the rhythms of daily life. Prayer preceded every meal, and Christian morality was taught through both Sunday sermons and inflexible household rules. Despite this strict upbringing, she never attended school, spending her youth on domestic work, obedience, and an unwavering sense of duty.

Upon reaching adulthood, Borman found work at a psychiatric institution far from the eyes of society. There, she cared for rejected, troubled, forgotten, and marginalized people for a meager salary between 15 and 20 marks a month. She fed patients, cleaned wounds, changed dressings, and offered gestures of humanity to those who had already lost everything.

That quiet and compassionate routine contrasted brutally with the fate that awaited her. No one could have imagined that the same hands that once caressed feverish foreheads would later unlock gates, fire weapons, and unleash attack dogs on defenseless prisoners. The transformation was slow and almost imperceptible, but ultimately devastating for her moral compass.

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and the National Socialist Party seized power after years of aggressive rhetoric. For many Germans, this represented the rebirth of hope, economic stability, and a glorious future following the humiliation of the First World War. What few understood at the time was that this political change would profoundly transform the national soul.

Nazi ideology infiltrated schools, churches, families, and the mindset of ordinary citizens across the country. Although official discourse placed women in a subdued role, practical reality revealed that about 13 million of Germany’s 40 million women were directly involved in party structures. They supported racial purification, Germanic superiority, and territorial conquest through various administrative and operational roles.

In 1938, at the age of 44, Johanna Borman made a decision that definitively marked her life by accepting a job at the Lichtenburg concentration camp. Located in Saxony, Lichtenburg was one of the first Nazi camps to house exclusively female prisoners. Her motivation was straightforward and cynical: money, as the SS offered a salary about ten times higher than her hospital wages.

Lichtenburg operated within an old Renaissance castle that had once symbolized nobility and civilization, but its corridors now resounded with cries of pain. Borman found her new role in the kitchens, a strategic location where she decided who would receive a meal and who would be punished with hunger. From day one, she held absolute and silent power to humiliate, punish, and slowly kill.

In May 1939, Lichtenburg was decommissioned, and operations transferred to Ravensbrueck, a new complex built near Berlin. Johanna Borman followed, carrying the coldness acquired through months of blind obedience and calculated violence. Ravensbrueck became the only major Nazi concentration camp created exclusively for women, ultimately holding around 132,000 female prisoners from across Europe.

Only 40,000 women survived Ravensbrueck, while the remaining 92,000 perished under brutal conditions. The camp served as a training center where ordinary women learned to become machines of repression under Dorothea Binz’s sadistic rule. Approximately 3,500 female guards passed through this system, absorbing the poison of institutionalized cruelty.

Borman remained at Ravensbrueck for years, starting in the kitchens before moving to forced labor areas where physical exhaustion proved lethal. Her performance caught the attention of superiors, leading to a promotion close to the camp’s elite. She was eventually assigned to the farm of Oswald Pohl, where she received an inseparable companion: a German Shepherd trained to obey with military precision and attack with savagery.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II and leading to the establishment of extermination camps in occupied territory. Among them was Auschwitz-Birkenau, a facility designed for industrial-scale death. Johanna Borman was transferred there in October 1942, bringing her hardened demeanor to the women’s section under ruthless commanders like Maria Mandel, Margot Dreschel, and Irma Grese.

Auschwitz dehumanized its victims completely, turning them into numbers while executioners operated as cogs in a cruel machine. Borman adapted with astonishing speed and pleasure, quickly earning a reputation as one of the most hated individuals in the camp. Survivor Helena Cooper recounted how Borman intercepted a running female prisoner, struck her with a club, threw her to the ground, and unleashed her German Shepherd to tear the victim apart.

Borman’s cruelty extended to stripping women of any remaining semblance of dignity, such as patched coats or proper shoes. She ripped their clothes off in a fury, leaving them naked before other prisoners, and forced them to perform grueling exercises under extreme weather until they collapsed. She then beat them brutally with wooden or rubber sticks, laughing as blood stained the courtyard floor.

Another impactful witness, Dora Silberg, remembered her friend Rachela Silberstein, a 21-year-old Jewish woman from Lodz who fell gravely ill. When Dora informed Borman that Rachela could not work, Borman struck Dora in the face, breaking two teeth, and then released her dog to drag Rachela across the yard. Rachela died days later in the infirmary from her infected injuries.

Ilka Malachovska revealed Borman’s direct involvement in selections for the gas chambers during a cold January morning in 1943. Out of 150 prisoners, Borman selected 50 for death, including Ilka’s sister Ida, who was taken away in a truck and never returned. Borman continued selecting, beating, and shouting, transforming Auschwitz into an efficient women’s slaughterhouse.

As the Eastern Front collapsed, the Nazis reorganized their camps, and Borman was transferred to the Hindenburg auxiliary camp in Poland. She maintained her merciless behavior despite the falling regime. In January 1945, she returned briefly to Ravensbrueck before receiving her final assignment in March at Bergen-Belsen, a camp that soon descended into apocalyptic chaos.

Bergen-Belsen swelled from 7,300 prisoners to over 60,000 by April 1945 due to hasty evacuations from eastern camps as the Red Army advanced. The camp transformed into an open-air mass grave devoid of food, clean water, and sanitation, where typhus and dysentery killed tens of thousands. In this hellish environment, Borman was put in charge of the pigsty, feeding pigs standard rations while humans starved to death around her.

Prisoner Dr. Peter Leonard recounted seeing Borman beat a young woman in March 1945 for stealing vegetables to survive. Borman punched and kicked her victims with ferocious energy, acting as though the Third Reich remained immortal. However, the end of the regime was fast approaching for the guards of the concentration camp system.

On April 15, 1945, British troops crossed the gates of Bergen-Belsen and encountered an abyss of humanity where 60,000 skeletal prisoners wandered among piles of rotting corpses. Veteran British soldiers wept before the devastation, confronting the systematic destruction of human beings. Amidst the chaos, desperate survivors discovered that Borman’s 52 pigs were receiving regular diets of mashed potatoes and beets, prompting them to slaughter the animals for food.

Two days later, British forces arrested Johanna Borman in uniform alongside her German Shepherd. Borman expressed genuine surprise when ordered to hand over the dog, seemingly unable to comprehend a denial of her authority. The authorities confiscated the animal, and the camp was eventually burned down to prevent the spread of disease after thousands more died post-liberation.

On September 17, 1945, the Belsen Trial began in Lueneburg, Germany, bringing Nazi war criminals before a British Military Tribunal. Borman sat alongside other notorious figures of female camp cruelty, stripped of her SS uniform and her dog. When confronted with numerous testimonies from Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, and Bergen-Belsen, she adopted a shocking stance of systematic denial.

Borman claimed she never committed deliberate brutality, suggesting that occasionally slapping prisoners who disobeyed orders was entirely normal. She coldly denied participating in gas chamber selections and insisted her dog was merely a pet rather than a weapon. The judges, however, found the extensive and consistent witness testimonies undeniable and completely rejected her defense.

On November 17, 1945, the tribunal sentenced Johanna Borman to death by hanging. Defense counsel Major Leonard attempted to portray her as a lonely and fragile woman merely trying to survive, but the court maintained that survival and loneliness do not justify torture or sadism. Borman was transferred to Hamelin Prison to await execution by the renowned British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.

On December 13, 1945, a 52-year-old Borman walked down the corridor toward the scaffold with a noticeable limp, weighing only 45 kilograms. As she stood on the scale trembling with fear, she spoke her final words: “I only said F, I have feelings.” This hypocritical statement came from a woman who had systematically destroyed the lives and humanity of thousands of others.

At 10:38 in the morning, following the executions of Elizabeth Volkenrath and Irma Grese, Borman was led to the trapdoor with a black hood covering her face. Pierrepoint calculated a precise drop of 2.64 meters, and the trapdoor opened, causing her death instantly. Her body was cremated and her ashes scattered without ceremony or remembrance, leaving behind only the enduring voices of the survivors who bore witness to her crimes.