Alisa Orlowski is less known than the Nazi death camp wardens Ilsa Koch or Irma Grese, but her name is also included in the list of the most inhuman criminals. She worked as a warden in several concentration camps.
The surviving victims called her "an exemplary SS employee," although Orlowski did not serve and could not serve directly in the ranks of the SS. Like all women who held various positions in the military units of the NSDAP, she was in auxiliary units, otherwise called the SS retinue.
By the beginning of World War II, a resident of Berlin, at birth called Alice Minna Elisabeth Elling, was 36 years old, so her fascination with the ideas of Nazism can hardly be attributed to mental and mental immaturity. Probably, work in a concentration camp attracted her, not least because of the generous salary. Alice Orlowski was characterized by rationalism and scrupulousness, combined with cruelty, reaching the level of sadism.
Ravensbrück and Majdanek
Orlowski began her career in 1941 at the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp in northeastern Germany. In the fall of 1942, the hardworking warden was transferred to Poland, to the Majdanek concentration camp, located in the vicinity of Lublin. Here, under the leadership of the deputy commandant Hermine Braunsteiner, she drove women into the gas chambers. Braunsteiner took pleasure in kicking prisoners who were already doomed to death. She trampled some to death. The "trampling mare," as the prisoners called her, turned out to be a good mentor, although she was much younger than Alice. Orlowski, like Braunsteiner, liked to castigate women. She also invented her own signature techniques. For example, when the gas chamber was filled to capacity, Orlowski would grab small children and throw them over the heads of adults.
Some time later, Orlowski got a promotion. She looked after a hundred women, sorting clothes, money, jewelry, watches, taken from their comrades and from themselves.
Promotional video:
Plashov, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the death march
Orlowski called the prisoners in Plaszow, a concentration camp near Krakow, "an exemplary SS employee". At the next duty station, she became the right hand of the commandant, SS Untersturmführer Amon Goeth. It was Alice who he entrusted to keep all documents containing information about mass executions. Neat and punctual, Orlowski protected the papers until the end of the war and only then destroyed them.
In Plaszow, Orlowski's old sadistic habits were added to new ones - she loved to knock out prisoners' eyes with a whip. In a concentration camp, this was tantamount to murder, moreover, sophisticated - the blind prisoners were no longer fit for work and were sent straight to the gas chambers.
The next item on Alisa Orlowski's track record was Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp in Poland. From here she accompanied the prisoners in Wodzislaw Slaski (German name Loslau) in January 1945, when the "death marches" began (the movement of prisoners of concentration camps of Nazi Germany in the occupied territories as the Allied troops approached them to the camps in the country), which claimed many lives …
The surviving prisoners later testified at the trial that during the death march, Orlowski's behavior had changed dramatically. It was as if mercy had awakened in her. She comforted the crying, gave water to emaciated women, slept next to them on the bare ground. But, perhaps, Alice hoped that such testimony of the prisoners would ease her fate after the war. And if this is true, then to some extent her calculation was justified.
The circle was closed: shortly before the defeat of Germany, Orlowski returned to Ravensbrück, where she began her journey.
Exemplary Prisoner
After the Red Army liberated the prisoners of Ravensbrück in April-May 1945, Alisa Orlowski was extradited to Poland. During the investigation, which was led by the Supreme National Tribunal, mainly her actions related to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the "death march" were considered. At the first trial, held November 24 - December 22, 1947 in Krakow, Orlowski was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The "exemplary SS employee" turned out to be an exemplary prisoner, so she was released long before the end of her term, in 1957. However, many years later, the famous "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal took up the investigation of Orlowski's crimes. In 1975 she was again brought to trial. This time - within the framework of the third trial for Maidanek's employees, which took place in Germany, in Dusseldorf. Orlowski did not live to see the verdict. She died in 1976 at the age of 73.
