Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was a Nazi concentration camp guard.

She is believed to have spent her childhood in Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. In 1944, she became an Aufseherin in the Stutthof SK-III

Stutthof concentration camp

Stutthof was the first Nazi concentration camp built outside of 1937 German borders.Completed on September 2, 1939, it was located in a secluded, wet, and wooded area west of the small town of Sztutowo . The town is located in the former territory of the Free City of Danzig, 34 km east of...

 women's camp, where she brutalized prisoners, some to death. She also selected women and children for the gas chamber

Gas chamber

A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...

s. She was so severe the women prisoners nicknamed her the Beautiful Specter.

Barkmann fled Stutthof as the Soviets approached. She was arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave a train station in Gdańsk

Gdansk

Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...

, incarcerated and became a defendant in the Stutthof Trial

Stutthof Trial

Stutthof Trial was a war crime tribunal held at Gdańsk, Poland, from April 25, 1946, to May 31, 1946, where the joint Soviet/Polish Special Criminal Court tried and convicted of crimes against humanity a group of thirteen ex-officials and overseers of the Stutthof concentration camp and...

. She is said to have flirted with her prison guards and was apparently seen arranging her hair while hearing testimony. She was found guilty, after which she declared, "Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short."

Barkmann was publicly hanged

Hanging

Hanging is the lethal suspension of a person by a ligature. The Oxford English Dictionary states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain...

 on Biskupia Gorka Hill near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was around 25 years old.