Elisabeth Lupka

Elisabeth Lupka (27 October 1902 – 8 January 1949) was a Nazi female guard at two prison camps during World War II.

Lupka was born in Klein-Damner, German Empire (present-day Dąbrówka Mała, Lubusz Voivodeship, Poland).^[1] She got married in 1934, had no children and soon divorced.^[2] In 1937 she went to Berlin to work in an aircraft factory.^[3]

In 1942 she left her menial job as a labourer and went to Ravensbrück concentration camp to undergo training as a camp guard.^[4] Lupka graduated and later became an Aufseherin over several work details. In March 1943, she was assigned to the German Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland as an Aufseherin then as a Blockführerin (Block Overseer), where she physically beat many prisoners with a whip and selected many others for the gas chambers.^[4] She stayed in the camp until its last evacuations in early January 1945 and accompanied a death march to Loslau. Lupka returned to Ravensbrück later that same month.^[2][5]

On 6 June 1945, Lupka was arrested by Allied troops and sent to an internment camp. Two years later, on 6 July 1948, after a long investigation, she appeared at a Kraków court for war crimes, mainly the maltreatment of prisoners and her involvement in selections of inmates to the gas chambers. Lupka was found guilty, and executed by short-drop hanging on 8 January 1949 at Montelupich Prison in Kraków. Her corpse was sent to Jagiellonian University in Krakow for use by medical students.^[1][3]