Johanna Langefeld (née May; 5 March 1900, Kupferdreh, Germany – 26 January 1974) was a Nazi German guard and supervisor at three Nazi concentration camps: Lichtenburg, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. She was arrested and imprisoned for her role in the Holocaust, but she escaped prison and was never tried.
Early life and Nazism
Born in Kupferdreh (now Essen, Germany), Johanna May was brought up in a Lutheran, nationalistic family alongside a sister. She was named after a German heroine figure, Johanna Stegen. Her father was a blacksmith. Her parents instilled her and her sister with values of strict discipline and Kinder, Küche, Kirche.
In 1924, she moved to Mülheim and married Wilhelm Langefeld, who died in 1926 of lung disease. In 1928, Langefeld fell pregnant with another man, left him soon afterward,
Trial, later life and death
On 20 December 1945, Langefeld was arrested by the U.S. Army, and in September 1946, was extradited to the Polish judiciary preparing a trial in Kraków against SS personnel in Auschwitz. On 23 December 1946, she escaped from prison. Given her prior relatively positive treatment of inmates in this German Nazi concentration camp located on occupied Polish soil, the escape was assisted by Polish staff of the prison where she was held. After the escape she hid in a convent, working in a private home. Sometime around 1957, she returned illegally to live with her sister in Munich. During 1957, she tracked down Buber-Neumann to her home in Frankfurt to apologize in hopes of absolution. At this point, she was missing multiple teeth.
Personality and brutality
Langefeld had a complicated view of contemporary German gender roles. Though she was raised with the belief women should be subordinate to men and was attracted to Hitler for his endorsement of such ideas, she also pushed against patriarchal relationships in her professional life. She strongly believed her life would have been better had she been born male.) and never complained about the killing of Jews in the Holocaust. She hated Koegel's disciplinary methods of long, gratuitous beatings, but her own methods were also violent: imposing strict rules either impossible to obey or resulting in long periods of discomfort and having guards kick and slap prisoners for infractions to keep them constantly on their toes. Langefeld herself would sometimes slap prisoners for emphasis.