Elisabeth Lupka

Who was Elisabeth Lupka?

Elisabeth Lupka was a Nazi female guard at two camps during World War II.

Lupka was born in Klein-Damner, Germany. She married in 1934, had no children and soon divorced. In 1937 she went to Berlin to work in an aircraft factory.

In 1942 she left her menial job as a laborer and came to Ravensbrück to undergo training as a camp guard. Elisabeth graduated and later became an Aufseherin over several work details. In March 1943, she was assigned to the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Nazi-German Occupied Poland as an Aufseherin then as a Blockfǖhrerin, where she physically beat many prisoners with a whip and selected many others for the gas chambers. She stayed in the camp until its last evacuations in early January 1945 and accompanied a death march to Loslau. She returned to Ravensbrück later that same month, where she continued her reign of terror.

On 6 June 1945, Lupka was arrested by Allied troops and sent to an internment camp. 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. On 8 January 1949, was hanged in the Montelupich prison in Kraków aged 46. Her corpse was later sent to Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland for use by medical students.