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A Ballerina Who Stabbed an SS Guard With a Stiletto and Other Historic Rebels

Khalid Elhassan August 10, 2020 34 min

36. Leading a Rebellion

As the stunned SS guards tried to process what had just happened, a dam of mounting tensions in the undressing room broke. Franceska Mann’s shots triggered the remaining women into attacking the SS guards with whatever lay at hand, and with their bare hands and teeth if they could not get a hold of anything else. One SS man was scalped, while another had his nose torn off before the guards fled the room.

As the women barricaded themselves, SS reinforcements arrived to put down the uprising. Using grenades and submachine guns, the Germans eventually killed everybody in the undressing room, including Franceska. Other versions have it that some survived, to be taken out and executed. What is certain is that SS guard Josef Shillinger was killed, Wilhelm Emmerich was shot and lived, while Walter Quakernack and other SS men were wounded. After Germany’s surrender, Quakernack was tried for war crimes and executed.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.