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History’s Deadliest Woman and Other Lesser Known Killers

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2019 54 min

If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women - Ravensbrück concentration camp

The death camps in occupied Poland. Wikimedia

1. The Governor-General and the Jews

As ruler of rump Poland, Hans Frank instituted a reign of terror, featuring the segregation of Jews into ghettos. Then their wholesale extermination. It did not matter that he fathered five children. Frank reconciled affection towards his own kids with coldhearted indifference towards the murder of thousands of other people’s children. In December of 1941, he instructed his subordinates.

“Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible”.

Under Frank, the mass murder of Jews morphed from ad hoc massacres to deliberate policy. Of the Holocaust’s six extermination camps, four were located in Frank’s General Government. After the war, he tried to pretend he knew nothing about the millions of Jews killed in his territory. But documentary evidence exposed the lie in that claim. Captured by US troops in the war’s closing days, he faced trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Convicted, and sentenced to death, he was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Hans Frank at the dock in Nuremberg. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Alliance for Human Research Protection – Operation Paperclip Nazi Rogues

All That is Interesting – Why Isn’t Belgium’s King Leopold II As Reviled As Hitler or Stalin?

Badass of the Week – Ranavalona the Cruel

Biography – Idi Amin, Facts, Life, & Uganda

Clements, Barbara Evans – Bolshevik Women (1997)

Daily Mail, October 3^rd, 2018 – The Hunt For the Monstrous Nazi That‘s Got the Nation Hooked: Untold Story of the ‘Lost’ SS General Responsible for the Deaths of Half a Million Jews

Encyclopedia Britannica – Massacre of Amritsar

Encyclopedia Britannica – Hans Frank

Futurist Dolmen – Rozalia Zemlyachka: An Incomplete Biography

History Things – History‘s Nutcases: The Zhengde Emperor

JSTOR – Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa

Murderpedia – Georg Karl Grossmann

Murderpedia – Karl Denke

Ranker – The Untold Story of Peter Niers, The Cannibal Magician Who Killed 500 People

Smithsonian Magazine, October 28^th, 2015 – A Brutal Genocide in Colonial Africa Finally Gets its Deserved Recognition

Tovar, Diana, UC Santa Barbara – Stella: the Story of Stella Goldschlag

War History Online – Japan‘s Dr. Mengele: Medical Experiments on POWs at Unit 731

Weiner Library For the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide – Commandant Rudolph Hoess

Liu Pengli, Wikipedia

Ranavalona I, Wikipedia

Shiro Ishii, Wikipedia

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.