“You’re Not Animals,” the British Officer Told the Bergen-Belsen Women Guards—Then the Hidden Microphones Rolled: What They Said in the Next 10 Minutes Changed the Trial and History
I first heard the phrase in a voice that tried to sound bored.
“You’re not animals,” the officer said, almost casually, as if he were correcting a child who’d said something foolish. “So don’t act like it. Stand up straight. Answer like a human being.”
He wasn’t speaking to prisoners in striped uniforms.
He was speaking to the women in gray.
They stood in a row under an overcast German sky, hands clenched tight enough to whiten the knuckles, hair pinned back in a manner that still seemed to insist on order. They were young and old, thin and sturdy, faces flushed with cold, and all of them wearing the same expression you see right before a dam breaks: the look of people trying to hold back a story that no longer wants to be contained.
Behind them, Bergen-Belsen sat like a wound the world had finally looked at.
British forces had entered the camp on April 15, 1945, and what they found was beyond anything they had expected—tens of thousands of starving and gravely ill prisoners in catastrophic conditions, with disease spreading fast. The war wasn’t over yet, but something in the world had already ended: the ability to pretend.
I was there as a translator, a reluctant listener with a pencil and a thin notebook, assigned to capture statements and convert them into the plain English that courts demanded. I had grown up in German. I had fled German. Now I was paid by the British to catch German words as they fell.
People think translation is a clean act—one sentence becomes another, like coins exchanged at a counter.
It isn’t.
Translation is intimacy. You have to let a person’s meaning into your head before you can carry it out.
And in the days after liberation, meaning was everywhere, spilling out of the ground, out of the overcrowded huts, out of the air itself. It clung to uniforms. It sat on tongues. It appeared in the pauses between questions, where everyone could feel the unsaid things pressing in.
The women guards—Aufseherinnen, they called them in the paperwork—were taken into custody along with male SS personnel and prisoner-functionaries. Within months, many would stand trial in what became known as the Bergen-Belsen trial, held by a British military court beginning in September 1945 in Lüneburg.
But on those first days, before the courtroom, before the transcripts, before history simplified them into names on a list, there was only the raw problem of what to do with them—women who had worn authority inside a place where authority meant control over life and death.
The officer’s words—“You’re not animals”—were not mercy. They were a warning.
Because what many people wanted most in those early days was to turn everyone involved into a single creature: monster. It felt satisfying. It felt clean.
And it was dangerously wrong.
The truth was more unsettling: these were human beings. Human beings who had made choices. Human beings who had followed orders. Human beings who had, at times, used those orders as permission to become worse versions of themselves.
Calling them “animals” would let them off the hook.
So the officer insisted on their humanity, the way a doctor insists on naming an illness before treating it.
“You’re not animals,” he said again. “Which means you can’t hide behind instinct. You’ll answer for what you did.”
Then he nodded at me. My signal.
I opened my notebook.
The recruitment nobody likes to talk about
The first “untold” part is also the least dramatic: paperwork.
Most of the women were not recruited with speeches about ideology. Some were volunteers, some were desperate for wages, some were pulled into the SS system as it expanded and as the war dragged on. The SS had formal structures that included women in auxiliary roles—female guards were not “SS men,” but they were attached to the SS system and served in camps. Wikipedia+1
When I questioned them later, many began their stories the same way:
“I needed work.”
“I was assigned.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I only watched.”
“I only guarded.”
Their sentences were defensive from the first syllable.
One woman—mid-twenties, neat hair, eyes that wouldn’t stay still—told me she’d been trained at Ravensbrück and transferred through postings like a clerk rotated through offices. She spoke in the voice of bureaucracy.
When I asked her what she believed her job was, she replied without emotion:
“To keep order.”
I remember thinking: Order is a beautiful word that can hide anything.
Another woman, older, with hands that looked used to scrubbing floors, insisted she never hit anyone.
“I shouted sometimes,” she admitted. “I had to. They wouldn’t move. There were too many.”
Too many.
That phrase came up again and again in any discussion of Bergen-Belsen. The camp became massively overcrowded, especially in late 1944 and 1945 as prisoners were transported from other camps while the front shifted. encyclopedia.ushmm.org+1 Overcrowding became an excuse in every mouth—guards, administrators, even some local officials. It was the word people used when they didn’t want to say collapse.
But “too many” didn’t explain the cruelty witnesses described. It didn’t explain choices.
It didn’t explain why someone would use power as entertainment.
At some point in every interrogation, the women would say something like:
“We were afraid.”
And when they said it, they always expected it to change the room—like fear was a pardon.
But fear, I learned, is not an excuse. It is only a climate.
People still choose how they behave inside it.
“We weren’t like that here”
Many of the women guards tried to build a wall between Bergen-Belsen and “the other camps.”
They spoke as if the camp’s horrors were mainly sickness and shortage, not deliberate harm. They leaned hard on the chaos. They wanted the story to be that they were overwhelmed, not violent.
And it’s true that Bergen-Belsen became infamous for catastrophic conditions—starvation, disease, lack of sanitation—especially in the final months. Imperial War Museums+2nam.ac.uk+2 But the legal record that followed did not treat them as passive bystanders. The Belsen trial heard testimony about brutality and killings across Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-related contexts, involving both male and female camp staff and prisoner-functionaries. encyclopedia.ushmm.org+2UBTPTCLHQ+2
One woman tried to sound clever when she told me:
“You must understand—this was not a camp of… of that kind.”
She wouldn’t say certain words. She didn’t need to. Everyone knew what she meant.
I asked her, “Did you think ‘that kind’ mattered to the women you screamed at?”
She stared at me with offended confusion, like I’d broken the rules of how interrogations were supposed to go.
They expected anger from soldiers.
They didn’t expect questions that sounded like morality.
That was the second “untold” part: how quickly these women learned that moral language would be used against them.
Not slogans. Not propaganda.
Just the simple human question: What did you do when you had power?
The day of the “factory tour”—but reversed
There’s a story people tell about captured officers who demanded to see enemy factories and regretted it. They expected weakness and found production.
What happened with the women at Belsen was the reverse.
They expected vengeance.
They expected to be treated like beasts.
Instead, the British treated them like defendants.
That sounds like mercy until you understand what it meant: names recorded, statements taken, witness testimony gathered, chain of command mapped, crimes placed on calendars.
A slow machinery of accountability—cold, careful, and relentless.
The women reacted poorly to that.
Because vengeance is theatrical. You can brace for it.
Accountability is quieter. You have to live inside it.
The British—along with medical and relief personnel—were urgently focused on controlling disease and providing aid. Imperial War Museums+2nam.ac.uk+2 And yet even in that chaos, they were already thinking ahead: evidence, documentation, trials. The Bergen-Belsen trial became one of the earliest war crimes trials after World War II, beginning in September 1945. encyclopedia.ushmm.org+1
That is where the women truly began to regret things—not because they suddenly grew a conscience, but because the old protections were gone.
No more shouted orders that ended conversations.
No more uniforms that made people flinch.
Just questions.
And silence.
“You’re not animals” — what the line really meant
The line became a strange hinge in my mind.
Some guards used it later as proof of British “fairness,” as if fairness meant they deserved sympathy. But the officer hadn’t said it to comfort them. He’d said it to prevent the world from giving them a loophole.
Because “animals” do not stand trial.
Human beings do.
He wanted them to understand: you cannot escape into the fantasy that you were driven by instinct. You cannot claim you were something less than responsible.
So the next time a woman tried to say, “We were like trapped creatures,” I wrote down the officer’s phrase in the margin of my notebook and stared at it until I felt calm again.
You’re not animals.
You’re accountable.
The courtroom: where stories stop being private
When the Belsen trial opened in Lüneburg in September 1945, it wasn’t staged like a grand international spectacle. It was held in a gymnasium, practical and stark, because the war’s infrastructure didn’t have time for marble. Wikipedia+2UBTPTCLHQ+2
Dozens of defendants were tried—SS men, women guards, and prisoner-functionaries from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz contexts. Wikipedia+1
In the hallways outside the courtroom, the women looked smaller than they had on the camp grounds. Without uniforms, without whips, without the performative certainty, many appeared suddenly ordinary—like shopkeepers, like secretaries, like neighbors.
That ordinariness was, to me, the most frightening thing.
Because if they looked like ordinary women, then ordinary women could do what they did.
And if ordinary women could do what they did, then the world was not safe simply because it called itself civilized.
In court, the women tended to use two tactics:
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“I didn’t do it.”
-
“I didn’t matter.”
The first was denial. The second was a plea to be overlooked.
But the witnesses who testified—survivors who had endured the camp—spoke with a precision that can only come from lived terror. Their words described not only conditions but behavior: who struck, who shouted, who selected, who smiled.
And when the women heard those testimonies, they often reacted the same way:
They went still.
Not because they were moved.
Because they realized their private version of the story would not be the official one.
The hidden split among the women
The internet loves to imagine the female guards as a single category: cruel women, end of story.
The reality, as it appeared in statements and behavior, was messier.
Some women were openly hard. They held their faces like armor. They refused to show fear because fear felt like defeat.
Others cried constantly, not always from remorse, but from self-pity—the shock of being powerless for the first time.
A few tried to bargain with language.
“I was kind,” one insisted, over and over, as if repetition could create evidence.
I asked her, “Kind compared to what?”
She didn’t answer.
And then there were the ones who did something stranger: they blamed other women.
They pointed at the “worse” ones to make themselves look lighter by contrast. They created hierarchies of cruelty, as if cruelty could become acceptable if you were not the worst example.
That was the hidden side most people don’t consider: even inside an immoral system, people compete to feel superior.
The officer was right to refuse the animal metaphor.
Animals don’t construct moral ladders.
Humans do.
The quiet “regret” that wasn’t regret
If you expect a story where the women finally understood what they had done and broke down in remorse, you’ll be disappointed.
That did happen in some individual cases in the broad landscape of postwar testimony—human beings can surprise you—but it was not the dominant arc I saw.
What I saw most often was a different emotion that people confuse with remorse:
fear of consequences.
When the women realized the court would not be moved by tears, they began to change their stories.
They adjusted dates. They minimized roles. They pretended not to recognize faces they surely knew.
And when they were confronted with contradictions, they reacted like people who had never been forced to answer honestly before.
They became angry.
That anger was the clearest evidence of their former power. They had once lived in a world where a raised voice could solve problems. Now the raised voice only made the judge write more notes.
Why the story still matters
It matters because people keep wanting a neat moral:
“Women are kinder.”
“Women are worse.”
“Women are victims too.”
“Women are monsters.”
The truth is harder.
Women in camps like Bergen-Belsen were not a symbol. They were participants in a system designed to dehumanize others. The fact that they were women did not cancel the system’s brutality, and it did not make the system less real.
The most chilling lesson is not that these women were uniquely evil.
It’s that they were human beings who learned, step by step, that cruelty could be rewarded—and then behaved accordingly.
And the most important response is not to turn them into animals.
It is to keep them human in the record—so the record cannot be dismissed as a fairy tale about monsters.
Because monsters are rare.
Human choices are not.
The last time I heard the phrase
Months later, after a long day of testimony, I saw the same British officer in a hallway outside the courtroom. He looked older, like the job had carved a little more off him.
I told him I’d written down his phrase—the one he’d used with the women guards.
He nodded, not smiling.
“Good,” he said. “People will want to turn all of this into something easy.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He gestured toward the doors of the courtroom. “They’ll want villains that don’t resemble them. They’ll want stories they can watch from a safe distance.”
He paused, then said the last line quietly, almost to himself:
“If you keep them human, you keep the warning.”
I thought of that for a long time.
Because in the end, that’s what the phrase “You’re not animals” really was:
Not compassion.
A warning label for the future.
A refusal to let the world escape into comforting myths.
A demand that we look at what people can do—especially when uniforms, ideology, and permission combine—so we don’t pretend it can’t happen again.
And if that feels like an “untold story,” it’s only because the truth is harder to share than the rumor.
The truth requires us to admit something terrifying:
The worst systems in history weren’t run by creatures from another planet.
They were run by human beings—some of them women—who made choices, day after day.
And human beings can be stopped, judged, and remembered.
That’s the point.
That’s why the microphones stayed on.
