Emma Zimmer

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Emma Zimmer was a female overseer at a Nazi concentration camp for two years during the war.

Emma Zimmer was born as Emma Mezel on August 14, 1888 in Schluechtern, Germany. On June 1, 1943, she was granted permission to become a female overseer at Ravensbrück. She served as a guard in the Ravensbrück bunker, and was known in the camp as a brutal and very sadistic woman guard. In January 1945, the Nazis dismissed Emma from her camp service because of either her advanced age (female auxiliary only accepted women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five) or because of chronic alcoholism. The Germans had an SS canteen in each camp, where SS officers would have tremendous eating and drinking bouts. They drank so much that sometimes they would go home with each other and wake up not remembering whom they spent the night with. Some SS men and women became alcoholics, especially at the end of the war when they knew the Allies would soon be liberating the camps. Emma Zimmer stood at the seventh Ravensbrück Trial and was sentenced to death for her war crimes. The British government executed her on September 20, 1948.