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This post describes the crimes, trial, and execution of Nazi euthanasia nurses, including details of their atrocities against patients. Shared solely for historical education and remembrance of their victims.
Execution of the Guillotined Female Nazi Nurses – Hilde Wernicke and Helene Wieczorek’s Crimes at Obrawalde (1947)
In the grim aftermath of World War II, as Allied tribunals prosecuted Nazi war criminals, two women stood out for their roles in the “wild euthanasia” program at Meseritz-Obrawalde (now Obrzyce, Poland) – a psychiatric hospital turned killing centre. Hilde Wernicke (born 1910, doctor) and Helene Wieczorek (born 1908, nurse) were convicted of murdering hundreds of patients through lethal injections, starvation, and neglect as part of the extended Aktion T4 – Hitler’s secret program to eliminate “life unworthy of life.”
On 15 January 1947, both were guillotined in Berlin for their crimes against humanity, marking one of the few executions of female Nazi perpetrators.
Obrawalde, from 1940–1945, was a “wild” euthanasia site – unofficial extensions of T4 where killings continued after the official program halted in 1941 due to public outcry. Over 18,000 patients (mostly women, children, and psychiatric cases) were murdered there through “medication” overdoses or neglect. Wernicke, as senior physician, selected victims and administered fatal injections; Wieczorek assisted in the killings and cover-ups.
Their actions were motivated by Nazi ideology of “racial hygiene” and “euthanasia” as “mercy,” but testimonies revealed sadism – patients begged for life as nurses mocked them.
Arrested in 1945, they were tried in the Soviet zone’s Berlin court. Survivors and staff testified to the horrors: injections of morphine-scopolamine causing slow, painful deaths; bodies stacked in morgues. Sentenced to death for “crimes against humanity,” they were executed by guillotine – a method the Nazis themselves used on thousands, now turned on them. Wernicke (36) and Wieczorek (38) were among 14 Obrawalde staff convicted; their deaths symbolised justice for the forgotten victims of Nazi medical murder.
We remember the victims of Obrawalde today not to sensationalise punishment, but to honour the thousands murdered in the name of “mercy”; to recognise that women like Wernicke and Wieczorek were active perpetrators in Nazi atrocities; and to ensure history teaches us vigilance against ideology that devalues human life.
They injected death into the vulnerable. Justice came by the blade they once wielded.
Official & reputable sources
Holocaust Historical Society – Meseritz-Obrawalde entry (crimes and arrests)
ResearchGate – Duty and ‘Euthanasia’: the Nurses of Meseritz-Obrawalde (2008, on their roles)
HAL Science – Meseritz-Obrawalde PDF (2004, on ‘wild euthanasia’)
YouTube – “Execution Of The Guillotined Female Nazi Nurses” (2024 documentary)
Trove – “GUILLOTINED FOR ASYLUM MURDERS” (1947 newspaper on executions)