Erna Dorn

Erna Dorn (17 July 1911 – 1 October 1953) was a victim of the politicised justice system in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

There is an alternative birth date of 28 August 1913.

From 1932 she was working with the Königsberg police department where, in one submission, she states she was employed as a typist and in another submission that she was employed as an assistant police officer.

She also stated, according to interrogation records, that between 1934 and 1935 she was a Nazi Party member, but there is no independent confirmation of this.

(An earlier marriage, between 1935 and 1943, to a Communist activist called Erich Brüser, seems to have been another fiction. )

Erna Dorn was born in East Prussia which at that time was part of Germany.

An earlier statement, that she herself was arrested by the Gestapo, along with her father and her husband, Erich Brüser, in June 1940 and thereafter been held in a succession of concentration camps, had disappeared in later reports.

Although she was executed as Erna Dorn, no records have surfaced identifying her by that name from before 1945.

Also, between 1945 and 1949 she was married, and may be identified in sources by her married name as Erna Gewald.

(Since 1945 the part of East Prussia in which she was born has been redesignated as the Kaliningrad Oblast and has now become a - physically separated - part of Russia.) She was either born in 1911 in Tilsit or else in 1913 in Königsberg.

She turned up in Halle in 1945, apparently arriving from the direction of Czechoslovakia, in the context of the massive ethnic cleansing of 1944/45.

A forged release document purportedly from the concentration camp at Hertine is dated 12 May 1945 and identifies her as Erna Brüser, born Erna Scheffler, the daughter of a railway inspector called Artur Scheffler.

She joined the Communist Party in 1945.

She convinced a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and "fighter against Fascism", Max Gewald whom she married in December 1945.

Following the contentious merger in April 1946 that created what would become the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship, she was one of many thousands who lost no time in signing their party membership over to the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED).

She must have been convincing as a concentration camp survivor.

Shortly afterwards the couple moved into their own two room apartment in which, from March 1946, she is recorded as having lived as a "housewife".

Things began to unravel in August 1948 when the trial opened in Halle of Gertrud Rabestein, notorious as a Ravensbrück concentration camp guard and dog handler.

Dorn was called upon to testify.

She was probably concerned that her carefully crafted false identity, as a Ravensbrück survivor, might be uncovered if she were to appear in court.

She therefore asked to be excused from testifying on the grounds that she was pregnant.

The pregnancy lasted two years.

In addition to enabling her to avoid the trial of Gertrud Rabestein, it entitled her to various special allowances in a land that, following the slaughter of war, was desperately short of people of working and child-bearing age.

However, the duration of her pregnancy was eventually noticed.

The Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime ("Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" / VVN) produced a report stating that "[Dorn] excused herself from the duty [to testify] and for two years presented herself, in writing and through acting, stuffed up with pillows, as a pregnant and thereby silenced woman".

The VVN seems to have played a lead role in building a case against her following the two-year pregnancy.

Surviving sources depend heavily on court files containing records of investigations and researches created during the four years prior to her execution, between 1949 and 1953.

Her testimony during this period appears to have become ever more outlandish.

There are also suggestions that some of what appears in these East German official records is uncorroborated and might be based on statements inaccurately attributed to Dorn by interrogators.

Two alternative birth names that appeared were Erna Kaminski and Erna Brüser.

Towards the end she came up with more (apparently fictitious) identities for herself.

For the next six years she lived in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (after October 1949 relaunched as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany), not as a former Nazi supporter or official, but as a surviving victim of Nazi persecution.

According to later statements recorded during the 1950s, from the end of 1934 or early in 1935 she was working for the Gestapo after which, in 1941, she was sent to work in the political department at Ravensbrück concentration camp.

She is believed to be the only female to have been sentenced and executed in the aftermath of the East German uprising of 1953.

According to records she claimed to have worked in the political department at Ravensbrück concentration camp and to have been responsible for the deaths of between eighty and ninety inmates.

She was sentenced to death on 22 June 1953 by the district court at Halle, found guilty of war mongering and boycott incitement against the German Democratic Republic: she was executed by guillotine two months later.

On 22 March 1994 the conviction and sentence were posthumously revoked.

There is much that remains unclear about Erna Dorn.

Her father, Arthur Kaminsky, was a clerical worker who later, according to research published in 1994, may have worked for the Gestapo during the 1930s, possibly towards the end of that decade as a senior Gestapo officer in Königsberg.

Erna attended an all-girls' secondary school and then embarked on an apprenticeship with the Chamber of Commerce in Königsberg.