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Alice Orlowski was born on 30 September 1903 in Berlin, then part of the German Empire. The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939. In 1941 Orlowski was deployed in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Opened in May 1939, Ravensbrück was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
In October 1942, Alice Orlowski was selected as one of the guards to be posted at the Majdanek camp located near Lublin, in German-occupied Poland. During the entire period of its existence, the Majdanek camp was under construction. Construction on the camp began in October 1941 with the arrival of about 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war. However, most of them were too weak to work and virtually all were dead by February 1942. Majdanek primarily served to concentrate Jews whom the Germans spared temporarily for forced labor. It occasionally functioned as a killing site to murder victims who could not be killed at other killing centers such as Belzec, Sobibor or Treblinka
Between 80,000 - 120,000 people perished in Majdanek between October 1941 and July 1944 when the camp was operational.
When the Soviet army liberated Majdanek, Orlowski was already serving in the Płaszów concentration camp where she had been sent in April 1944.
The Płaszów camp was established in 1942 under the authority of the SS and police leaders in Krakow. It was initially a forced-labor camp for Jews. The original site of the camp included two Jewish cemeteries. From time to time the SS enlarged the camp and it reached its maximum size in 1944, the same year that it became a concentration camp. Until that time, most of the camp guards were Ukrainian police auxiliaries chosen from among the Soviet soldiers in German prisoner-of-war camps and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Lublin.
In the camp, Alice Orlowski was commonly known and nicknamed by the prisoners as ‘Chłopczyca’ or Tomboy for her masculine physical appearance.
Orlowski was an alcoholic, liked vodka and often seemed insane. Sometimes she worked herself into a frenzy and tortured prisoners whom she filled with terror.
As the Soviet army approached in the summer of 1944, the Germans prepared to dismantle the Płaszów camp. The SS transferred prisoners to the other concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Others were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center and murdered there. Among the guards deployed from Plaszow to Auschwitz was also Alice Orlowski. When she arrived at the camp her reputation as a brutal sadist preceded her. According to Józefa Woźniak, who served at the Auschwitz from 1942 until its evacuation in 1945, Orlowski was dreaded at the camp because of her cruelty and the maltreatment of prisoners. She beat prisoners either with a rod she carried or with her hand, on the face, or alternatively she kicked people with her black high boots
After the war ended in May 1945, Orlowski was captured by Soviet forces and extradited to Poland to stand trial for the crimes she had committed during the war. She was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began on the 24th of November 1947 and lasted one month. Her changed behavior in the end of the war saved her from being hung and unlike her Nazi comrade Maria Mandl who received a death sentence, Orlowski was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In the end however she was released in 1957 after serving only 10 years and she then moved to West Germany.
In 1973, while working in Cologne, Orlowski made a remark complaining that only "half the work" had been completed, making reference to the extermination of Jews. As a result, she was arrested, charged with making anti-Semitic statements and a West German court found her guilty of hate speech sentencing her to 10 months in prison, of which she served 8 months.
In 1975, Orlowski was arrested for a second time by the West German authorities, this time for crimes committed in Majdanek. When she was facing the Third Majdanek trial and justice was about to be served, Orlowski died of natural casues on 21 May 1976. She was 72 years old. There were no tears shed for Alice Orlowski.
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