Klara Opitz

Klara Opitz was a female overseer at two Nazi camps during World War II.

Klara Opitz was born to German parents in Schemhedenberg, Poland on April 16, 1909. In 1942 she came to Ravensbruck for a three week training course. She later came to Auschwitz where she became a camp overseer. There she oversaw the garden kommando in Birkenau, or Auschwitz II. In January 1945, Klara was assigned to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp near Celle, Germany. When the camp was liberated by the British Army, Klara was forced to help dump the 10,000 corpses lying around the camp grounds. From that, her and several other SS officers caught typhus and she lost all of her hair. The court handed Klara a sentence of ten years imprisonment for war crimes.