Johanna Langefeld (5 March 1900, Kupferdreh, Germany – 26 January 1974) was a German female guard and supervisor at three Nazi concentration camps: Lichtenburg, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. Early life Born in Kupferdreh (now Essen, Germany), Johanna Langefeld was brought up in a Lutheran, nationalistic family. Her father was a blacksmith. In 1924, she moved to Mülheim and married Wilhelm Langefeld, who died in 1926 of lung disease. In 1928, Langefeld fell pregnant with another man, left him soon afterward, and moved to Düsseldorf, where her son was born that August. Langefeld was unemployed until age 34, when she began to teach domestic economy in an establishment of the city of Neuss. From 1935 onwards, she worked as a guard in a so-called Arbeitsanstalt (working institution) in Brauweiler, which was, in fact, a prison for prostitutes, unemployed and homeless women, and other so called "antisocial" women, who were then later imprisoned in concentration camps. From 1937 on, Langefeld was a member of the Nazi party. Camp work In March 1938, Langefeld applied for a job as a camp guard in the first Schutzstaffel (SS) concentration camp for women in Lichtenburg. After one year, she became the female superintendent of this camp, where she stayed until the camp population was transferred to Ravensbrück in May 1939. She was in charge of the selections in Ravensbrück during the so-called "14f13” murder campaign. In March 1942, Langefeld was assigned to build a new women's camp in Auschwitz. There, she selected prisoners for the gas chamber. Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, recalled his contact with Johanna Langefeld as follows:The chief female supervisor of the period, Frau Langefeld, was in no way capable of coping with the situation, yet she refused to accept any instructions given her by the leader of the protective custody camp. Acting on my own initiative, I simply put the women's camp under his jurisdiction. During the visit of Heinrich Himmler on 18 July 1942, Langefeld tried to get him to annul this order. In fact, Rudolf Höss admitted after the war that “the Reichsführer SS absolutely refused” his order and that he wished “a women's camp to be commanded by a woman”. Himmler ordered that Langefeld should stay in charge of the women's camp and that in the future, no SS man should enter the female camp. That month, the Auschwitz women's camp was moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau