Various
debates surround the definition of women perpetrators in the Third Reich. The issue of female perpetrators was a topic
which was hardly investigated initially. The women who were accused of
committing atrocities used their gender to argue that due to their inferior
status men had exploited them thereby portraying themselves as hapless victims
in a male dominated system. Alas in the courtroom trials and through the media
the Nazi female perpetrators were
“stereotyped and demonised as complete
deviations from femininity and exceptional ‘female brutes’, e.g., Ilse Koch,
‘the witch from Buchenwald’, Carmen Maria Mory, ‘the devil’ of Ravensbr¨uck, or
Herta Oberheuser, ‘the sadist of Ravensbr¨uck”[1]
As
a result of such characterizations large numbers of female perpetrators went
un-noticed because the rest of society was able to represent itself as ordinary
and blameless citizens[2].
Subsequently however an increasing awareness into the issue of women and the
Holocaust opened up more research into the topic of female perpetrators and
created a dispute among feminist historians on the different approaches by
which to interpret this topic[3].
There
are three approaches which have dealt with female perpetrators in National
Socialism. Firstly there is the theory that both men and women shared the
responsibility as joint perpetrators during the Holocaust[4].
The author Claudia Koonz advocated this idea but she implicated not only the
women who belonged to Nazi organizations and were the wives of SS men in her
classification of female perpetrators but she also included ordinary mothers
and wives in Nazi Germany on the basis that they it was they who created the
impression of normality in their homes. By doing this she argued that “wives
gave individual men who confronted daily murder a safe place where they could
be respected for what they were, not what they did”[5].
Koonz’s description of female perpetrators was found to be problematic and she
was criticised for such a classification but as a result of her views
significant questions were raised about the role women played in Nazi Germany[6]. The
Nazi definition of the home itself was problematic as during the time of the
Second World War women were expected to conform to their traditional role in
the home, yet home was redefined by one woman writer as anyplace where the
nation of Germany required the services of women[7]. Gisela
Bock however chose to absolve wives and mothers of liability for the crimes of
the Nazis. She felt that it was the women who fulfilled non-traditional roles
outside the home who were responsible for Nazi crimes[8].
However the most significant method by which to approach this topic is to
consider women as implementers of National Socialist policies on their own
incentive and not simply conformers to the strategies of men[9].
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| Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp |
Research
done on concentration camps and the euthanasia killings made the role that
women played in such crimes more visible. Directly or indirectly women who were
nurses, doctors and midwives carried out the murder of innocent persons.
Infamous concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau and
Bergen-Belsen and camps such as Ravensbr¨uck, specifically created for women,
employed women in roles ranging from camp guards to cooks. It is estimated that 10 percent, which was a
total of 3500 camp guards, were women. Such individuals terrorized and murdered
victims[10].
They were not forced to do so and the evidence of a Jewish survivor Rena
Kornreich Gelissen highlights the fact that female perpetrators had the space
to make their own decisions and did not simply follow orders. Rena Gelissen was
among the first transport of women to arrive in Auschwitz and the only survivor
from the first transport to have written about her experience. In her
recollections of life at the camp she describes an incident where an SS woman
threw her cap over a boundary in the camp which the inmates were prohibited
from crossing. The SS woman had a German Shepard dog with her and she called a
young Jewish girl of about 20 years of age to go and pick up the cap. When the
young girl crossed the boundary the SS woman let the dog loose and said “go,
get her”. The dog tore the girl apart and Rena recalled that the SS woman had a
smile of satisfaction on her face. Rena said that she recollected this story in
order to emphasize the fact that there was nobody standing there and giving
orders. The women perpetrators were not simply passive but active participants
in the process.[11].
In
the women’s camp at Auschwitz among the SS women supervisors Margot Drexler and
Maria Mandel are said to have been renowned for their brutal treatment of the
female prisoners. Such viciousness was extraordinary even by the standards of
Auschwitz[12].
Gudrun Schwarz, like Koonz, claims that the 240,000 women married to SS men
were direct perpetrators due to the stable emotional and domestic setting they
provided for their husbands who committed atrocities. Certain wives of Gestapo
and SS men voluntarily participated in killings and female perpetrators were as
efficient as their male colleagues in ensuring that Nazi ideology was
implemented[13].
[1] Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann. Ordinary People as Mass murderers, Great
Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p.29
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid, p.41
[4] Christina Herkommer, ‘ Women
under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action and the Issue of Gender’ in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian
W. Szejnmann (eds). Ordinary People as
Mass murderers, Great Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, p.103
[5] Vandana Joshi, Gender and Power in the Third Reich, female
denouncers and the Third Reich, Great Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003,
p.5-6
[6] Ibid, p.6
[7] Charu Gupta, P’olitics of
Gender: Women in Nazi Genocide’, Economic
and Political Weekly, vol.26.17 (1991) p.43
[8] Ibid.
[9] Herkommer, p.103
[10] Jensen and Szejnmann, p.42
[11] Part IV: Rena’s Promise, A talk with the 716 Woman in Auschwitz from
the first transport of women, dir. unknown, Salem College, 1994.
[12] Yisrael Gutman and Michael
Berenbaum. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1998 P.396
[13] Szejnmann, p.42
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