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German women's role in Nazi crimes

Discussion in 'WWII Today' started by Kai-Petri, Feb 4, 2009.

  1. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Revealed: women's role in Nazi crimes - Telegraph

    A new book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very different reality.

    "Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective conscious of the Germans for a long time," she wrote in the book, Female Perpetrators: Women under National Socialism.

    Many women were in fact used as assistants to the doctors who sterilised and murdered disabled people and as guards in the concentration camps - like the character played by Kate Winslet in her Oscar nominated role in the film The Reader.

    "The history of National Socialism has long been reduced to one that blamed men for everything," said Ms Kompisch. "This was and is the popular picture."

    "Women typed the statistics of the murdered victims of the SS Action Squads in the east, operated the radios which called up for more bullets, were invariably the secretaries - and sometimes much more - in all the Gestapo posts," she said. "And at the end of the war they tried to diminish their responsibility by saying they were just cogs in the all-male machine which gave the orders."

    Analysing pre and post-war statistics, Ms Kompisch found there were more government, private sector and military jobs to be had for women under Hitler than in peacetime.

    Most "Blockwaerts" - apartment house snoops who reported on un-Nazi activities to the party - were women, who denounced their neighbours to the Gestapo if they suspected them of being ideologically unsound or Jewish.

    The surviving files of the Gestapo in the city of Duesseldorf noted that women "try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis." "Lower-middle or working-class urban women tended to be the ones who filed reports with the Gestapo, and such reports were most likely to lead to the persecution of the denounced party if he was a member of a group considered racially inferior, like the Poles," said Ms Kompisch.

    Some 3,200 women served in the concentration camps. Female guards were generally low-to-middle class and had little or no work experience, although SS records show that some were matrons, hairdressers, tram conductors or retired teachers.
     
  2. STURMTRUPPEN

    STURMTRUPPEN Member

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    weird
     
  3. jemimas_special2

    jemimas_special2 Shepherd

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    Now I wonder how this came about.... Did the women willingly join in this effort?, or was this a mandatory requirement? Great article

    Mark
     
  4. brndirt1

    brndirt1 Saddle Tramp

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    Their employement in the Gestapo role as informers was purely voluntary I'm sure. Paula Wolfe (Hitler's little sister) employed that tactic so as to purchase a mountain villa she had her eye on, which the owners wouldn't sell. She reported them as anti-Nazi, and poof, vacant house which brother Adolf promply "bought" for her to live in.

    As to SS secretary work, my best friend's Mom back in Central Montana was an ex-SS secretary. She was a war widow (Heer officer husband died in the east in 1942), who supported her crippled Father, and younger sister. She got a good paying job at Buchenwald doing clerk/typist work, and to this day Gertrude's eyes will well with tears if you mention the camps.

    She was never able to do anything about what she knew full well was going on in the KZ, she need her job and preferred level ration card more than anything else. I don't know how voluntary that type of service can be. She wasn't conscripted into it, but her Father's pension just wouldn't stretch for all three of them (her Mother died years before the war started), and neither would other civilian jobs she could find.

    There certainly were other females whose sadism is well documented. Irma Griese (another Nazi with whom I share a birthdate, Oct. 7th), in the female side of the KZs, became known as "the Angel of Death," "the Blond Beast," "the Queen of Auschwitz" and/or "the Angel of Hell." All by the tender age of 25. She dropped through the trap door of the gallows post-war.

    And let’s not forget Juana Bormann (no relation to Martin Bormann), the sadistic SS female guard who served in the death camp Auschwitz as well as the transit camp Bergen-Belsen; who also dropped through the trap, but at age 42. Or how about Herta Bothe who was charged with and convicted of having committed numerous lesser war crimes. At the Bergen-Belsen Trial she got imprisonment for 10 years, and served it all.

    How about Ilse Koch; "The Bitch of Buchenwald", she of lampshade fame who committed suicide while in prison. Or how about Maria Mandel, the chief-guard of Birkenau women's camp. She was tried and convicted on December 22, 1947. For her participation in the camp atrocities, Maria Mandel was condemned to death as a war criminal by the Supreme People's Court in Crakow and subsequently executed.

    And let’s not neglect Dr. Herta Oberheuser, who was the only female defendant in the medical trial. She received a 20 year sentence but was paroled in April 1952 and became a "family doctor" in West Germany. After some un-named indiscretions, her license to practice medicine was revoked in 1958, and she died alone and destitute.

    It (atrocity) wasn't a male perview entirely, and I am sure there were more than those I remembered.
     
  5. jemimas_special2

    jemimas_special2 Shepherd

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    Well done Clint. I appreciate the feedback! This definitely helps :)
     
  6. LRusso216

    LRusso216 Graybeard Staff Member

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    It has always seemed odd that there is little mention of the role of German women. I've heard of a few, as Clint mentioned, but when you think about it, there had to be lots of women involved as secretaries or in other "women's" jobs, just to keep the whole system running. Thanks, Kai, for the interesting article.
     
  7. brndirt1

    brndirt1 Saddle Tramp

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    Hey Mark, here is a link to the "ladies" I mentioned. I couldn't find it in my "well organized" filing system until now!

    Goto:

    World War 2 - Ilse Koch

    There is another sub-link in there with the "lampshades" and other gross outs.
     
  8. jemimas_special2

    jemimas_special2 Shepherd

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    Ilse Koch

    Now this lady takes the cake, her role in Nazi crimes was to the extreme!


    Mark
     

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