Women at Work: SS Aufseherinnen and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust by 2014 Shelly M
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Women at Work: SS Aufseherinnen and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust By 2014 Shelly M. Cline Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Nathan Wood ________________________________ Fran Sternberg ________________________________ Eve Levin ________________________________ Victor Bailey ________________________________ Leslie Tuttle ________________________________ James Woelfel Date Defended: November 18, 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Shelly M. Cline certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Women at Work: SS Aufseherinnen and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust ________________________________ Chairperson: Nathan Wood Date approved: December 16, 2014 ii Abstract: Grossly outnumbered by their male colleagues and largely forgotten by history, SS women experienced and implemented the Holocaust in gendered ways. SS Aufseherinnen guarded women imprisoned within the Nazi concentration camp system. Within this system, they devised strategies to conform to the prevailing male gender norms which governed camp culture. This work examines their training, their camp experience, their postwar trials, and the use of their images in postwar culture. These were ordinary women, but their experience was marked at every stage by their gendered otherness. iii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 Background ................................................................................................................................. 2 Methodology ............................................................................................................................... 4 Historiography ............................................................................................................................ 7 CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................................................................... 16 Welcome to the SS Aufseherinnen: Recruitment, Application, and Training .............................. 16 Help Wanted ............................................................................................................................. 17 Applications, Please .................................................................................................................. 19 Salary and Benefits ................................................................................................................... 24 Welcome to the Aufseherinnen ................................................................................................. 24 Training ..................................................................................................................................... 27 Acclimating to Violence ........................................................................................................... 42 Opportunities for Promotion ..................................................................................................... 43 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 47 CHAPTER TWO .......................................................................................................................... 50 Die Dienstzeit: The Workplace ..................................................................................................... 50 Background on Birkenau: Workplace History .......................................................................... 51 Atmosphere of Arrival .............................................................................................................. 57 Challenges of the Workplace .................................................................................................... 59 Kitchens .................................................................................................................................... 67 Moving around .......................................................................................................................... 73 Promotion and Leadership ........................................................................................................ 75 Gender and the Workplace........................................................................................................ 80 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 88 CHAPTER THREE ...................................................................................................................... 90 A Crucible: Trials and Justice ....................................................................................................... 90 Overview of Postwar Trials ...................................................................................................... 92 The Belsen Trial ........................................................................................................................ 97 Gender Matters........................................................................................................................ 100 Poor Navigation ...................................................................................................................... 104 Media Attention ...................................................................................................................... 112 The German Press ................................................................................................................... 118 Verdicts ................................................................................................................................... 119 iv Appeals ................................................................................................................................... 122 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 124 Ladies First.......................................................................................................................... 125 CHAPTER FOUR ....................................................................................................................... 126 Irma, Ilsa, Elsa: Recasting the Aufseherin .................................................................................. 126 Historiography of Holocaust Film .......................................................................................... 127 “Stalag” Fiction ....................................................................................................................... 129 “Nazisploitation”..................................................................................................................... 131 Out of the Ashes ...................................................................................................................... 140 The Reader .............................................................................................................................. 143 Playing for Time ..................................................................................................................... 150 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 157 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 161 Paradox of Ordinary Women ...................................................................................................... 161 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 169 v INTRODUCTION In the summer of 2010, I arrived in Ravensbrück, the German concentration camp located northeast of Berlin. The camp maintains much of its wartime form, yet has shed the most overt signs of its grim past. The buildings pictured below once served as the barracks for the female camp guards called in German Aufseherinnen, and today they house a youth hostel.1 Where the SS once lived and worked, children now play soccer and campers ride bikes. 2 I, too, stayed in these barracks and inhabited the space of the women I came to the camp to study. Staying in the rooms that had been theirs, walking their routes to and from camp, and seeing the same views from my windows presented me with an opportunity to normalize a geography and a past reality usually shrouded in the bizarre and monstrous. Sitting on my small porch writing emails home, I wondered about the letters they too must have written. Pausing to find my next sentence, I looked up, then wondered also, what filled their thoughts in the spaces 1 The term Aufseherinnen translates as overseer. 2The photo on the left shows two of the 12 buildings that once housed the Aufseherinnen. The photo on the right is a view of the “SS village” from the front door of the former SS administration building, which now houses the archive of Ravensbrück. Directly behind the administration building is the former concentration camp itself. And to the left, just out of view is the small lake that bordered the camp and the