Video: Buchenwald Witches: Women who served as overseers in Nazi Germany concentration camps
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated in January 1945. Most of the guards who worked in the camps were later convicted and imprisoned or executed, but some still managed to escape punishment. At the same time, when speaking of warders, they most often mean men, but according to documents in the entire concentration camp system, out of 55,000 warders, about 3700 were women.
About a thousand female wardens were American troops during 1945, as soon as their guilt was proven. Since it was not possible to conduct research on each case, some of these women managed to escape punishment.
Later, in the course of investigations of crimes in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, it turned out that women took an active part in almost all the brutal actions on the part of warders and camp workers. And if the Soviet troops were extremely categorical in their decisions - in those camps that were liberated by the Soviet army, almost all the warders were killed on the spot, and a few of them were sent to concentration camps in Siberia - then in those camps that were liberated by friendly troops, almost all camp workers managed to avoid such a harsh fate.
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Moreover, many managed to deceive the investigation and escape, later changing their names and never being brought before a court. The warders arrested by the American army were held during the investigation in Dachau, in which they temporarily organized a prison after the end of the war.
The women who served as overseers (German: Aufseherin) were mostly from the middle and lower strata of society, without education and often without any other work experience. The main thing when accepting them for this job at one time was to prove on their part that they support and love the Third Reich quite fiercely.
Some of the women who worked as overseers in the concentration camps came straight from the organization of the League of German Girls, in which there was an intensive propaganda of the ideas of Nazism. However, according to the documents, these girls were only volunteers and were part of the so-called "SS help" group, which later allowed them in court to argue their innocence by the fact that they were not officially members of the SS, unlike their male colleagues who worked in concentration camps.
Regardless of their official position, some of the women-supervisors, according to the testimony, were distinguished by such a strong propensity for cruelty and sadism that against their background the men working there faded.
Initially, women overseers appeared in 1939 at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, located near Berlin and planned as a "guarded detention camp for women." However, three years later, due to the increase in prisoners in other camps, women were also recruited in places where previously only men were employed - in Auschvi and Majdanek (near Lublin). From that moment on, women began to appear more and more often as overseers, as it was believed that they were doing an excellent job with this work, while men were better off going to the front.
One of the most famous women who served in the concentration camps in Germany was Ilsa Koch, the wife of the head of the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camp Karl-Otto Koch. Because of her incredible cruelty, she was called nothing less than the "witch of Buchenwald."
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Another such famous warden was Clara Kunig from Ravensbrück, her behavior was even set as an example for other women who worked in concentration camps.
Despite a fairly significant number of women warders who managed to escape punishment, most of them ended up on trial, during which they were charged and sentenced - from a year in prison to the death penalty.
We also advise you to look 20 historical photographs of prisonersrescued from the Death Train at Dachau.
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