Read e-book online Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek PDF

By Elissa Mailänder, Patricia Szobar

ISBN-10: 1611861705

ISBN-13: 9781611861709

How did “ordinary women,” like their male opposite numbers, turn into able to brutal violence through the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder examines the day-by-day paintings of twenty-eight ladies hired via the SS to supervise prisoners within the focus and demise camp Majdanek/Lublin in Poland. Many woman SS overseers in Majdanek perpetrated violence and terrorized prisoners not just whilst ordered to take action but additionally on their lonesome initiative. The social order of the focus camp, mixed with person propensities, formed a microcosm during which violence turned endemic to workaday existence. The author’s research of Nazi files, court docket testimony, memoirs, and movie interviews illuminates the guards’ social backgrounds, careers, and factors in addition to their daily habit in the course of unfastened time and at the “job,” as they supervised prisoners on paintings aspect and within the telephone blocks, performed roll calls, and “selected” women and girls for demise within the gasoline chambers. Scrutinizing interactions and conflicts between woman guards, relatives with male colleagues and superiors, and inner hierarchies, girl SS Guards and Workaday Violence exhibits how paintings workouts, strain to “resolve problems,” fabric gratification, and Nazi propaganda stressing guards’ roles in “creating a brand new order” heightened girl overseers’ id with Nazi guidelines and radicalized their behavior.

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Additional info for Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944

Sample text

For example, how did former camp staff present and justify their own actions, and what arguments did they draw upon? By placing these statements in their cultural and historical context, we can often obtain glimpses of how the events being related were perceived at the time. A discursive analysis also offers the possibility of reconstructing the internal logic and code of values of the female guards and SS men. 102 This study will thus combine historical and ethnographic methodologies to gain insight into the daily lives and the practice of violence by the SS staff at the Majdanek camp.

93 Regarding the names of the former male and female camp guards, the sources often contain a variety of different spellings (for example, Muhsfeldt vs. Mussfeldt, or Herta vs. Hertha Ehlert). In addition, many of the women married, divorced and/or remarried after the war. For this reason, many of the individuals reappear in the source documents under new names (Frau Ehlert became Frau Naumann, and Hermine Braunsteiner became Mrs. Ryan). To avoid confusion, I have chosen to use the maiden names for the women throughout, and to spell the names of all SS members in the body of the text in uniform fashion.

In so doing, I do not strive for coherence, but rather aim to uncover the many layers of meaning, and even the contradictions, they reveal. These contradictions are central to the analysis, and serve as an expression of the manifold histories that underpin the broader narrative accounts. For all my sources, I do not strive primarily for coherence. Instead, I seek to uncover the many layers of meaning, and even the contradictions, the different types of sources reveal. These ambivalences are central to the analysis, and serve as an expression of the manifold histories that underpin the broader narrative accounts.

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Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 by Elissa Mailänder, Patricia Szobar


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