Sunday, August 16, 2020

Nazi Female Guards: Loyal and Merciless


From DW:

The Austrian Maria Mandl was exactly what the self-proclaimed proponents of the "master race" wanted their female guards to be: loyal and merciless.

Someone like Mandl could go places under the perverse hierarchy of the Nazis. In 1942, after three years in Ravensbrück, she was transferred to work at the death camp Auschwitz. There, she created the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz that was forced to play music during prisoner transports and executions.

In 1940, after World War II had begun, the female guards became subsumed under Hitler's elite death squad the SS (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squadron in English.) The freshly designed and updated exhibition, "In the SS's Service," first conceived in 2004, does not shirk from details. The location of the exhibition was also carefully considered: The old barracks for female camp guards, right next to the former camp. Only a wall and barbed wire separated the perpetrators from their victims. (Read more.)
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