Abstract
Providing administrative support for the Nazis, the SS-Helferinnen, the Nachricthenhelferinnen and the secretaries were united by the nature of the work, their gender and their race. Yet there were pronounced differences between the war-time experiences of each group, evident in their route to employment, the locations they were deployed to and the expectations placed upon them. One theme holds true for all groups, however: the contribution that the women could make as administrators was important, but they were more highly valued for the contribution they could make as mothers. Century argues against an overarching categorisation of the female administrators of the Nazis as either victims of the regime or perpetrators for it; the multiplicity of narratives means that each administrator should be considered in light of their individual contribution. Century does show, however, that the vast majority of the female administrators knew about the Holocaust, were contributing towards it through their administration and took no action to prevent it occurring.
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Notes
- 1.
Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.4–5.
- 2.
See Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), Christina Herkommer, ‘Women under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action and the Issue of Gender’, translated by Richard Littlejohn, in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, eds., Ordinary People as Mass Murderers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986) and Gisela Bock, ‘Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany. Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders’ in Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
- 3.
Jane Caplan, ‘Gender and the Concentration Camps’ in Jane Caplan and Nicholas Wachsmann, eds., Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), p.98. See also, Ulrike Weckel and Edgar Wolfrum, ‘NS-Prozesse und ihre öffentliche Resonanz’ in Ulrike Weckel and Edgar Wolfrum, Bestien und Befehlsempfänger: Frauen und Manner in NS-Prozessen Nach 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhöck and Ruprecht, 2003).
- 4.
See, for example, Jack Morrison, Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishing, 2000), and Helga Schneider, Let Me Go. My Mother and the SS (London: Vintage Random House, 2005).
- 5.
See, for example, David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, New edition, 1996), Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler. Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Peter Longerich, ≫Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!≪: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2006).
- 6.
Gellately, Backing Hitler, Longerich, ≫Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!≪, Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), and Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (London: John Murray, 2005).
- 7.
Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995), pp.130ff.
- 8.
Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp.1, 137–138.
- 9.
Jill Stephenson, ‘Inclusion: building the national community in propaganda and practice’ in Jane Caplan, ed., Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.99.
- 10.
Lisa Pine, Hitler’s ‘National Community’ Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (London: Hodder Education, 2007), p.229.
- 11.
Gudrun Schwarz, ‘“During Total War, We Girls Want to Be Where We Can Really Accomplish Something” What Women Do in Wartime’ in Omer Bartov, Atina Grossman, and Mary Nolan, eds., Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 2002), pp.121–137.
- 12.
Fritzsche, Peter, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p.18.
- 13.
Melissa Müller, ‘Confronting Guilt’ in Melissa Müller, ed., Until the Final Hour, translated by Anthea Bell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), p.241.
- 14.
See, for example, Henrik Eberle, ed., Briefe an Hitler. Ein Volk schreibt seinem Führer. Unbekannte Dokumente aus Moskauer Archiven (Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe, 2007) and Helmut Ulshöfer, ed., Liebesbriefe an Adolf Hitler: Briefe in den Tod (Frankfurt am Main: VAS, 1994) and Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘“Dear Adolf!”: Locating Love in Nazi Germany’ in Luisa Passerini, Lilianna Ellena and Alexander C.T.Geppert, eds., New Dangerous Liaisons. Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010).
- 15.
It should be noted that German men were equally fascinated with Hitler, demonstrated by the throng of men and women who lined streets to greet Hitler, wrote letters to him, and signed up to serve him, see for example, Christoph Kuehberger, ‘Sexualisierter Rausch in der Diktatur: Geschlecht und Masse im italienischen Faschismus und deutschen Nationalsozialismus’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51, no.10 (2003).
- 16.
For more information, see for example, Inge Scholl, Dorothee Solle, The White Rose: Munich, 1942–1943, translated by Arthur R. Schultz (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983)and Frank McDonough, Sophie Scholl (Stroud: The History Press, 2010).
- 17.
Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage [The Final Days], an Oscar nominated film, released in 2005, grossed more than $10.8 million dollars worldwide, and won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, the European Film Awards and the German Film Awards.
- 18.
See Martin Gilbert, The Righteous. The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (London: Transworld Publishers, 2002), pp.38–39 and Irene Opdyke, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer (New York: Knopf Books, 1999). A Broadway play based on her book was produced in 2009.
- 19.
Patricia Hebrerer, Children During the Holocaust (Lanham: AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011), pp.252–253.
- 20.
Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp.108–109.
- 21.
Corey Ross, Pamela Swett, Fabrice d’Almeida, eds., Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 22.
Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 23.
Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism. Memory and Morality in Twentieth-century Germany (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), p.1.
- 24.
Herzog, Sex After Fascism, p.13.
- 25.
See, for example, James Walter, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2007), Richard Sonnenfeldt, Witness to Nuremberg (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006), or Eric Zillmer, The Quest for the Nazi Personality (New Jersey: Routledge, 1995).
- 26.
Hans Askenay, Are We All Nazis? (Secaucus, New Jersey, Lyle Stuart Inc, 1978).
- 27.
Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, eds., Ordinary People as Mass Murderers (Chippenham and Eastbourne, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.1.
- 28.
Philip G. Zimbardo, Ebbe B. Ebbesen, Christina Maslach, eds., Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behaviour (Massachusetts and California, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1977), p.3.
- 29.
Lawrence L. Langer, ‘Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies’, in Dalia Ofer and Leonore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p.362.
- 30.
Gisela Bock, ‘Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany. Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders’ in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, p.95.
- 31.
Bock, ‘Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany’, p.94.
- 32.
Kühne, Belonging and Genocide, pp.1, 137–138.
- 33.
Müller, ‘Confronting Guilt’ in Müller, ed., Until the Final Hour, p.216.
- 34.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage International, 1989), p.67. For a detailed exploration of this, see Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2005).
- 35.
Koonz, Mothers, pp.418–419.
- 36.
Herkommer, ‘Women’ in Jensen and Szejnmann, eds., Ordinary People, p.110.
- 37.
International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946, Volume XVII (Nuremberg, 1948).
- 38.
Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, translated by Joel Golb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.48.
- 39.
See, for example, Omer Bartov, ‘Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich’, in Christian Leitz, The Third Reich The Essential Readings (London: Blackwell, 1999), pp.129–150, Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon, 1989), pp.58–60 and Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 2006), notably chapter 5, The Legend of the Wehrmacht’s ‘Clean Hands’.
- 40.
Dr Hugo Milne, quoted in Jean Ritchie, Myra Hindley (London, Angus and Robertson Publishers, 1988), p.290.
- 41.
Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival. The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (New York: State University of New York Press, 1982).
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Century, R. (2017). Conclusion. In: Female Administrators of the Third Reich. Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54893-1_9
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