“They are looking for healthy workers from among 27 Y 40 years for a military location ”, it read in a job advertisement in a German newspaper at 1944.
It promised the selected women good wages and free food, lodging and clothing.
What is not mentioned is that the clothing is a SS uniform .
And that the “military site” was the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp.
The precarious wooden barracks for female prisoners disappeared a long time ago.
All that’s left is an eerily empty rocky field about 86 kilometers north of Berlin.
What does follow in foot are eight attractive villas of solid construction with wooden shutters and balconies.
They are a Nazi version of the decade of 1940 of the medieval German huts.
This is where the guards lived, some with their children.
From the balconies they could see a forest and a beautiful lake.
“It was the most beautiful moment of my life “, said a former guard, decades later.
But from their bedrooms they would also have seen the row of chained prisoners and the chimneys of the gas chamber.
“Many visitors who come to the monument ask about these women and yet there are not so many questions about the men who worked in this field,” he says Andrea Genest, dire curator of the memorial museum in Ravensbrück, while showing me where the women lived.
“People don’t like to think that women can be so cruel.”
Many of the young women came from poor families , dropped out of school early and had few career opportunities.
A job in a concentration camp meant more wages tall, comfortable accommodation and financial independence.
“It was more attractive than working in a factory,” says Genest.
Many had been indoctrinated early in Nazi youth groups and believed in Hitler’s ideology.
“They felt that they were supporting society and doing something against the enemy, ”he said.
Hell and comforts home
Inside one of the houses, a new exhibition shows photos of what the female guards did in their free time.
Most of them were in their twenties, they were pretty and wore fashionable hairstyles.
The images show them smiling while having coffee and cake at home.
Or laughing, arms intertwined, as they stroll through the nearby forest with their dogs.
The scenes seem innocent, until you notice the insignia of the SS in women’s clothing and remember that those same Alsatian dogs were used to torment people in concentration camps.
Some 3, 500 women worked aban as Nazi concentration camp guards, and they all started in Ravensbrück.
Many ended up working later in death camps like Auschwitz- Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen.
“They were horrible people”, Selma van de Perre tells me, from 105 years, by phone from her home in London.
Van de Perre was a Dutch Jewish resistance fighter who was imprisoned in Ravensbrück as political prisoner.
“They probably liked working there because it gave them power. It gave them a lot of power over the prisoners. Some prisoners were mistreated. Hit ”.
Selma worked clandestinely in the Netherlands when were occupied by the Nazis and helped Jewish families escape.
In September he published a book in the UK about his experiences, My Name Is Selma (My Name is Selma).
This year it will be released in other countries, including Germany.
Selma’s parents and teenage sister were murdered in the camps, and almost every year he returns to Ravensbrück to participate in events commemorating the crimes committed there.
Ravensbrück was the concentration camp for women only largest in Nazi Germany.
M more than 105, 01 women from all over Europe were imprisoned here.
Many were fighters from the political resistance or opponents.
Others were considered “not suitable” for Nazi society: Jews, lesbians, sex workers or homeless women.
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At least 30. 01 women died here.
Some were gassed or hanged.
Others died of hunger, for illnesses or they worked to death.
They were brutalized by many of the guards: beaten, tortured or murdered .
The prisoners gave them nicknames, such as “Brygyda the bloody” or “Revolver Anna”.
After the war, during Nazi war crimes trials in 1945, Irma Grese was nicknamed by the press as the “beautiful beast”.
Young, attractive and blonde, she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging.
The cliché of sadistic blonde woman in SS uniform became more late into a sexualized cult figure in movies and comics.
Few convictions
But of the thousands of women who worked as SS guards, only 78 were prosecuted .
And very few were actually convicted.
They were portrayed themselves as ignorant helpers, easy is to manipulate in the patriarchal society of postwar West Germany. Most never spoke of the past.
They got married, changed their names, and faded into society.
A woman, Herta Bothe, who was imprisoned for horrendous acts of violence, later spoke in public.
She was pardoned by the British, after spending only a few years in prison.
In a rare interview, recorded in 1999 just before he died, showed no regret.
“I made a mistake? No. The mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it, otherwise they would have put me in it. That was the mistake. ”
The excuse
That was an excuse that ex-guards used to give.
But it was not true.
The records show that some of l a s new a s guards left Ravensbrück as soon as they realized what the
They were allowed to leave and did not suffer retaliation .
I ask Selma if she thinks the guards were devilish monsters.
“I think they were ordinary women who did evil things. I think that can happen anywhere and to anyone, even in England. It can happen here if it was allowed. ”
It’s a chilling lesson, think.
Since the war, SS guards have been portrayed in many books and movies.
The most famous has been The Reader, a German novel that later became a film starring Kate Winslet.
Women are sometimes portrayed as victims of exploitation.
At other times as sadistic monsters.
The truth is scarier.
They were not extraordinary monsters, but ordinary women, who ended up doing things monstrous.
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