You've seen them as background "extras" in motion pictures with
Holocaust themes. One was a guard who escorted Meryl Streep across
the grim landscape of Auschwitz in Sophie's Choice (1982). In the
dark comedy Seven Beauties (1976), a hapless Italian POW finds
himself having to patronize an exceedingly large version of one. In
The Boys from Brazil (1978), Nazi hunter Sir Lawrence Olivier
interviews the aging prison inmate who is attempting to broker a
deal through him. In Playing for Time, Triumph of the Spirit, and
Schindler's List, similar representations appear. These are the
female SS guards, and even ardent students of the Holocaust know
little about these feminine shadows of camp terror. In truth, the
so-called "SS Women" served in guard capacities in the camps, but
their official status in the SS was strictly that of auxiliaries.
The female guards were never truly considered members of the
"sacred corps" of Hitler's elite guard: they were never actual SS
members. All this notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of
these women inflicted tremendous pain and suffering on the
thousands of unfortunate, helpless victims, who came under their
power. The rank-and-file female guards were frequently singled out
in postwar trials as being worse than the male tormentors. Indeed,
as the world witnessed photographic evidence of well-fed, usually
hefty female guards throwing emaciated corpses in the the mass
graves of Bergen-Belsen, the scope and extent of these culprits'
participation in the Nazi orgy of death became clearer. Sadly, with
the passage of time, the world has largely forgotten these female
oppressors. The Camp Women is the first complete resource volume
dedicated to the SS-Aufseherinnen - the female guards of the camps.
Although no directory, database, or index on the subject has ever
existed, Daniel Patrick Brown has taken the bank records of the
concentration camp designated for women, RavensbrA"ck, to begin to
catalog all of these overseers who can be documented. Furtherm with
added data from the German Federal Archives in Berlin, the Polish
State Museum in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), and the Central Office (for
prosecution of Nazi war crimes) in Ludwigsburg, essential material
on these women has finally been synthetized into this valuable tool
for subsequent research on the female guards. In addition, the role
of the girl's youth organization in developing future overseers,
and the eventual recruitment, training, and employment of these
women is likewise examined. Because of their participation in the
slaughter in the camps, a number of female overseers were tried,
convicted, and executed following the war. This aspect of their
organization's brief history is also analyzed. Finally, a section
of photographs and maps will provide the reader with some
heretofore unseen data. Professor Brown's timely work fills a void
in the terrible annals of the Nazism: at last, the women guards and
their crimes are subject to public scrutiny.
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