
Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence
The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944
Elissa Mailaender(Author)
Michigan State University Press
Will be published approx. on 1. March 2015
Book
Hardback
434 pages
978-1-61186-170-9 (ISBN)
Description
How did "ordinary women," like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailaender examines the daily work of twenty-eight women employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the concentration and death camp Majdanek/Lublin in Poland. Many female SS overseers in Majdanek perpetrated violence and terrorized prisoners not only when ordered to do so but also on their own initiative. The social order of the concentration camp, combined with individual propensities, shaped a microcosm in which violence became endemic to workaday life. The author's analysis of Nazi records, court testimony, memoirs, and film interviews illuminates the guards' social backgrounds, careers, and motives as well as their day-to-day behavior during free time and on the "job," as they supervised prisoners on work detail and in the cell blocks, conducted roll calls, and "selected" girls and women for death in the gas chambers. Scrutinizing interactions and conflicts among female guards, relations with male colleagues and superiors, and internal hierarchies, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence shows how work routines, pressure to "resolve problems," material gratification, and Nazi propaganda stressing guards' roles in "creating a new order" heightened female overseers' identification with Nazi policies and radicalized their behavior.
Reviews / Votes
"The book demonstrates that young women often acted to a considerable degree on their own initiative to ensure the functioning of an extermination camp. . . . By elucidating the horrific 'workaday routines' of these female perpetrators in Majdanek and confronting the abysmal anthropological depths of a topic that is still taboo, the author helps to reconstruct how the murder of Europe's Jews could become reality."-Bernward Doerner,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
East Lansing, MI
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
20
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 35 mm
Weight
713 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61186-170-9 (9781611861709)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Elissa Mailaender is Associate Professor at the Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po and on the staff of the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and the Centre interdisciplinaire d'etudes et de recherches sur l'Allemagne in Paris. Formerly, she was a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C.
Patricia Szobar is a writer and translator who lives in Berlin.
Patricia Szobar is a writer and translator who lives in Berlin.
Content
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Methodological and Theoretical Considerations
Chapter 2. The Majdanek Concentration and Death Camp: An Overview
Chapter 3. Women Looking for Work: Paths to Careers in the Concentration Camps
Chapter 4. Ravensbrueck Training Camp: The Concentration Camp as Disciplinary Space
Chapter 5. Going East: Transfer to the Majdanek Concentration and Extermination Camp, 1942-1944
Chapter 6. Work Conditions at Majdanek
Chapter 7. Annihilation as Work: The Daily Work of Killing in the Camp
Chapter 8. Escapes and Their Meaning within the Structure of Power and Violence in the Camp
Chapter 9. License to Kill? Unauthorized Actions by the Camp Guards
Chapter 10. Violence as Social Practice
Chapter 11. Cruelty: An Anthropological Perspective
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Methodological and Theoretical Considerations
Chapter 2. The Majdanek Concentration and Death Camp: An Overview
Chapter 3. Women Looking for Work: Paths to Careers in the Concentration Camps
Chapter 4. Ravensbrueck Training Camp: The Concentration Camp as Disciplinary Space
Chapter 5. Going East: Transfer to the Majdanek Concentration and Extermination Camp, 1942-1944
Chapter 6. Work Conditions at Majdanek
Chapter 7. Annihilation as Work: The Daily Work of Killing in the Camp
Chapter 8. Escapes and Their Meaning within the Structure of Power and Violence in the Camp
Chapter 9. License to Kill? Unauthorized Actions by the Camp Guards
Chapter 10. Violence as Social Practice
Chapter 11. Cruelty: An Anthropological Perspective
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index