Part 1

Interestingly enough, in most of the literature concerning the so-called Höcker Album, named for Karl Friedrich Höcker, adjutant of the commander of Auschwitz I Stammlager Richard Baer, who made these photos, the women who appear in these photos are not identified. This could be related to the fact that they most likely wouldn't show up in that available personnel files since women who worked in the camps as guard and in other capacities were not part of the SS but rather of the so-called SS-Gefolge (SS-auxilliaries). Or it could be related to the fact that in all the effort to find out who appears in the album the women were not seen as important enough. The latter especially was a trend in historiography of the Holocaust – women being ignored unless they appear as specifically "beastly" a la Irma Grese or Ilse Koch – that people only have started to rectify in recent years with more and more research being done into the issue of female perpetrators and the Holocaust.

So, basically, it is not possible to say who these women were exactly. What we know however is that these women were female camp guards rather than female medical doctors working in the camp. From much of the recent research it is possible to give information about female camp guards (Aufseherinnen) in a more general sense as well as what their role was and how they came to be there.

About 3500 women served as guards in the Concentration Camps. Most of those obviously in the Ravensbrück camp, the women's concentration camp, but they also served in other places that held female prisoners, namely Auschwitz, Lichtenburg, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen.

As already mentioned, these women were not officially part of the SS but rather of the so-called "SS-Gefolge", meaning they counted as civilian employees of the SS. In these camps, the administration was male but especially in Ravensbrück and also the women's camp in Auschwitz II Birkenau the day-to-day interaction with the prisoners was dominated by these female guards. Similarly in other camps where the male guards and male members of the administration were not allowed to enter the women's camps without an accompanying female guard.

Both, how they ended up there as well as how they behaved in their role as guards was strongly influenced by then contemporary gender norms and ideas of female and male behavior as well as by the way Nazi Germany incorporated taking part in the Holocaust and other ideological measures into what they envisioned their new society to be like. Looking at the background of the SS-Aufseherinnen is interesting in as far as guard duty in the camps seems to have been a from of climbing the social ladder. In contrast to the male guards and administration where you find all stratas of society represented, the female guards were predominantly from socio-economically weaker parts of society. A lot of single mothers, women from broken homes, or women who previously had only worked as secretaries etc. chose the career as way to advance in society.

This ties into with some of the more general research done in the last couple of years both on Nazi German society as well as on female perpetrators. Several scholars have recently dealt with the idea of the "Volksgemeinschaft" (German racial community, literally the "people's community" or "folk community") not just being a propaganda term by the Nazis but also something that was constantly reaffirmed through practicing it. While this is debated (see: Martina Streuber, Bernhard Gotto: Visions of Community in Nazi Germany. Social Engineering and Private Lives, Oxford 2014 for details), it is also useful in terms of gaining insight into the motivation of women who participated in the Holocaust. The idea of the Volksgemeinschaft was in essence egalitarian as in equality between the members of the German racial community. This was to be affirmed especially by taking actions against the ultimate other, the Jews (see Michael Wildt: Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939, Hamburg 2007 in which Wildt makes the case that violence against Jews in the 1930s served the purpose of uniting the Germans in their racial community). Partaking in this project seemd to and served certain women of German society as an essentially emancipatory gesture, taking part in the great racial communal project of subjugating Bolshevism and destroying Judaism. This is espeically true for women from social strada and locations that during the Weimar period had been excluded or removed from the emancipatory strides made. Thus it can give insight into the motivation of women who went to become CC guards, racial detectives in the East, secretaries in the occupation of Europe and so and so forth.

In terms of how gender and gender norms of Nazi society influenced the behavior of women involved in Nazi crimes, things are a bit less clear. In the post-war trials female CC guards were often portrayed as especially cruel and violent ( a cultural stereotype that has lead to later exploitation films picking up the topos, e.g. Ilse, Shewolf of the SS). This is apparent in the cases of Maria Mandel, tried in Krakow in 1947 and known as The Beast, or Irma Grese tried by the British in the Belsen trials and receiving a lot of gender stereotype influenced coverage from the media. The patriarchal narrative in these cases ran along the lines that these women were especially cruel despite women's inclination to be docile and care-giving and thus they were somehow especially evil. Recent scholarship has to a certain degree renounced such a narrative pointing out that female concentration camp guards were neither more nor less crule than their male counterparts in most respects (see: Kimberly Partee: Evil or Ordinary Women: the Female Auxiliaries of the Holocaust.). While we can accept this as accurate overall, other historians have made the argument that especially in the initial time of their service, some female guards strove to be especially brutal in order to prove tho their male officers and colleagues that they too were "worthy" of serving in the camps (see: Simone Erpel (Hrsg.): Im Gefolge der SS: Aufseherinnen des Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück. Begleitband zur Ausstellung, Berlin 2007.)

Shelly M. Cline, in her 2014 dissertation Women at Work: SS Aufseherinnen and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust also deals with this specific subject. In her conclusion she sums up:

In the end, my research showed that the women of the SS were indeed very ordinary. They were everyday people: shopkeepers, hairdressers, factory workers, and farm girls. They were not selected for their political beliefs or their propensity to cruelty. Yet, the fact remained that they were also women - ordinary women who were subject to discrimination, exploitation, and obfuscation in ways that ordinary men were not. At first I was only looking for what made them average individuals, but time and again I was reminded of how much their experience was shaped by their gender or gendered expectations. This does not make them victims, but it nuances how we read their perpetration.

[...]

Every facet of their employment was marked by their gender. The existence of the Aufseherinnen went against the Nazi ideals of woman. As such it placed this auxiliary group in a difficult position. Trapped between the ideals of the state and its needs, the Aufseherinnen encountered discrimination in their workplace, and they lacked the respect and support of their male colleagues and superiors. Unlike the SS men, Aufseherinnen were not recruited or trained for a lifelong brotherhood. Instead, they were selected for a specific job - guarding prisoners - that was intended to expire at the end of the war. Their position as SS auxiliaries did not come with the privileged position afforded to the men who were its actual members.

And writing on the relation of gender to violence:

[U]nderlying it all was an acrimonious relationship with their male colleagues. Insulted and disparaged by these SS men, occasionally Aufseherinnen sought to prove themselves to these men through an increased use of violence toward prisoners. When the Aufseherinnen struggled to conduct appell, they were seen as incompetent and lazy by their male colleagues and superiors - derided as a “bunch of flustered hens.” Resenting the placement of female overseers in the camps, the male administration was prepared to let them fail, rather than to provide them with assistance or the needed tools to succeed.

So, basically, in both the aspects of how women ended up working the camps and in how they conducted themselves as Aufseherinnen, the fact that they were women as well as the gender dynamics and perceptions within Nazi society played a pivotal role. What needs to be emphasized in relation to this is that the same is true for men albeit because men were and are still seen as the default in society in different ways and with different concepts behind it. But the the conception of manliness and the gender aspect of how Nazi society envisioned men also played a key role in their conduct and career as perpetrators of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.