“In early October 1942, I set off for Lublin,” Hermine Braunsteiner¹ recalled in a 1973 interrogation. “We took the train. There were nine of us guards and one chief guard.”² On October 16, 1942, this first group of ten female guards (SS-Aufseherinnenin the terminology of the SS) arrived at the Majdanek Concentration and Extermination Camp³ from the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp.⁴ By the time Majdanek was evacuated in April 1944, a total of twenty-eight women had worked as guards at that camp, known for its particularly harsh conditions and the brutal behavior of its SS staff.⁵ Prior to starting...

Why devote a study solely to female concentration camp staff? Although Nazi concentration camps have been the subject of much historical study, the SS is still not a major subject in concentration camp research. The first study of concentration camp staff was undertaken by Karin Orth, who employed a sociohistorical perspective to examine the male administrative elite within the camp.¹ Orth has spurred new research into the history of perpetrators within the system of the concentration camp,² but apart from the excellent study of Marc Buggeln,³ who combines structural history with a cultural historical perspective, this research continues to focus...

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Only two days before Operation Barbarossa—the German code name for the invasion—began, Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to Lublin. On June 20, 1941, Himmler ordered the establishment of a new concentration camp in Lublin. With respect to both its genesis and function, the Lublin camp would be something of an oddity within the concentration camp system. The camp, nicknamed “Majdanek” or “Little Majdan” by its inmates (after the district of Majdan Tatarski in the city of Lublin), fulfilled a variety of functions during its operation. Between 1941 and 1944,...

When the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp commenced operation in May 1939, the SS began searching for female guards to staff the new facility. At that time, it continued to be mainly political opponents and individuals persecuted on “social-racial” grounds who were held in the concentration camps. This category included individuals associated with groups that had been classified as “asocial.” From 1939 until 1941, Ravensbrück was the only location where female concentration camp prisoners were held. Even after that, it remained the only major camp for women in the Third Reich. As such, Ravensbrück was a key factor in the National...

“At Ravensbrück, I received training in how to guard prisoners,”¹ Alice Orlowski remembered in her 1973 testimony. Like allAufseherinnenwho worked at the Majdanek Concentration and Extermination Camp between 1942 and 1944, Orlowski passed through the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, which had been established in May 1939. At Ravensbrück, recruits were trained and received their first contact with the “concentration camp universe.”² As stated on the application form, the new guards were subject to a three-month probationary period.³ The following discussion explores Ravensbrück’s function as a training camp for newly hiredAufseherinnen.

When they first arrived at the camp,...

Asked in 1980 by Eberhard Fechner how long she had worked at the Ravensbrück camp, Erna Pfannstiel answered:

I guess about a year, and then we were transferred…. The other ten were moved too. We paid a visit to the camp commandant at the time. I don’t even know what his name was anymore. I think it was Kögel. Well, we were transferred. Though we didn’t want to go, I tell you. First of all it was too far away…. No, no, we even went up there, but it was no use.¹

Pfannstiel was part of the first group of...

For theAufseherinnenat Majdanek, the work day began with the prisoners’ roll call at 8 a.m. on the central grounds of the women’s camp, the final count from which was typically reported to Hermine Braunsteiner:¹ “The chief guard took our count and went over the day’s schedule with us. She assigned us to the different work details.”² Afterwards, the female guards proceeded to their work assignments, where it was their job to supervise the prisoners.³ As was the case in other concentration camps, the majority of the female guards did not have a permanent work assignment; rather, they were...

As an institution, the concentration and extermination camp produced death on a mass scale. For this reason, killing was a central work duty for most camp staff . In what follows, I will examine the daily work duties of the female guards and the SS men who served at the Majdanek camp. This analysis will primarily entail exploration of how the mass killing of prisoners shaped day-to-day work routines.

A central element of this process of annihilation is that it was carried out within a highly structured work process that involved numerous steps, in which many individuals in different functions...

The guards were to prevent escapes at all costs and, when escapes did occur, they resulted in severe punishments and reprisals. As already described in chapter 4, the very architecture of the camp served as an instrument of domination and control. No one was permitted to leave the camp without authorization. Control over space, then, was a defining aspect of the camp as an institution.¹ However, although the camp was a closed space, its borders were not as impermeable as one might assume. Two incidents at Majdanek—the overnight escape of eighty-six Soviet prisoners on June 14–15, 1942, and...

The disciplinary and penal code for the concentration camps spelled out the treatment of prisoners in precise detail. However, the daily violence and punishments meted out by the SS often bore little relation to these official guidelines, a discrepancy that has received comparatively little attention in the scholarship on Nazi concentration camps. In this chapter, I will examine this contradiction and explore the opportunities for independent action afforded to the female guards and SS men during their daily duties. To what extent were their actions guided by the regulations, and how were these regulations implemented in their daily duties in...

According to sociologist Albert Scherr, physical violence is an act whereby the perpetrator “communicates something about himself or herself, about his or her relationship to the victim and, finally, may also be addressing a third party.”¹ Although the female guards and SS men who worked at the concentration camps were clearly in a position of superiority over the prisoners, they were themselves embedded within a system of complex relationships alternating between power and dependency. TheAufseherinnenand SS men exerted violence over the prisoners and power over their coworkers, rendering them not only the agents, but also the recipients of...

In her postwar account, French ethnologist Germaine Tillion described the aftermath of a flogging that took place in the Ravensbrück bunker. While Tillion did not witness the scene herself, a friend who was imprisoned in the bunker for an extended period told her of it. Describing her friend as a woman with “excellent powers of judgment,” Tillion later relayed her friend’s account of the actions ofAufseherinDorothea Binz:¹

After one such flogging, my friend ventured a look through a gap in the floorboards; by then, the punishment was over, and the prisoner was lying half-naked with her face to...

The twenty-eight SSAufseherinnenwho worked at Majdanek between fall 1942 and spring 1944 were not, to use Karin Orth’s words, “born experts of terror.”¹ Rather, they became violent within the context of a very specific institutional and sociocultural setting. As a social setting, however, the Majdanek camp was by no means a static entity. Instead, following arguments set forth by Alf Lüdtke, it is best understood as a dynamic arena involving a variety of actors. For this reason, a historical investigation of the everyday actions and experiences of the SS staff offers a lens through which to view the...