Bad conscience? Regret? Maria Mandl has not experienced remotely or another. “There was nothing with the camp,” said the head of the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrick, Germany. The 36-year-old woman was hanged in 1948 after a Kraków court sentenced her to death as a war criminal.
His cruelty career is part of the new exhibition on the guardians of concentration camps at the memorial site. More than 140,000 people, mostly women, from more than 30 countries were buried in Ravensbruck, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Berlin, between 1939 and 1945. The camp is also the main place for babysitting education and recruitment. 3300 of them worked at Ravensbrick.
German shepherds used as watchdogs in Ravensbrick camp
The Austrian Maria Mandl precisely what the self-proclaimed supporters of the “race of teachers” sought to be her guardians: unwavering and ruthless.
Someone like Mandl can just place himself under the perverse hierarchy of the Nazis. In 1942, after 3 years in Ravensbruck, she was transferred to paintings at the Auschwitz death camp. There she created the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra, which was forced to play sending music and prisoner executions.
In 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, the guards have been included in Hitler’s elite death squad, the SS (Schutzstaffel). doesn’t shy away from the details. The exhibition has also been carefully studied: the former barracks of the country’s guardians, next to the old camp. Only one wall and a barbed rope separated the perpetrators from their victims.
Read more: Auschwitz: a scenario of atrocities even the horrors of the Holocaust
Guard Johanna Langefeld lived with her son in the camp.
In the exhibition you can also listen to audio files of torment and whimsical abuse inflicted on prisoners. Some of the interviews with witnesses are over 20 years old. Ursula Winska of Poland, for example, explains in a video how Maria Mandl beat an older woman, especially brutally, on her way to camp. When a fellow inmate arrived at his aid, he found himself in the bunker. Months later, she would punch you in the face every day with the mocking comment: “You’re a woman, but I can hit you.”
There were nannies who showed humanity. According to another Polish prisoner, Henryka Stanecka, her prisoner organization was allowed to shower in the lake after completing a muddy day in a sugar beet field. “A guard even gave us a towel, ” said Stanecka.
Read more: The German company that allowed the Holocaust
The main condition of running in the field of loyalty to the Nazi party
The longer the war lasted, the more complicated it became for the Nazis to locate volunteer guards. New staff hired through newspaper advertisements. The words “concentration camp” were not included in these task descriptions. For example, a 1944 announcement at The Hannoverscher Kurier read: “Healthy personnel between 20 and 40 years old are wanted for a position in military service.” Compensation granted based on the fees applicable to public servants. In addition, the promised paper: “Accommodation, catering and clothing (uniform) free”.
Such clients were enough for many women to volunteer. A woman known only as Waltraut G. was among them. In an interview in 2003, he explained that he had accepted the position for monetary reasons. She was the eldest of five siblings. “So I didn’t think much of it, all I thought was: if I can win more there, I’ll take care of the task.” Anna G. also had no qualms about taking the job. He discovered that the task in the field was simply “attractive like nonsense paintings on the meeting line,” as in a factory.
Read more: Auschwitz, years later: a race opposed to time
Apparently, only a very small number of guards have resigned or expressed any opposition. But, says curator Simone Erpel, “we did not discover any indication that someone who resigned or expressed any opposition was pursued in any way.
“It is vital because after the war, the guards said in their defense that they would have been thrown into a concentration camp if they had refused to follow orders, but we found no indication of that, so it must have been imaginable to them. to make their own decisions,” Erpel says.
Curator and historian Simone Erpel organized the exhibition
Most camp guards had little to worry about after the war. Only 77 of them had to be tried, according to Erpel, who is also a historian. Death sentences, as in Maria Mandl’s case, or long criminal penalties were rare. Subsequent investigations were usually inconsequential for field geriatric guards who were still alive. More recently, proceedings in 8 cases were officially closed in February 2020 through the German state of Brandenburg, where Ravensbrick is located: seven because defendants may simply not be questioned or attended the hearings and one for lack of sufficient evidence.
Read more: Germans to protect Holocaust memorial culture
Some guards placed in U.S. POW camps in 1945
“Not guilty”: This is how the few nannies whose cases were attempted were declared. As far as authors are concerned, that’s all there is to be said. None said anything that could have helped their victims. This bankruptcy of German jurisprudence is now “history” – 75 years after the liberation of the Ravensbrick camp – according to a Prosecutor of the Republic, in an interview that can be heard in the exhibition.
There’s also a room about “facts and fiction.” This is considered the figure of the guardian of the field in literature and film, as well as the industry of Nazi memories. Alongside Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader, which has been translated into 50 languages and become a film starring Kate Winslet, you can see an SS grey box uniform. “This may be a forgery,” the attached text says, explaining the dubious origin of the garment, but there is a protective cap that is real. It was donated to the Ravensbrick Museum through a former French prisoner.
Doll in SS uniform
A doll in an SS uniform
In the last corner of the exhibition, you will locate a glass cabinet with a doll. His call is Silken Floss and he is a figure founded on the main character of the film The Spirit through Frank Miler in 2008. Scarlett Johansson plays the hero in a tale based on a comedy adventure through Will Eisner from the 1940s and 1950s. The original comedian is a detective mystery with mystical and comic elements. Ravensbrick’s memorial doll has blond hair and wears an SS uniform. You can buy things like this smoothly online, but you also find it in bad taste.
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