The role women play in the Holocaust

The Holocaust was a big operation involving tens of thousands of guards. As manpower shortages began to plague Nazi Germany towards the end of WW2 women were allowed to join an offshoot of the SS called the SS-Gefolge.

Many of these women were as evil and sadistic as their male counterparts and would serve as camp guards. Over 3,700 worked as guards in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

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Irma Grese: Known as the “bitch of Belsen” by prisoners, she was a really nasty human being. She would spend her days inspecting barracks and inventing minute nonsense reasons to beat and humiliate female prisoners. She worked at Belsen which was home to some seriously sadistic stuff towards the end of the war and she was involved in the horror that took place there.

Ilse Koch: Known as “The Bitch of Buchenwald” by prisoners her husband was the camp commander of Buchenwald and Ilse very much loved living at the camps. She enjoyed selecting which prisoners to execute and would often shoot them herself. The severed heads of those killed by her were displayed on poles by her orders. Her husband and her also embezzled money from the camps by stealing the items Jews brought with them to the camps and selling them.

Maria Mandel: Maria was a guard at Auschwitz and seemed to enjoy her life there. She enjoyed selecting children to be killed or executed and would patrol the camps for any children “slacking off” to be killed.

Hertha Bothe: Known as the “sadist of Stutthof” she worked at Stuttof as a guard. She would regularly beat prisoners to death or shoot and kill them and took pleasure in it. She would later be involved in the death marches of Jews at the end of the war and would kill dozens of people.

• Remember that scene in Schindler’s List where the camp commander wakes up, takes out his rifle, stretches, and shoots random people walking by as target practice? Well, Hertha actually did this. She enjoyed shooting women carrying food containers around the camp as target practice.

Juana Bormann: Juana was a dog trainer that was stationed at numerous camps. She trained Shepards to attack and ravage Jewish prisoners and took pleasure in using prisoners as practice for her dogs.

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One last interesting one- Elfriede Huth

Elfriede as you can tell worked as a guard dog trainer during the Holocaust. She was stationed at Ravensbruck and while there she trained dogs to attack prisoners.

After WW2 she got away and immigrated to the US. She was never identified as a guard and hid that information very well.

She settled in San Franciso and married a Jewish man named Fred William Rinkel who had lost his entire family in the Holocaust.

She of course never told anyone about her past and was well-liked by the community and her family. Her husband would die in 2004 thankfully for him because in 2006 it was discovered who Elfriede really was.

She was deported back to Germany to stand trial but nobody could prove if she actually killed anyone (she claimed not to). She lived out her final years in Germany, dying in 2018.