I had an article sent to me about the movie "The Reader." I'll skip past the obvious issue of a child being exploited, some would say sexually abused, by an older woman and look at some other things that the article brought up. Here are some excerpts from that article:
The acclaimed movie has put into focus the evil done by the 3,700 female guards employed at Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
Their monstrous crimes included selecting which children would be sent to the gas chambers and making items such as lampshades from the skin of Holocaust victims.
When I read the article it reminds me once again that gender is moot when it comes to these type of things.
Some point to Hermine Braunsteiner — known as the Mare of Majdanek, a German extermination camp in Poland.
She took part in choosing women and children to be executed and whipped several women to death.
She also killed women by stamping on them.
Like Rinkel, Braunsteiner also fled to the US and married an American after the war, living a comfortable life until Nazi-hunters tracked her down.
Her husband, Russell Ryan, a US air force mechanic who met her while serving in Germany, told a journalist in 1964: “My wife, sir, wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
The next piece is chilling when you consider what her husband said:
Yet at Braunsteiner’s 1975 trial in Germany, a witness told how she “seized children by their hair and threw them on trucks heading to the gas chambers”.
She was convicted of murdering 80 people, abetting the murder of 102 children and collaborating in the murder of 1,000 people.
The article also looked at how some of these people tried to minimize their responsibilty for their actions:
Historian Kathrin Kompisch said: “The fact is women were involved at all levels of the Third Reich’s most infamous and brutal crimes.
“There were always choices, even within the Third Reich, and women often made their own choices as much as men.
“And at the end of the war these women tried to diminish their responsibility by saying they were just cogs in the all-male machine which gave the orders.”
Infamous brute Herta Bothe was 24 when she worked as a guard on the forced march of prisoners from central Poland to Belsen.
Later, as prisoners carried containers of food from the kitchen to their huts at Belsen, she enjoyed taking pot-shots at them with her pistol.
She would also pick out sick girls to beat them with a stick.
“She had no remorse. She couldn’t understand she had done something wrong. She felt she was a victim.”
In an interview nine years ago, Bothe said: “Did I make a mistake? No. The mistake was it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it otherwise I would have been put into it myself. That was my mistake.”
But, like others involved in the SS mass murders, she was selected to work there because of her devotion to the Nazis’ warped world view.
Dr Simone Erpel, author of a paper on female Nazi camp guards, told The Sun: “Female guards like Rinkel and Bothe use the excuse that it was necessary to blindly obey orders or risk life and limb.
“One woman called to duty at the SS training camp in Ravensbruck in 1944 did refuse. Her refusal did not result in repression of any kind.” - Read the entire article here
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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