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Germany great again,
Same slogan Trump used for his racist retoric
Hitler’s programme for women could not have been clearer: German women were to stay at home, rear as many Aryan children as they were able, and obey their husbands. Women were not fit for public life; most jobs would be barred to women and access to university curtailed.
Handmaid's tale
certain authority – a knack for quietening prisoners without a fuss – because he marked her down as Ravensbrück’s future chief woman guard.
114 women wore red triangles (political prisoners); 388 Jehovah’s Witnesses wore lilac; 119 wore green (habitual criminals); 240 wore black (asocials); 137 wore yellow (Jews) and some of the categories overlapped.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses caused more trouble for Max Koegel, this time by refusing his offer to set them free. In return for their release the women were told they simply had to sign a piece of paper renouncing their faith, but each one refused, repeating that the Führer was the Antichrist.
It will be impossible to keep order if these hysterical hags can’t be broken.
for those who were lesbians – a significant minority – Ravensbrück offered special opportunities to meet other women, particularly at a time when lesbianism, like all homosexuality, was reviled.
it was the Jews who suffered most: they seemed weaker, and were less used to hardship,
‘She suffered from the particular pain and guilt of those who had been lucky enough to get out before the worst began.’
Survivors guilt, the burden to live a meaningful life
As soon as the Czech capital fell, all resistance was rooted out, intellectuals were targeted and newspapers shut down, including The Soweress, a communist feminist magazine, which Jozka edited.
the prisoners who riled him most were not the ‘communist whores’, the ‘Slav vermin’ or the ‘Jewish bitches’, but these religious ‘hags’.
Adolf Hitler showed little interest in the concentration camps – according to the records, he never visited a single one – but they lay at the centre of Himmler’s empire;
Super interesante, a pesar de ser lo mas recordado del regimen
None of the Nazi elite believed in the master-race ideology more fanatically than the Reichsführer SS, and none had such an obsession with related theories; for information on Indian mysticism or freemasonry and how they related to ideas of racial hygiene Himmler could recite chapter and verse,
hid it for the duration of the war, and Marianne’s warning to the world only came to light in the late 1950s, when it was anonymously handed in to the camp memorial’s archives.
Käthe Leichter, born in Vienna in 1895, came from a prosperous, cultured Jewish family, but rejected her bourgeois roots and went to Heidelberg in Germany to study sociology under the philosopher Max Weber.
Wooooooo!
The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners.
Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.
As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went.
Nazi bureaucracy,
So extensive was the police records system set up by Himmler so as to monitor and then exterminate Germany’s underclass that Bomber Command failed to destroy every file.
And as lesbianism was a crime in the camp (though not outside),
More shocking to Grete than the sex was the way the women continually denounced each other.
there was a certain professional pride in her attitude. She knew what she was and she insisted she was good at what she did.’
‘No, Herr Camp Commandant,’ said Else. ‘I never beat a fellow prisoner.’ ‘What, you dirty whore? You think you can pick and choose? That’s refusal to obey an order.’ Else shrugged, but was grimly determined. ‘Take the whore away,’ snorted Koegel. ‘You’ll have cause to remember me, I can tell you.’
That Himmler should take a mistress was entirely in keeping with his views on extramarital relationships. It was Himmler who in 1937 had introduced the concept of Lebensborn (‘Source of Life’) homes – institutions where SS officers could procreate outside marriage with selected Aryan women, in order to produce a constant supply of perfect Aryan children.
Walter Sonntag began a thesis in 1939 on ‘social medicine’ in which he compared the Führer’s ideas to those advocated by the Spartans, or by the scientists of medieval times who would have killed off lepers had religious scruple not intervened.
That Sonntag was a sadist none of the prisoners who worked with him at the hospital had any doubt. It was an ‘extreme pleasure’ for Sonntag to extract otherwise healthy teeth. Women would come with an infected tooth;
SS used the tattooed skin of murdered prisoners to make bookmarks, wallets and other emblems.
There is no record of who the woman was who Olga had carried to the hospital, or what became of her. But she is remembered today as the skeletal figure lying in Olga’s arms in Tragende, the statue which looks out over the Ravensbrück lake.
It was Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, however, that Milena talked of most to Grete; she had translated the novella into Czech. She told Grete the story of Gregor Samsa, the misunderstood commercial traveller, who in Kafka’s story is transformed into a huge beetle and is kept hidden by his family under a bed, as they are ashamed of him.
So successful had she proved at running Block 1 that it was now always chosen as the show block; outside visitors – top Nazis, diplomats from neutral countries, industrialists, members of the German Red Cross or officers of the Wehrmacht – would be shown inside Rosa’s block to see just how civilised a concentration camp really was.
Like fred's house in handmaid's tale
During the first week of January 1942 he was in Russia again, and on his return to Germany he had much to do. He was involved in the issue of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’, which was to be discussed at an urgent meeting, to be chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, on 20 January. Heydrich was by then the chief of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) and Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
Nobody knows when Hitler formally decided on mass murder. The Führer had always pledged to exterminate the Jews, but until now no solution had emerged. The mass shooting used to kill Soviet Jews had proved inefficient and bad for army morale. On the other hand, gas had worked well in the ‘euthanasia’ programme, which proved that mass murder of innocent civilians was technically feasible and that German officials and German bureaucracy were ready to adapt to get it done.
‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses could all have saved themselves. All they had to do was sign a paper saying they gave up their faith. But from 1000 only five did this.’
