Daily Life
Relations between SS men and female guards are said to have existed in many of the camps, and Heinrich Himmler had told the SS men to regard the female guards as equals and comrades. At the relatively small Helmbrechts subcamp near Hof, Germany, the camp commandant, Doerr, openly pursued a sexual relationship with the head female overseer Helga Hegel.
Corruption was another aspect of the female guard culture. Ilse Koch, known as "the witch of Buchenwald", was the chief female guard at the Buchenwald camp, and at the same time married to the camp commandant, Karl Koch. Both were rumoured to have embezzled millions of Reichmarks, for which Karl Koch was convicted and executed by the Nazis a few weeks before Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Army; however, Ilse was cleared of guilt. On a side note, some sources speculate that she had had the witnesses in Buchenwald murdered.
Despite their reputation for brutality, there were certainly some who were relatively kind. Klara Kunig became a camp guard in the middle of 1944 and served at Ravensbruck and its subcamp at Dresden-Universelle. The head wardress at the camp pointed out that she was too polite and too kind towards the inmates, resulting in her subsequent dismissal from camp duty in January 1945. Her fate has been unknown since February 13, 1945, the date of the allied firebombing of Dresden. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, one Aufseherin was found guilty of aiding inmates illegally, and the chief overseer ordered her punished; her fellow guards were forced to give her twenty-five lashes.
Read more about this topic: Female Guards In Nazi Concentration Camps
Famous quotes related to daily life:
“There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)