Female Guards in Nazi Concentration Camps - Recruitment

Recruitment

Female guards were generally low class to middle class and had no work experience; their professional background varied: one source mentions former matrons, hairdressers, streetcar ticket-takers, opera singers, or retired teachers. Volunteers were recruited by ads in German newspapers asking for women to show their love for the Reich and join the SS-Gefolge ("SS-Retinue," an SS support and service organisation for women). Additionally, some were conscripted based on data in their SS files. The League of German Girls acted as a vehicle of indoctrination for many of the women. One head female overseer, Helga Hegel, referred to her female guards as "SS" women at a post-war hearing. She placed the SS in quotes because the women were not official members of the SS, but many of them belonged to the Waffen-SS. In fact, fewer than twenty women ever served as true SS members, mostly because Schutzstaffel membership was closed to women. The relatively low number of female guards who belonged to the Allgemeine-SS or SS-Gefolge served in the camps. Other women, such as Therese Brandl and Irmtraut Sell, belonged to the Totenkopf ("Death's Head") units.

At first, new recruits were trained at Concentration Camp LichtenburgGermany in 1938 and after 1939, at the Ravensbrück camp near Berlin. When the war broke out, the Nazis built other camps in Poland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and other countries they occupied. The female guards' training was similar to that of their male counterparts; the women attended classes which ranged from four weeks to half a year, headed by the head wardresses - however, near the end of the war little, if any, training was given to fresh recruits. Court records cite former SS member Hertha Ehlert, who served at Ravensbruck, Majdanek, Lublin, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen, as describing her training as "physically and emotionally demanding" when questioned at the Belsen Trial. According to her, the trainees were told about the corruption of the Weimar Republic, how to punish prisoners, and how to look out for sabotage and work slowdowns. The same sources claim Dorothea Binz, head training overseer at Ravensbruck after 1942, trained her female students in the finer points of "malicious pleasure" (Schadenfreude or sadism).