Sonia Smith
Doctoral Award
The 27th January is Holocaust Memorial Day, this dark time of European history holds many prominant lessons about the importance of tolerance and respect for differences that are now more than ever appropriate in our modern world. Research into the Holocaust and its perpetrators can only help in the field of genocide and its prevention but the majority of this research only focuses on males. While the issue of women in the Third Reich has been brought more to the fore with movies such as ‘The Reader’ it is still a male dominated study. This study by Sonia Smith’s at Royal Holloway, University of London, seeks to rectify this and aims to give insight into how and why a person, and in particular a woman, could be motivated to involve themselves in these atrocities.
Female concentration camp guards have long been ignored in Holocaust scholarship. Women have largely been portrayed as victims, while atrocity has been regarded as a function of extreme masculine behaviour. The presence of female overseers in the women’s sections of concentration camps presents an uncomfortable reality to those who would rather paint women as a homogenous group of victims of the Third Reich. Sonia uses the trial in Düsseldorf of six women who worked at the concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek in Lublin as the source for an investigation of the factors that influenced the behaviour of women who were deeply implicated in the Holocaust. Sonia was able to use her own language skills along with a travel grant from the AHRC to travel to Germany and Poland to do some first hand research work on the archives there.
There are many factors that are considered as being of importance in determining how overseers treated the prisoners under their control. This project concludes that while gender issues were significant in motivating female perpetrators of the Holocaust, there were also many non-gender specific factors that led to women committing atrocity during the Third Reich. Women were as much a part of Nazi Germany as men, living through the same economic upheavals and societal changes. The potential for violence is not an exclusively masculine phenomenon – there are elements within femininity too that can lead to atrocity. As Sonia explains;
“ “Aryan” women in the Third Reich had the opportunity to gain personal advantage through alignment with the goals of Nazi ideology, and my thesis shows how and why some of them were willing to commit acts of murder and genocidal violence for the regime.”
This is an important piece of research and its conclusions can only help us in understanding and go some way towards preventing another such period in our history.
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