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Aufseherinnen
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Of the 50,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 5,000 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of ''Aufseherin'' translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen (March – May 1945), Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts. Recruitment Female guards were generally from the lower to middle class and had no relevant work experience; their occupational background varied: one source mentions former matrons, hairdressers, tramcar-conductresses ...
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Ravensbrück Concentration Camp
Ravensbrück () was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel). The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish, approximately 15%. 85% were from other races and cultures. More than 80% were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides. In the spring of 1941, the SS established a small adjacent camp for male inmates, who built and managed the camp's gas chambers in 1944. Of some 130,000 fem ...
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Maria Mandel
Maria Mandl (also spelled Mandel; 10 January 1912 – 24 January 1948) was an Austrian '' SS- Helferin'' (" SS helper") known for her role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where she is believed to have been directly complicit in the deaths of over 500,000 prisoners. She was executed for war crimes. Life Mandl was born in Münzkirchen, Upper Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, the daughter of a shoemaker. Camp work After the ''Anschluss'' by Nazi Germany, Mandl moved to Munich, and on 15 October 1938 joined the camp staff at Lichtenburg, an early Nazi concentration camp in the Province of Saxony, as an '' Aufseherin'', and worked with fifty other SS women. On 15 May 1939, along with other guards and prisoners, Mandl was sent to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin. She soon impressed her superiors and, after she had joined the Nazi Party on 1 April 1941, was elevated to the rank of a ''SS-Ob ...
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Auschwitz Concentration Camp
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (''Stammlager'') in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. After Germany sparked World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp. The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles for whom the camp was initially established. The bulk of inmates were Polish for the first two years. In May 1940, German criminals brought to ...
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Majdanek Concentration Camp
Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, the camp was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. The camp, which operated from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of the camp's infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove most incriminating evidence of war crimes. The camp was nicknamed Majdanek ("little Majdan") in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjace ...
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Neuengamme Concentration Camp
Neuengamme was a network of Nazi concentration camps in Northern Germany that consisted of the main camp, Neuengamme, and more than 85 satellite camps. Established in 1938 near the village of Neuengamme in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg, the Neuengamme camp became the largest concentration camp in Northwest Germany. Over 100,000 prisoners came through Neuengamme and its subcamps, 24 of which were for women. The verified death toll is 42,900: 14,000 in the main camp, 12,800 in the subcamps, and 16,100 in the death marches and bombings during the final weeks of World War II. Following Germany's defeat in 1945, the British Army used the site as an internment camp for SS and other Nazi officials. In 1948, the British transferred the land to the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg, which summarily demolished the camp's wooden barracks and built in its stead a prison cell block, converting the former concentration camp site into two state prisons operated by the Hamburg authorities f ...
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Majdanek - Hermine Braunsteiner
Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, the camp was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. The camp, which operated from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of the camp's infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove most incriminating evidence of war crimes. The camp was nicknamed Majdanek ("little Majdan") in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjacen ...
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Herta Bothe
Herta Bothe (3 January 1921 – 16 March 2000) was a German concentration camp guard during World War II. She was imprisoned for war crimes after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and was subsequently released early from prison on 22 December 1951. Life Herta Bothe was born in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In 1938, at the age of seventeen, Bothe helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then worked temporarily in a factory, then as a hospital nurse. In 1939, Bothe was a member of the League of German Girls. Guard at Ravensbrück-Stutthof In September 1942, Bothe became the ''SS- Aufseherin'' camp guard at the Nazi German Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. The former nurse took a four-week training course and was sent as an overseer to the Stutthof camp near Danzig (now Gdańsk). There she became known as the "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her brutal beatings of prisoners. In July 1944, she was sent by ''Oberaufseherin'' Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost (Bromberg Eas ...
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Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism (german: Hitlerfaschismus). The later related term " neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War. Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, and the use of eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist '' Völkisch'' movement which had been a prominent aspect of German nationalism since the late 19th century, and it was strongly influenced by the paramilitary groups that ...
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Helmbrechts Concentration Camp
As a Nazi concentration camp for forced labor, Helmbrechts concentration camp was a women's subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp founded near Helmbrechts near Hof, Germany in the summer of 1944. The first prisoners who came to the camp were political prisoners from the Ravensbrück camp in northern Germany. Later Jewish prisoners were brought. History In the beginning, no barracks were completed so the women slept in the factory hall. Eventually twelve barracks were completed, but only four were for prisoners living quarters. Fifty-four guards served at the camp; twenty-seven men and twenty-seven women. Most of the women guards served at other camps; many trained at Flossenburg, two at Gross Rosen and some in Ravensbrück concentration camp before they arrived at Helmbrechts. The male guards were mostly older Germans or ethnic Germans who were no longer combat worthy. Herta Haase, Erna Achtenberg, Ellia Mains, Ingeborg Schimming-Assmuss, and Ruth Hildner were som ...
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Hof, Germany
Hof () is a town on the banks of the Saale in the northeastern corner of the German state of Bavaria, in the Franconian region, at the Czech border and the forested Fichtelgebirge and Frankenwald upland regions. The town has 47,296 inhabitants, the surrounding district an additional 95,000. The town of Hof is enclosed by, but does not belong to the Bavarian district of Hof; it is nonetheless the district's administrative seat. The town's most important work of art, the Hofer altar, dates from about 1465 and is exhibited in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich today. The Heidenreich organ in the parish church of St. Michaelis, completed in 1834, is considered one of Bavaria's finest. Hof is known for two local "delicacies", namely , a kind of hotpot, and sausages boiled in a portable, coal-fired brass cauldron, which are sold in the streets by the ''sausage man'' ( in the local dialect). There is also a particularly strong beer (), which is available only on the first Monday after Trini ...
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Karl-Otto Koch
Karl-Otto Koch (; 2 August 1897 – 5 April 1945) was a mid-ranking commander in the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) of Nazi Germany who was the first commandant of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. From September 1941 until August 1942, he served as the first commandant of the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland, stealing vast amounts of valuables and money from murdered Jews. His wife, Ilse Koch, also took part in the crimes at Buchenwald and Majdanek. Life Koch was born in Darmstadt, Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt on 2 August 1897. His father worked in a local registrar's office and died when Karl was eight years old. After completing elementary school in 1912, Koch attended Mittelschule and completed a commercial apprenticeship. In 1916, he volunteered to join the Imperial German Army and fought on the Western Front until he was later captured by the British. Koch spent the rest of the war as a POW and returned to Germany in 1919. As a s ...
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Wilhelm Dörr (Nazi)
Wilhelm Dörr (9 February 1921 – 13 December 1945) was a German SS-''Oberscharführer'' and concentration camp officer. He served as a guard at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and as deputy commander of the sub-camp of Kleinbodungen. Following World War II he was convicted of war crimes by British occupation authorities in the Belsen Trial and executed. Life Wilhelm Dörr was born in the town of Merenberg, Hesse on February 9, 1921, and raised in Emmerichenhain (Rennerod) where he worked primarily as a farmhand. Dörr was a member of the Hitler Youth from 1932 to 1939 and volunteered for the ''Waffen-SS'' in December 1940 after being rejected for service by the ''Wehrmacht''. While training to become a combat engineer in Dresden in October 1941 he became seriously ill with rheumatism and was confined to a hospital for several months. Following his recovery, Dörr was reassigned to the '' SS-Totenkopfverbände'' in the summer of 1942. He went on to serve as a guar ...
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