The barbaric behavior of concentration camp guards has raised some serious questions regarding the human capacity for evil. But the perpetrators as a whole were not sadists lusting for power and blood, or brainwashed by propaganda, or simply following orders. They had given themselves a personal choice to be or not to be evil. Many chose to be ruthless and brutal, and actually promoted the use of violence and terror.
Many of the SS who were posted to camps such as Belsen spoke about their personal experiences as if it was ‘normal’, except that rations for SS members were particularly good. Nowhere do they present themselves as mindless automatons that would have followed any command given to them. Although they were massively influenced by the propaganda of the times, it is evident from extensive research that they nevertheless made a series of personal choices. They carried on working in the concentration camps not just because they were ordered to but because, having weighed the evidence put before them, they thought that treating the inmates inside the camps inhumanely and killing them, was right. They could have easily rejected the values of their community, resisted and got posted to the front, but there is no record of any member of the SS ever having done so on moral grounds.
The men and women who were posted to Belsen regarded it as a particularly good posting, and felt what they were doing there was right. Although they were taught blind and absolute obedience to all orders from their SS superiors, on a number of occasions they felt able to criticize the way the camp was being run. They knew that they never needed to fear terrible retribution if they criticized an order because, strange as it may seem, the Nazi leadership allowed functionaries lower down the chain of command openly to use their initiative and voice their views. Many of them, whatever they may have professed to their captors at the end of the war, actually believed wholeheartedly in the Nazi vision, and this meant that they felt free to question the details of its implementation. Many of the guards knew that they had embarked on something that human beings had never attempted before – the systematic extermination of thousands of men, women, and children in a matter of months. These men and women in the camps had created killing factories, whether they were extermination camps with gas chambers, or such as Belsen where inmates were tortured, shot, starved and left to die disease ridden. They were concerned not about the suffering of the inmates, but about problems of how the camp would run smoothly and efficiently.
Most of the guards considered that they lived a tolerable life. Outside the camp they felt almost insulated from the brutality and were able to avert from their eyes from anything that displeased them. As guards they lived in comfortable barracks with several of their comrades. For the officers, life was better still. Many stayed with their families in requisitioned houses nearby; they enjoyed a standard of living that far surpassed anything they could have achieved had they been attached to a fighting unit. Here in their homes these men with their wives and children, had created a settled environment and, for the most part, they had found a successful way of distancing themselves from life in the concentration camp. Their families were never given any hint of what murderous activities their husbands and fathers were undertaking inside the camps. Almost every concentration camp operative was determined from the onset to conceal as much of this gruesome knowledge as possible from the outside world. In their own minds it was not just their oath of loyalty they were protecting, but their own credentials as human beings.
Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,700 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Germans began conscripting women because of a guard shortage. Most women who were recruited to become overseers were middle to low class, from non-professional backgrounds, and had no work experience. As a group, the women guards were not highly regarded by their inmates, who were often educationally and culturally their superiors. Volunteers were mostly German women who were recruited by advertisements in newspapers asking women to show their love for the Reich by joining the SS-Gefolge (an SS cousin organization for women). A few entered the service this way, attracted to the promise of light physical work and good wages. But countless young women were recruited under stronger incentives from SS officials. They were told to choose between continuing their menial position indefinitely or joining the SS. The position of a women guard paid well, and in 1944 an unmarried women guard in her mid-twenties could make considerably more than she could as a textile worker. By 1943, the Reich Labour Ministry was empowered to conscript women between 17 and 45 years of age for labour service, and by the end of that year, most of the women reporting for concentration camp training were conscripts.
Ravensbrück served as the main training ground for some 3,700 female guards after 1938. Trainees spent anywhere from a week to six months at the camp, at first being given regulated instruction from the Head Overseer. The trainees were taught the standard regulations applicable to all concentration camps, ‘how to detect sabotage and work slowdowns, how to prevent escapes, and how to punish prisoners within the parameters of camp regulations’. It was emphasized that female guards were to have no relationship of a personal nature with any of the prisoners. The guards were notoriously cruel. Yet not all women became accustomed to brutality. On the contrary, some were sympathetic to the needs of the prisoners. However, those that deviated from the standard mentality often faced despair and were severely punished as a result of their insubordination. In the eyes of their superiors their ultimate aim was to gradually accustom the recruits to the brutality of camp life, step by step. The nicknames given to some of the guards, such as the ‘Beast of Auschwitz’ and the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’, are clear evidence of the success of this process. The simple-mindedness of some of the female guards made them more amenable to torment and kill the ‘racially impure’. The internal structure of the individual concentration camps they would be sent to, all involved a method of mistreating the prisoners. The code of conduct for these female guards was based upon the SS demand for blind and absolute obedience to all orders from superior officers, and upon their insistence that each prisoner be regarded with fanatical hatred as an enemy of the state. By exhorting the women guards to constantly hate the prisoners, and simultaneously by buttressing this hatred with the legality of orders, they were enabled to mete out the harshest punishments to the prisoners.