Description: How did "ordinary women," like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder examines the daily work of twenty-eight women employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration and death camp in Poland. The author analyzes Nazi records, court testimony, memoirs, and film interviews to illuminate the guards' social backgrounds, careers, and motives as well as their day-to-day lives on the "job."
Review Quotes: "The book demonstrates that young women often acted to a considerable degree on their own initiative to ensure the functioning of an extermination camp. . . . By elucidating the horrific 'workaday routines' of these female perpetrators in Majdanek and confronting the abysmal anthropological depths of a topic that is still taboo, the author helps to reconstruct how the murder of Europe's Jews could become reality."
--Bernward Dörner, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung