Daily Life
Relations between SS men and female guards are said to have existed in many of the camps, and Heinrich Himmler had told the SS men to regard the female guards as equals and comrades. At the relatively small Helmbrechts subcamp near Hof, Germany, the camp commandant, Doerr, openly pursued a sexual relationship with the head female overseer Helga Hegel.
Corruption was another aspect of the female guard culture. Ilse Koch, known as "the witch of Buchenwald", was the chief female guard at the Buchenwald camp, and at the same time married to the camp commandant, Karl Koch. Both were rumoured to have embezzled millions of Reichmarks, for which Karl Koch was convicted and executed by the Nazis a few weeks before Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Army; however, Ilse was cleared of guilt. On a side note, some sources speculate that she had had the witnesses in Buchenwald murdered.
Despite their reputation for brutality, there were certainly some who were relatively kind. Klara Kunig became a camp guard in the middle of 1944 and served at Ravensbruck and its subcamp at Dresden-Universelle. The head wardress at the camp pointed out that she was too polite and too kind towards the inmates, resulting in her subsequent dismissal from camp duty in January 1945. Her fate has been unknown since February 13, 1945, the date of the allied firebombing of Dresden. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, one Aufseherin was found guilty of aiding inmates illegally, and the chief overseer ordered her punished; her fellow guards were forced to give her twenty-five lashes.
Read more about this topic: Female Guards In Nazi Concentration Camps
Famous quotes related to daily life:
“Dutch painting: daily life is enough.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An entertainment is something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life. It makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries; it interrupts our conscious thoughts and habits, rests our nerves and minds, though it may incidentally exhaust our bodies. Art, on the other hand, though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)