Female Guards Tried Today
Not tried but deported by the US Justice Department was 84-year-old San Francisco resident Elfriede Lina Rinkel, who hid her secret for more than 60 years from her family, friends and Jewish German husband Fred. Rinkel fled to the US after the Second World War seeking a better life.
The last trial of a female overseer was held in 1996. Former Aufseherin Luise Danz, who served as overseer in January 1943 at Plaszow, then at Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and at the Ravensbrück subcamp at Malchow as Oberaufseherin, was tried at the first Auschwitz Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. In 1956, she was released for good behavior. In 1996, she was once again tried for the murder of a young woman in Malchow at the end of the war. The doctor overseeing the trial told the court that the proceedings were too much for the elderly woman and all charges were dropped. As of 2011, Danz is still alive at the age of 94.
In 1996, a story broke in Germany about Margot Pietzner (married name Kunz), a former Aufseherin from Ravensbruck, the Belzig subcamp and a subcamp at Wittenberg. She was originally sentenced to death by a Soviet court but it commuted to a life sentence and she was released in 1956. In the early 1990s, at the age of seventy-four, Margot was awarded the title "Stalinist victim" and given 64,350 Deutsche Marks (32,902 Euros). Many historians argued that she had lied and did not deserve the money. She had, in fact, served time in a German prison which was overseen by the Soviets, but she was imprisoned because she had served brutally in the ranks of three concentration camps. Pietzner currently lives in a small town in northern Germany.
The only female guard to tell her story to the public has been Herta Bothe, who served as a guard at Ravensbrück in 1942, then at Stutthof, Bromberg-Ost subcamp, and finally in Bergen-Belsen. She received ten years' imprisonment, and was released in the mid-1950s. In an interview in 2004, Bothe was asked if she regretted being a guard in a concentration camp. Her response was, "What do you mean? ...I made a mistake, no... The mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it - otherwise I would have been put into it myself, that was my mistake."
Read more about this topic: Female Guards In Nazi Concentration Camps
Famous quotes containing the words female, guards and/or today:
“If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside of time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)