Rebecca Cordony

Following an initial absence, studies concerning the roles of Nazi women and gender have recently emerged in histories of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Despite these advances, female perpetrators remain relatively understudied, overshadowed by distorted and sensationalised representations of female violence and deviance in popular consciousness.

The most common of these stereotypes, the sexually voracious and monstrous “Female Nazi”, first appeared during the Allied (British and American) press coverage of the liberation of the concentration camps and the Nazi war crimes trials that followed. This thesis seeks to both broaden understandings of the multiples ways in which women were in fact complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich and also to examine the preferential ways in which female perpetrators of the Holocaust have (or have not) been represented across time and modality since (including post-war trials, press and media, popular culture and the memorial museum context). Implicit in such an analysis is the consideration of the ways perpetrators more broadly (i.e. males) are represented, as are other representations of females and gender across these sources.

This work hypothesises that female perpetrators, either through their literal absence or comparative marginalisation are represented in a particular (erroneous) gender normative narrative. In this way, men are designated as perpetrators (life-takers) and women are overwhelmingly designated as victims (life-givers).

Within such a framework female violence and complicity is either absent or represented as aberration. These representations curate a collective, public, cultural narrative that feeds ontological security, whose stability is owing to a particular set of factors that shape ways of seeing and knowing, that are grounded in principles of gender normativity.

This research aims to call attention to a relatively neglected area in Holocaust scholarship and pursues a canon corrective. Through unpicking the misrepresentational stereotypes that tend to sexualise, marginalise or ignore female violence, in order to dispel the notion that female political agency and participation in state sanctioned atrocity is somehow extra-ordinary. The correct and visible representation of the multifarious manifestations of female violence and complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich have the ability to commence a reshaping and reconfiguring of a hitherto largely unchallenged and enduring discourse surrounding female violence and political agency. This reconfiguration would compel Holocaust education and popular conceptualisations of perpetrator motivation and behaviour and contribute to understandings of female violence in contemporaneous state-sanctioned crimes.

To date, this research has utilised a broad and diverse collection of materials. Primary sources utilised include trial transcripts from multiple war crimes trials (under the auspices of the United States, Britain, West Germany), press articles and news reels (produced by global press outlets and disseminated from the moments of liberation and concurrent with relevant legal trials), official photographic and film evidence  roduced by the Allies, Nazi propaganda, cinematic feature length film and documentary and survivor testimony (accessed in the USC archive and others) and analysis of exhibitions in museum and memorial spaces. Secondary source material is equally diverse, but below is a summary of key sources utilised in the initial chapters of this work, indicating breadth and depth and potential for multi-disciplinary contribution to the field.

Citation Summary

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