Gender and Power in a Nazi Concentration Camp

Drawing on a rich and varied corpus of contemporary and post-war sources – including personal letters, legal documentation, camp regulations, and survivor memoirs – this open access book reveals extraordinary detail about the lives of eleven female doctors and nurses employed at the only camp for women prisoners in Nazi Germany. While it may seem unthinkable that medical staff worked in a place of death and suffering, Kate Docking looks at how female medical personnel were hired to work at the camp from September 1939 until its liberation by the Allies in April 1945, highlighting how many women in fact actively sought jobs there.

Examining the motivations of these women to work at Ravensbrück, their recruitment, and their behaviour – including their participation in human experiments – from a gendered perspective, Gender and Power in a Nazi Concentration Camp sheds new light on the role of female medical personnel during the Nazi era. Though the Ravensbrück female medical personnel committed atrocities, the majority were not brought to justice in the post-war period, and prosecutors instead portrayed them as victims of the male-dominated Third Reich. By analysing the victimisation narrative, Docking underscores how stereotypes of femininity as ‘naturally innocent’ allowed women involved in Nazi crimes to continue their lives peacefully after the war. This ground-breaking book shows how gender ideals influenced not only the post-war treatment of the Ravensbrück female medical personnel but also their behaviour at the camp, demonstrating the clear need for gender to be considered in explanations of how the Holocaust was able to happen in the process.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, University of Hamburg, Germany.