German History page 1 of 2 © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. Book Review Gewalt im Dienstalltag: Die SS-Aufseherinnen des Konzentrations-und Vernichtungslagers Majdanek 1942–1944. By Elissa Mailänder Koslov. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. 2009. 520 pp. €35 (hardback). No concentration camp memorial exhibition is now complete without a section on the guards. Names, mugshots and grisly details of their crimes are presented for the appalled fascination of the visitors; so well established have these perpetrator displays become that they are increasingly themselves the object of research. Yet rarely is the attempt made to explain why the individuals on show committed these infamous crimes. The same absence is all too often mirrored in the historical literature. The historiography of the perpetrators in the Nazi camps has barely begun to shift in emphasis from the commandants—analysed in Karin Orth’s milestone study—towards the rank-and-file guards in daily, and frequently violent, contact with the prisoners. Such literature as there is on the individuals lower down the chain of command tends towards commemoration of the crimes rather than their analysis, with the perpetrators consequently remaining largely faceless monsters, acting upon atavistic urges towards brutality. Studies that seek systematically to explain why guards committed their violent acts are thus few and far between. For this reason alone, Elissa Mailänder Koslov’s book represents an important milestone. Drawing above all on postwar trial records archived in Düsseldorf, she reconstructs the experience and motivations of the twenty-eight female ‘overseers’ (Aufseherinnen) of the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, from their training period at Ravensbrück to the evacuation of Majdanek in April 1944. The predictably self-exculpatory utterances of the women as defendants, decades after the fact, are balanced where possible with the views of their luckless charges in their memoirs and witness statements. An introductory section recapitulating Majdanek’s place in both the camp system and the wider Nazi wartime policies of occupation and genocide gives way to one of the most fascinating sections of Mailänder Koslov’s study. Analysing how the women came to the camp, she shows that, while in the last two years of the war the Waffen-SS recruited women directly ‘from the conveyor belt’ of the factories in which they worked (p. 120), they could rely in the first years of the war upon women having chosen to volunteer. Overwhelmingly from the working class or the lower middle class, most had been unskilled domestic labourers or factory workers, lacking the opportunity to learn the skills that might have allowed for broader career prospects. At the time of their recruitment, most were also single, widowed or otherwise separated from their partners, and thus in need of work to support themselves; two of the women, as single mothers, had the added pressure of needing to provide for children. None of this is presented in order to excuse the women under study, but rather as an indication that the women sought and perceived in employment as an Aufseherin ‘an opportunity for upward social mobility and financial betterment’, with discontent with their current job—often monotonous assembly-line work—or their unemployment ‘decisive’ in their decision to volunteer; ‘the primary reason’ these women joined, Mailänder Koslov states, ‘was a financial one’ (p. 133). Promises of privileges and better working conditions than they were used to, status as employees of the Reich, job security and an above average wage for women of their class all made the prospect seem still more attractive. The author concludes that for only one of the women is ‘political motivation’ to be assumed, and this on the basis of her devotion to the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM). She acknowledges that, thanks to the obvious incentives for the women to downplay their commitment to the Nazi cause in the post-1945 courtroom, the paucity of the sources makes it hard to discern how great a role ideological grounds might have played in volunteering for Majdanek. The author similarly German History Advance Access published March 7, 2011 at Birkbeck College on March 31, 2011 gh.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from