• Awarded the Herbert Steiner Prize 2008, Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, for outstanding scholarship in the history of fascism

Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder Koslov examines the daily work of female civilians employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the concentration and death camp Lublin/Majdanek. From autumn 1942 to spring 1944, twenty-eight women, who were trained for the purpose in the Ravensbrück camp, worked at Majdanek. With its focus on the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of violence in the workplace of female concentration camp guards, this study fills a significant gap in historical research on female Nazi perpetrators.

»Workaday Violence« reconstructs the women’s career trajectories and analyzes the guard corps’ social composition, with a comparative perspective on male camp guards. A broad spectrum of sources, including contemporary Nazi records and postwar documents such as testimony from camp personnel prosecuted in Germany, interview material, and memoirs, are mined to illuminate the situation, motives, and day-to-day actions of the female Majdanek guards.

Most of these women—the majority single, born around the year 1920, and from less privileged families—viewed guard work as a well-paid, secure job that brought enhanced social status and the benefits offered by the civil service. Some sought a more »adventurous« life far from home. Their duties included roll calls, assigning prisoners to work commandos, supervising them at work and in the cell blocks, and, in some camps, the “selections” of girls and women for death in the gas chambers.

On all levels of command, female SS guards had a certain degree of freedom to interpret orders as they saw fit, and many made considerable use of these possibilities. Elissa Mailänder Koslov scrutinizes daily interactions and conflicts among the female guards, their dealings with male colleagues and superiors, and internal power structures to reconstruct how these factors contributed to the guards’ increasingly brutal treatment of prisoners. Workaday Violence offers valuable insights into how work routines, minor and major »problems« and their resolution, material gratifications, and Nazi propaganda stressing their role in »creating a new order« heightened the female guards identification with Nazi policies, motivated them, and radicalized their behavior. Equipped with an SS uniform and firearms, they experienced a sense of heightened authority, legitimacy, and self-empowerment.

Focusing on the workplace routines of a concentration camp that was also a death camp, this study demonstrates that female SS employees who guarded prisoners in Majdanek not only perpetrated violence when ordered to do so by their superiors. Rather, the complex interactions between various groups within the concentration camp hierarchy and individual propensities shaped local situations in which violence quickly became an ubiquitous phenomenon of workaday life, for female and male guards alike.

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