Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944

How did "ordinary women," like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder examines the daily work of twenty-eight women employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration and death camp in Poland. The author analyzes Nazi records, court testimony, memoirs, and film interviews to illuminate the guards' social backgrounds, careers, and motives as well as their day-to-day lives on the "job."