‘Sadistic female guard brought to justice’;1 ‘Danger women’;2 ‘Nazi she-devils’;3 ‘The bitches of Buchenwald’;4 ‘Mother of Atrocities’;5 The Beautiful Beast;6 Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS.7 These headlines and titles come from media outlets and academic publications. Their purpose is to shock and attract the public, stirring prurient interest and grabbing attention with the horror of the crimes, the terror of the genocidal regimes and the gender of the actors involved – but they send other messages as well. While male violence is frequently normalised and even expected in certain situations, female violence both repels and attracts since it contradicts the traditional view of women as peacemakers and life-givers.8
1 Michael Leidig, ‘Sadistic female guard brought to justice’, Sunday Express, 25 September 2005.
2 Yvonne Roberts, ‘Danger women’, Evening Standard, 1 February 2006.
3 Clare Raymond, ‘Nazi she-devils’, Mirror, 11 November 2005.
4 Tony Rennell, ‘Bitches of Buchenwald’, Daily Mail. 24 January 2009.
5 Carrie Sperling. ‘Mother of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s role in the Rwandan Genocide’, Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. 33 (Jan 2006).
6 Daniel Patrick Brown, The Beautiful Beast: The Life and Crimes of SS-Aufseherin Irma Grese, (Ventura, Cal.: Golden West Historical Publications, 1996).
7 Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, DVD, directed by Don Edmonds, (Hollywood: Cambist Films, 1975).
8 Georgie Ann Weatherby, Jamie Blanche, Gonzaga Rebecca Jones, ‘The Value of Life:
Female killers and the feminine mystique’, Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice Research and Education, Vol. 2; 1, 2008.
Study of the participation of women in militarised positions and the perpetration of genocide has grown during the last few decades, capturing the attention of academic, legal and media circles, a combined outgrowth of surging interest in women’s and genocide studies. This is certainly a welcome development, but what exactly are the messages they are communicating?
Furthermore, what are the repercussions of these portrayals? Do they generate further discourse and understanding of female perpetrators? Or do they impede further consideration and study due to their reliance on preconceived notions that determine portrayals and understanding?
Unlike male perpetrators, who have been the focus of intensive social, psychological and historical investigations, women are generally overlooked or even relegated to the sidelines.9 Nearly every major study has focused on men, leaving unclear any understanding of how women respond to the militarisation and brutalisation associated with genocide.10 While the press and public consciousness frequently return to themes of diabolism and sadism when confronting female perpetrators, legal and academic standpoints have developed their own rhetoric, which typically engages a broader, though also flawed, interpretation of women’s roles by suggesting a lack of agency or inherent character flaws. Within both domains extraordinary figures garner the attention, becoming the de-facto representatives for all female
9 There is a voluminous amount of literature dedicated to this subject from the past 70 years. Some of the studies, in order of their publication, that have most influenced the perception of male perpetrators include: Eugon Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, (Munich: Alber, 1946); Theodor W Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J Levinson, R Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Collins, 1950); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963); Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental Overview (New York: Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1974); Phillip G Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York:
Vintage Books, 1997).
10 Notable exceptions to this trend are found in recent studies focusing particularly on Nazi Germany. See Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) and Kathrin Kompisch, Täterinnen: Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2008). Simon Erpel, Jane Caplan, and Irmtraud Heike have also been instrumental in re-integrating female perpetrators back into the history and understanding of the Holocaust with their separate works on the Aufseheinnen. In particular see the edited volumes: Im Gefolge der SS. Aufseherinnen des Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück, Ed. Simone Erpel (Berlin:
Metropol, 2011), and Claus Füllberg-Stolberg and Martina Jung, ect. al, Frauen in Konzentrationslagern, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck (Bremen: Edition Temmen 1994).
perpetrators. This is likely due to the relatively small number of cases and the dearth of information currently available. The result is skewed towards the extreme and thus inhibits further exploration and understanding of why and how females become perpetrators, leading to miscarriages of justice and historical inaccuracies. Extraordinary figures have thus come to represent all cases of female perpetrators, omitting the ‘ordinary’ majority from the historical record, and excusing them, as well as their societies, from having to account for their actions.
The images produced by both popular and academic discourses are often the product of gendered stereotyping, which shares a high degree of sim-ilarity across time and cultures.11 This chapter deconstructs these images and identifies patterns of public perception in order to confront the barriers that have thus far limited our understanding of female perpetrators. When women break traditional gender boundaries by crossing into the masculine realm of violence, the response is polemical, from allegations of unfortunate, uncontrollable madness and hysteria to charges of inherent evil. Both distorted perceptions damage our understanding of who these women were and how they were mobilised to participate in genocide. They adopt a dispositional position, rather than considering the context and situation of their crimes, which is paramount to understanding the warped universe of genocide.
This chapter will examine two different cases in which women played significant roles in the perpetration of genocide or in crimes against humanity: the Aufseherinnen of Nazi Germany and the female genocidaires of Rwanda. While it will briefly consider who these women were, what they did and the context surrounding their behaviours and actions, its primary purpose is to examine how these women are portrayed, considered and remembered in the media and the public consciousness. Their experiences, training, backgrounds and the contexts of their crimes were different, as were the crimes themselves, yet their societies’ responses in both a legal and a media framework remained similar. With a comparative analysis of case studies spanning 50 years and two continents, I demonstrate that societies often create similar images and hold particular discourses in order to address transgressing women who participate in the ‘crime above all crimes’.
Ultimately, these discourses indicate more about the popular reception of violated gender norms than the psychology of female perpetrators.
11 John E Williams and Deborah L Best, Measuring Sex Stereotypes: A Thirty Nation Study (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1982); Todd D Nelson, The Psychology of Prejudice, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson Education, Inc. 2006), 201.
They apply a dispositional explanation, while further relying on extra-ordinary cases to represent all female perpetrators. Female perpetrators are considered unnatural, and are denied the assertion that they are ordinary persons who exercised agency and rationally participated in genocide.
It is important to note that this chapter limits its scope to examining active participants who, in various ways, physically contributed to the genocidal campaign through their active involvement and participation. It will not investigate bystanders and passive defenders, referring to the millions of women who supported the regime or stood by the men who orchestrated and carried out the genocide. Though their support certainly contributed to the resulting tragedy by enabling it to unfold, their experiences and involvement require a different examination.12