Women’s Experiences in Nazi Concentration Camps
Abstract:
People of all ages, mostly men but some women as well, were sent to concentration camps run by the Nazis during the Nazi regime. Men and women could be in separate sections of the same concentration camp, as in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz, but there were also a few camps that held only women, such as Ravensbrück. One characteristic of concentration camps that held women was that societal norms did not apply inside them. There were no such things as “men’s work” and “women’s work,” for example; men and women could be assigned hard physical labor, such as digging and moving gravel. If the circumstances were right, however, men and women could be assigned skilled labor, such as hospital staff. Such assignments were rare, but anyone could be assigned to such jobs, regardless of gender.
There were no concessions made for the modesty of women when they were made to strip out of their clothes, shower and shave in front of male guards upon arrival at the camps either. A woman’s treatment in the concentration camps was more likely to be a result of her race or religion than her gender; for example, a woman’s Jewish identity was likely to be emphasized more than the fact that she was a woman.
However, while men and women had similar experiences in the concentration camps, they were affected differently by them. For example, because of the traditional emphasis on female modesty, women found stripping out of their clothes in front of male guards traumatic in different ways than men might have. Women adapted some coping techniques to their traditional roles in society as caretakers and housekeepers as well; for example, they might swap recipes or sewing patterns to distract themselves from their situation. In these ways women were affected by and coped with their concentration camp experiences in subtly different ways than men.