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

Mailänder's extraordinary book, originally published in Germany and funded for translation by a consortium of authorities despite their own past participation, peers deep into the ugly heart of Nazi brutality. The horrors of the concentration camps have been previously examined from all sides: the survivors, architects, governments--even, on rare occasions, through the eyes of the Nazi guards (Rudolf Hoss, Peri Broad, and Johann Kremer, KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS, 1978, and editors Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, The "Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, 1991), but little work has been done on SS women in a concentration camp. This worthy book shows how frighteningly easy it was for some 28 low-level SS working women to go from their unit's creation in 1939 at the Ravensbrück women's camp to their unexpected transfer in the summer of 1942 to the Majdanek camp. Make no mistake, these are women whose already brutal behavior was molded by the "feminine culture" at Ravensbrück. Once they were transferred to the unregulated horrors of the eastern front, their behavior was amplified by competing male comrades to produce one of the worst death camps in Poland. Their story is a terrifying insight into the corruption of the Third Reich. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Arnold Paul Krammer, Texas A&M University