Between 1939 and 1945, around 10% of concentration camp guards were women, yet these Aufseherinnen (overseers) as they were known, barely feature in Holocaust history or literature. On the few occasions they do appear, it is most commonly as a masculinised sadist when the reality was much more complex.

I first became interested in the Aufseherinnen after reading a New York Times article about Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the first person to be extradited from America for Nazi war crimes, and decided to write a novel around her story. In the camps she earned the nickname “the Mare” – which would become the title of my novel – because she was known to kick prisoners to death. After the war, she fled to Vienna and faded into obscurity.

In 1957, American engineer Russell Ryan met Braunsteiner while holidaying in Austria. She did not tell him about her past. They fell in love, married and moved to New York, where they lived quiet lives until she was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Russell could not believe she had been a Nazi concentration camp guard. His wife, he said, “would not hurt a fly”.

Despite discovering everything Braunsteiner had done, Russell Ryan stuck by her through her extradition, trial and imprisonment – she was sentenced to life in 1981 and served 15 years in a German prison before being released on medical grounds in 1996. Hermine Braunsteiner died in 1999 at the age of 79.

The questions this story raised led me to a doctorate at the University of Sydney, in which I examined the history and representation of the Aufseherinnen. My new novel The Mare is the result of this work.

Women and brutality

In the post-war years, the overwhelming narrative was that all German women were victims of Nazism. The Aufseherinnen did not conform to the categorisation, so were written off as gender-defying monsters. For example, in Charlotte Delbo’s memoir Auschwitz and After:

All along the Lagerstrasse, a double row of the camp’s female personnel, SS women, female prisoners wearing armbands and blouses of every color and every rank, stood there, armed with walking sticks, clubs, straps, belts, lashes, whips, ready to flail and scourge whatever passed between the two rows.

Another post-war trope was to link female guards to sexual deviance. In Five Chimneys: The True Chronicle of a Woman Who Survived Auschwitz, Olga Lengyel depicts Aufseherin Irma Grese (who was a guard at Birkenau and Belsen) in a sexualised, predatory way:

The beautiful Irma Griese [sic] advanced toward the prisoners with a swinging gait, her hips in play, and the eyes of forty thousand wretched women, mute and motionless, upon her … The mortal terror which her presence inspired visibly pleased her … Those who, despite hunger and torture, still evidenced a glimmer of their former physical beauty were the first to be taken. They were Irma Griese’s special targets.

Grese appears again in Martin Amis’ novel, The Zone of Interest, published in 2014. Amis combines the caricature of the masculine woman with the pornography of Stalag fiction that proliferated in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s:

I found I was gazing at Ilse with all the freshness of discovery: the strong legs mannishly wide-planted, the hefty trunk in a black serge uniform gullibly studded with signs and symbols – lightning flash, eagle, broken cross.

In the 1960s, a more complex understanding of Holocaust perpetrators beyond innate sadists began to emerge. German historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Eichmann trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, concluded that Adolf Eichmann was driven by “sheer thoughtlessness”, an unquestioning detachment from his evil acts.

Historian Christopher Browning expanded this theory in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, outlining other motivating factors: job security, peer pressure, acclimatisation to violence, being plied with alcohol.

In his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, author and academic Daniel Goldhagen disagreed, finding “eliminationist antisemitism” the main cause of genocide.

Historians Claudia Koonz and Gisela Bock extended this discussion into female perpetration, in what became known as the Historikerinnenstreit (quarrel among female historians). Koonz (an American) asserted that German women were complicit in the Holocaust, while Bock (a German) insisted they had no power beyond the domestic sphere.

The truth is less binary. While Nazism was indeed sexist, women were undoubtedly involved in perpetration.

The only literary portrait of an Aufseherin in any depth is Hanna Schmitz in Bernhard Schlink’s award-winning novel The Reader. Hanna’s illiteracy is a metaphor for the “unthinkingness” of Nazi crimes discussed by Arendt. However, Schlink gives us no access to Hanna’s consciousness, so any other motivation remains a mystery.

German historians such as Sabine Arend and Simone Erpel have begun to explore the Aufseherinnen with nuance. It’s now thought most were ordinary women who took the job for the high pay but, once in the camps, acclimatised fast to brutality. Political prisoner Germaine Tillion describes the speed of this process in her memoir Ravensbrück:

One little Aufseherin, twenty years old, who had so little knowledge that she said “excuse me” when walking in front of a prisoner, and who was visibly frightened by the first round of brutality she saw, needed exactly four days to adjust her tone and procedures, although it was totally new to her.

This historical nuance does not exist yet in fiction. Robert Eaglestone hypothesises that writers “swerve” away from perpetrator ordinariness, afraid they will be accused of sympathising with the devil.

I attempt to address this in my work because, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Modernity and the Holocaust: “The most frightening news brought about by the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.”

The true horror of genocide is found in the similarity between us and the perpetrators, not in the difference.