Female Administrators of the Third Reich

Abstract

' was a secretary who worked for the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), or the Reich Security Main Office of Nazi Germany. Gerda obtained the job after she had finished commercial college, motivated by the desire to avoid her Pflichtjahr, the compulsory year of domestic or agricultural service that women under the age of 25 in the Third Reich were compelled to complete. During her time at the RSHA, Gerda worked for several different departments, including counterintelligence and the Department for Polish Affairs. Her secretarial duties were seemingly innocuous: she answered the phone, typed letters, and sent telegrams. However, through performing these duties, Gerda-and indeed the thousands of other women who worked as administrators for the Third Reich-played a part in facilitating the Holocaust. In her meticulously researched book, Rachel Century demonstrates that these secretaries typed lists of Jews to be deported to concentration camps-a job that ultimately enabled the Holocaust to occur. Yet, in spite of their role as facilitators of the genocide, female administrators have received little attention by historians. Century remedies this in her study, producing an eye-opening, analytical and highly nuanced book that sheds light on the 'ordinary women' who administrated for the regime. The key strength of the monograph lies in its breaking of new historiographical ground. The overriding theme that permeates Century's book is whether the women who administrated for the Third Reich were 'victims' or 'perpetrators' of the regime. Here, the author engages with the Historikerinnenstreit, or 'quarrel amongst historians of women' of the 1980s. Claudia Koonz argued that women were perpetrators of Nazism, as they 'made possible a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as motherly'.(1) She suggests that women contributed to the stability of the Nazi regime, as they provided men with love and reassurance after a day of killing.(2) Koonz's contention aroused an evocative response from Gisela Bock, who argued that women were not perpetrators of Nazism but victims, since they suffered due to the racist and sexist policies of the regime.(3) Century argues that female administrators were not 'perpetrators in the classical sense' in that they maimed or killed others, which raises wider questions about how we define a 'perpetrator'. However, the author contends that these women were hardly victims of the Third Reich either: while their gender made them subordinate to men, some were able to challenge the regime's expectations of women by obtaining positions of responsibility or questioning their duties. Ultimately, Century resists grouping female administrators into the categories of 'victims' or 'perpetrators', and contends instead that women in Nazi Germany must be considered as individuals, like men, who have

Entre lo monstruoso y el contorno de lo humano. Una contribución histórico-estética al debate acerca de la representación de víctimas y victimarios en el espacio público

“…[…] [E]ste discurso que rodea a las perpetradoras corre el riesgo de minimizar la agencia de las mujeres en la comisión de actos de violencia política, al extremo de que estos discursos presentan a las perpetradoras como manipuladas para realizar actos de violencia contra su voluntad, ya sea por miedo o a través de un proceso de adoctrinamiento que ellas no pudieron o no quisieron resistir" (Knittel et al 2017, 8). Ver al respecto Harvey (2003), Rowland (2013), Century (2017) y Luhmann (2018. gura.…”

Surveillance, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Anonymity in Democratic Kampuchea

“…And many such institutions are very much anonymous. But as historical accounts of the Nazi Gestapo, Soviet KGB, or East German Stasi demonstrate, bureaucracies can and often do function with deadly efficiency (Knight 1988;Lozowick 2002;Epstein 2004;Century 2017).…”