Gender and Power in a Nazi Concentration Camp : The Ravensbruck Female Medical Personnel

Drawing on a rich corpus of contemporary and post-war sources – including personal letters and legal documentation – this open access book illuminates the roles of eleven female doctors and nurses at a camp for female prisoners in Nazi Germany. While it may seem unthinkable that medical staff worked in a place of death and suffering, Kate Docking looks at how female medical personnel were hired to work at Ravensbrück concentration camp from September 1939 until its liberation by the Allies in April 1945, highlighting why many women sought jobs there.
Examining the experiences of these women from a gendered perspective, Gender and Power in a Nazi Concentration Camp sheds new light on the role of female medical personnel during the Nazi era. Though the Ravensbrück female medical personnel committed atrocities, the majority were not brought to justice. Docking underscores how stereotypes of femininity as ‘naturally innocent’ helped to allow women involved in Nazi crimes to continue their lives peacefully after the war.
This ground-breaking book demonstrates the need for gender to be considered in explanations of how Nazi persecution was able to happen.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, University of Hamburg, Germany.