Johanna Langefeld
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (September 2017) |
Johanna Langefeld | |
---|---|
Born | Johanna May 1900-03-05 |
Died | 1974-01-26 Augsburg, Germany |
Nationality | German |
Occupation | Concentration camp guard |
Johanna Langefeld (née May; 5 March 1900, Kupferdreh, Germany – 26 January 1974) was a
Early life and Nazism
Born in Kupferdreh (now Essen, Germany), Johanna May was brought up in a Lutheran, nationalistic family alongside a sister. She was named after a German heroine figure, Johanna Stegen. Her father was a blacksmith. Her parents instilled her and her sister with values of strict discipline and Kinder, Küche, Kirche.[1]: 6
In 1924, she moved to Mülheim and married Wilhelm Langefeld, who died in 1926 of lung disease. In 1928, Langefeld fell pregnant with another man, left him soon afterward,[1]: 7 and moved to Düsseldorf, where her son, Herbert Langefeld, was born that August.
Langefeld was unemployed until age 34, when she began to teach
Atrocities in Nazi concentration camps
This section relies largely or entirely on a single source. (September 2017) |
In March 1938, Langefeld applied for a job as a camp guard in the first
She was in charge of the selections in Ravensbrück during the so-called
Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, recalled his contact with Johanna Langefeld as follows:
The chief female supervisor of the period, Frau Langefeld, was in no way capable of coping with the situation, yet she refused to accept any instructions given her by the leader of the protective custody camp. Acting on my own initiative, I simply put the women's camp under his jurisdiction.
During the visit of Himmler on 18 July 1942, Langefeld tried to get him to annul this order. In fact, Rudolf Höss admitted after the war that “the Reichsführer SS absolutely refused” his order and that he wished “a women's camp to be commanded by a woman”. Himmler ordered that Langefeld should stay in charge of the women's camp and that in the future, no SS man should enter the female camp.
That month, the Auschwitz women's camp was moved to
Maria Mandl became the new Oberaufseherin of the women's prisoner camp in Auschwitz. Oswald Pohl instructed the Chief of Department D of his SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, Richard Glücks, to order that duties of protective custody camp leaders in the Women's Camps be executed thereafter by the female superintendents, the Oberaufseherinnen.
Trial, later life and death
On 20 December 1945, Langefeld was arrested by the
Personality and brutality
Langefeld had a complicated view of contemporary German gender roles. Though she was raised with the belief women should be subordinate to men and was attracted to Hitler for his endorsement of such ideas, she also pushed against patriarchal relationships in her professional life. She strongly believed her life would have been better had she been born male.[1]: 2 Growing up, she idolized Eleonore Prochaska, a historical German woman who dressed as a man to fight in the War of the Sixth Coalition.[1]: 6
Though she held some degree of sympathy toward the prisoners under her charge and believed herself to have had a connection with Buber-Neumann, she was also passionately antisemitic, visibly scowled when looking at Jewish prisoners,[1]: 2 and never complained about the killing of Jews in the Holocaust.[4] She hated Koegel's disciplinary methods of long, gratuitous beatings, but her own methods were also violent: imposing strict rules either impossible to obey or resulting in long periods of discomfort and having guards kick and slap prisoners for infractions to keep them constantly on their toes. Langefeld herself would sometimes slap prisoners for emphasis.[1]: 19, 25, 52 However, she never struck prisoners out of anger.[4]
See also
Further reading
- Johannes Schwartz, Das Selbstverständnis Johanna Langefelds als SS-Oberaufseherin, in: Ulrich Fritz, Silvija Kavčič, Nicole Warmbold (ed.): Tatort KZ, Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager, Ulm 2003, pp. 71–95.
- Johannes Schwartz, Geschlechterspezifischer Eigensinn von NS-Täterinnen am Beispiel der KZ-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld, in: Viola Schubert-Lehnhardt (ed.),Frauen als Täterinnen im Nationalsozialismus, Protokollband der Fachtagung vom 17.-18. September 2004 in Bernburg, im Auftrag des Kultur- und Bildungsvereins Elbe-Saale e.V. in Sachsen-Anhalt, Gerbstadt 2005, pp. 56–82, ISBN 3-00-017407-9.
- Johannes Schwartz, Handlungsoptionen von KZ-Aufseherinnen. Drei alltags- und geschlechtergeschichtliche Fallstudien, in: Helgard Kramer (ed.), NS-Täter aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive, Martin Meidenbauer Verlag, München 2006, S. 349-374.
References
- ^ ISBN 034912003X.
- ^ Albert Langen—Georg Müller, Milena—Kafkas Freundin, Verlag, Munich, 1977
- ^ Langefeld escape info, wysokieobcasy.pl; accessed 2 September 2017.(in Polish)
- ^ a b Jurkow, Wladek (co-director); Rohde-Dahl, Gerburg (co-director) (2019-10-16). The Case of Johanna Langefeld (Motion picture) (in German and Polish). Poland, Germany.