Memorial exhibition of the former Ravensbrück camp, 80 kilometers from Berlin, addresses atrocities committed by female guards in support of the ideology of the Third Reich. Few of the forams raised by julgament.
Heavy conscience? Remorso? These feelings were completely foreign to Maria Mandl. "Nothing could be found outside the camp," said the chef of the guard at the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp shortly before her death. She died at the age of 36, in 1948, after being sentenced to death as a war criminal in Krakow.
Her cruel career cannot be missed in the new permanent exhibition of the memorial of the former Ravensbrück concentration camp about the female guards. Because it is the same that the Germans of the self-proclaimed "superior race" are going to have their guards in the concentration camps: loyal and ruthless.
A person like Mandl was destined for high positions under the perverse logic of the Nazi regime. Therefore, after three years in Ravensbrück, she was transferred, in 1942, to the Auschwitz extermination camp. She created the Mädchenorchester, a men's orchestra that has to play during the transport of prisoners and executions.
The Austrian was half-doubted by more than 3,300 female concentration camp guards, who were prepared for their brutal work in Ravensbrück. The field, 80 kilometers north of Berlin, was the training and recruitment center for female guards.
In 1940, when the Second World War had already begun, they became the responsibility of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Hitler's elite assassination unit. See the title of the exhibition, Im Gefolge der SS (Na esteira da SS), conceived for the first time in 2004 and now reorganized and updated. The premises were also carefully guarded: an old concentration camp guard house, next to the old camp. Barely a wall and arame separated it from its 140 thousand victims from 1939 to 1945, most of whom were women, children and adolescents.