A secretary would open mail, type reports, edit publications, and relay communications between Nazi officials. The proportion of women in the Gestapo offices was high, reaching forty percent. The legions of secretaries who kept the mass murder machinery functioning were 18 to 25 years old. They were accomplices by typing up orders facilitation the robbery, deportation, and mass murder of Jews (Lower, 2013, pp. 55). They did this with the knowledge that they were contributing to the goal of total extermination of the Jews. One secretary, Liselotte Meier, participated in the planning of massacres and was present at several shootings. Witnesses describe her as the most knowledgeable person they knew, “better informed than many officials in the station.” Meier also joined her colleagues on Sunday morning hunting trips, with Jews as the targets (Lower, 2013, pp. 107). In Nazi Women: The Attraction of Evil, author Paul Roland explains the huge contribution of secretaries. Most of these secretaries were privy to information. Private correspondence of Gerda Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, reveals that she knew detailed knowledge about genocide and supported the Final Solution. She embraced the idea with enthusiasm, and there were many others like her (2014, pp. 2323). Twenty-year-old secretary year-old Johanna Altvater grew tired of …show more content…
Lower provides the information that by the war’s end, ten percent of camp personnel were female, and at least 3,500 women were trained as guards. Those who volunteered for this gruesome work saw these places as a place of employment and opportunity. The uniform was striking, the pay was decent, and the prospect of wielding power was alluring. Some of the women who became guards had criminal records of their own or were prisoners who transferred to guard duty as compulsory labor duty (2013, pp. 21-2). According to Roland, over 3,600 women worked as guards in concentration and extermination camps, only 60 were brought to trial and only 20 executed. These women were armed with wooden clubs that they used to brutalize and they trained dogs to attack defenseless prisoners (2014, pp.