Women's Role In The Holocaust

Throughout this class, and other history classes I have taken, there has always been little to no mention of women and the specific roles they have played in the Holocaust compared to the plethora of information about men. For this paper, I am going to compare three different stories about the experiences of women during the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Each woman comes from a different background faced varying degrees of misfortune and terror throughout their lives in Nazi Germany. The first woman, Ilse Landau, was a Jew who went into hiding during the war. Second is Marta Hessler, who was neither a Jew or a Nazi, just an ordinary German citizen who knew little about the mass murder. Finally, I will discuss Ruth Hildenbrand, another ordinary German, but she had more knowledge of what was happening in the Holocaust. Ilse Landau was a German woman born in 1910 to a Jewish department store owner in the town of Düren. She later moved to …show more content…
Typical German women seemed to have knowledge of the mass murder and the poor treatment of Jews. Jewish and non-Jewish women participated in rebellious activities, but seemed to be caught less often, or punished less severely. I was not expecting to find much differentiation between the actions of the genders, because Nazism is not inherently masculine, and neither is rebellion. Men and women were both targets of Hitler, and supporters of Hitler. Both seemed to participate in similar amounts and ways. The only exception would be women acting in the Gestapo, SS, military, or as concentration camp guards. There is no documentation of this occurring, but that is not a guarantee it did not happen, or that if given the choice women would have declined. In conclusion, men and women played similar roles in German society, as Nazis, or as resistors, women only seemed to act less publicly than