| The psychology of these women is what is interesting. The female camp guards were uneducated, from humble backgrounds, and found that their new jobs-as slave camp and death camp supervisors-gave them some sort of status for the first time in their lives. The guard jobs also gave them some sort of power for the first time in their lives. Not unexpectedly, many of these women abused their powers.
Look at the dull, disturbed eyes of the women guards presented in the photos. Look at the blank, hardened, flabby faces. They are of a 'type' easily recognized even today, seven decades after the concentration camps were dismantled.
We encounter women like this every day in America, women from the bottom of the socio-economic order who work in low-level jobs in which they are granted some limited powers over persons who would otherwise never associate with them. Everyone recognizes this 'type' in an instant. We see them in school systems, in court houses, at the Department of Motor Vehicles. They often delight in their new-found authority over persons who otherwise would not give them the time of day. These women are generally of low intelligence, overweight, unattractive and abusive-and often evince qualities of the sociopath and psychopath.
As a practicing attorney, I have been called upon, frequently, to deal with modern-day recreations of this type. In fact, once I had to deal with a ghastly women who was a dead ringer for the original Ilse Koch-and this modern-day Ilse Koch was even called 'the Bitch of Buchenwald' by persons who knew her. I have never forgotten it.
In a homeowner association in Fairfax County, Virginia, right outside of Washington, D.C., the local property manager IS Ilse Koch. She looks like Ilse Koch, she acts like Ilse Koch. She has been openly known to Sully II residents as 'The Bitch Of Buchenwald' for twenty years. The property manager must be a clone of Ilse Koch-she even dresses inappropriately and provocatively, as did Koch.
Some time ago, I represented a Sully II client in which this modern-day Ilse Koch showed up at a hearing wearing a body-hugging gray T-shirt without undergarments, exposing her nipples, which were disfigured. It was unbelievable. It was revolting. It was sickening. The first thing that came to mind the minute I saw this pig-faced woman was 'The people who live in Sully II are right-this woman IS the Bitch Of Buchenwald. Ilse Koch has been reincarnated'.
So we must be careful not to attribute the existence of such appalling women to Germany, or to particular times and events.
Such women are still with us. They are everywhere, in all cultures, in all societies. |
