Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust

One. Equality, Neutrality, Particularity: Perspectives on Women and the Holocaust

ONE Equality, Neutrality, Particularity: Perspectives on Women and the Holocaust John K. Roth The mother stood there facing the grave. A German walked up to the woman and asked: “Whom shall I shoot first?” When she did not answer, he tore her daughter from her hands. The child cried out and was killed. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? Gertrud Kolmar, “The Woman Poet” At frequent intervals, especially after a severe typhus epidemic broke out at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the summer of 1942, an Auschwitz truck went to Dessau, Germany. It returned with large quantities of 200-gram, hermetically sealed tin canisters. They contained Zyklon-Blausäure, or Zyklon B, whose trade name—meaning “cyclone”—also referred to prussic acid, which in German is called Blausäure because it produces deep blue stains. In the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Zyklon B crystals would asphyxiate more than a million Jews.1 A powerful pesticide developed during World War I, Zyklon B was used to combat contagious disease by fumigating lice-infested buildings. First used at Auschwitz in July 1940, it initially served those purposes in that vast camp complex, where overcrowded barracks, malnutrition, and poor sanitation made dysentery, typhoid fever, and especially typhus constant threats. By the late summer of 1941, however, much more 5 6 John K. Roth destructive uses for Zyklon B were found. Experiments on Soviet POWs confirmed that Zyklon B’s vaporizing pellets offered a particularly reliable and efficient way to advance the Final Solution. Two German companies—Degesch, or the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (The German Vermin-combating Corporation ) and Tesch and Stabenow Verlag—profited immensely by supplying Zyklon B to the SS and the German army. They even modified it for Auschwitz by removing the special odor that ordinarily warned people about their product’s deadly presence. Especially in 1942 and 1943, Auschwitz used tons of Zyklon B. Most of it went to conventional fumigation , but there was plenty left to pour into gas chambers packed with Jews. Once exposed to properly heated air—bodies tightly packed in the gas chambers helped to ensure that the temperature was right—the crystals produced lethal gas. Minutes later its human victims were dead. One of the particular burdens of the Holocaust is that the Zyklon B trucked from Dessau to Auschwitz-Birkenau was used to murder hundreds of thousands of Jewish women. That number soars into the millions when the death toll includes the Jewish women who were killed at the Holocaust’s other major death camps—Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek—as well as in the Third Reich’s concentration camps and ghettos. In the most basic way, of course, the Holocaust’s killing drew no distinctions among Jews: Hitler and his followers intended oblivion for them all—every man, woman, and child. That fact incited Gabriel Schoenfeld’s blast against what he called “the voguish hybrid known as gender studies,” whose practitioners, he argued, were committing “the worst excess of all on today’s campuses” when it came to what he labeled “witless and malicious theorizing” about the Holocaust.2 Numerous Holocaust scholars—men and women alike—took vigorous exception to Schoenfeld’s position.3 I argued that sound Holocaust teaching and research must concentrate on the particularity of the Holocaust , for the evil—and the good—exists in the details. Therefore, study about what happened to women is legitimate and necessary in Holocaust Studies. Some years ago, the students in my own Holocaust courses drove home this point for me by asking questions about women during the Holocaust years. I will return to these points in more detail, but one result was Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, a volume I edited with Carol Rittner. Although Schoenfeld mentioned this book, there was no evidence at the time that he had studied it with much care. Drawing on survivor testimony and the insightful, at times controversial , work of pioneering scholars, Different Voices takes a position that Equality, Neutrality, Particularity 7 is representative of most teaching and scholarship about women in the Holocaust. Supporting the pioneering efforts by significant scholars such as Joan Ringelheim, Myrna Goldenberg, Dalia Ofer, Lenore Weitzman , and others, its position is that the hell was the same for Jewish women and men during the Holocaust, but the horrors were frequently...