Gender, Recruitment and Medicine at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, 1939–1942

Abstract

Abstract This article sheds light on how gender intersected with the recruitment of three female doctors to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp in the Third Reich designated to intern only women prisoners. The favourable pay on offer, the prospect of permanent positions and their pre-existing affiliation with Nazi organizations led the female doctors to take jobs at the camp. While these women were hired to work at Ravensbrück as a result of the contemporary belief that women physicians were better suited to treating female patients than were male doctors, this gendered medical ideal was increasingly usurped in the camp hospital. Herta Oberheuser, one of the doctors, performed cruel experiments on female prisoners with venereal diseases and conducted humiliating gynaecological examinations on women arriving at the camp. Ultimately, we cannot fully understand the descent into medical malpractice in the hospital—including the types of medical atrocities enacted, who was subjected to them and who perpetrated them—without a detailed gendered analysis that incorporates the female doctors. In demonstrating how contemporary gendered medical ideals were actively violated, this article also asks how significant gender was in a women’s concentration camp.