Johanna Langefeld

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Johanna Langefeld (March 5, 1900 - January 26, 1974) was a female supervisor at three concentration camps during the Nazi Regime.

Born in Kupferdreh (now in Essen, Germany), Johanna Langefeld was brought up in a Lutheran-Protestant, nationalistic family. Her father was a blacksmith. In 1924 she moved to Mülheim and married Wilhelm Langefeld, who died two years later of lung disease. In 1928 she got pregnant by another man. She left him soon after and moved to Düsseldorf where her son was born in August 1928. She was unemployed until 34.

She began then to teach domestic economy in an establishment of the city of Neuß. From 1935 onwards, she worked as a guard in a so called Arbeitsanstalt, working institution, in Brauweiler. In fact, this was a prison for prostitutes, unemployed and homeless women and other so called asocial women – women, who were imprisoned later in concentration camps. From 1937 on, she was a member of the Nazi party. In March 38, she applied for a job as a camp guard in the first SS concentration camp for women in Lichtenburg. After one year, she became the female superintendent of this camp. She stayed in that position, when the camp was transferred to Ravensbrück in May 39.

The female superintendent (in German the actual term is “Oberaufseherin”) was the assistant of the so called Schutzhaftlagerführer, the protective custody camp leader, who was the deputy of the Camp Commandant. According to the camp regulations, the Oberaufseherin should “consult the Schutzhaftlagerführer in all female matters.”

Johanna Langefeld was in charge of the selections in Ravensbrück during the so called “14f13” murder campaign.

In the middle of March, 1942, Johanna Langefeld was assigned to build a new women’s camp in Auschwitz. There she selects prisoners for the gas chamber.

Rudolf Höß, the Commandant of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, recalls his relationship towards Johanna Langefeld as follows:

“The chief female supervisor of the period, Frau Langefeld, was in no way capable of coping with the situation, yet she refused to accept any instructions given her by the leader of the protective custody camp. Acting on my own initiative, I simply put the women’s camp under his jurisdiction.”^{[citation needed]}

During the visit of Heinrich Himmler in July 18, 1942, Johanna Langefeld tried to make him to annul this order. In fact, Rudolf Höß admitted after the war that “the Reichsführer SS absolutely refused” his order and that he wished “a women’s camp to be commanded by a woman”. Himmler ordered that Langefeld should stay in charge of the women’s camp and that in the future no SS man should enter the female camp.^{[citation needed]}

That same month the Auschwitz women's camp was moved to the Auschwitz Birkenau camp 3 km away. Two weeks later, Johanna Langefeld had an injury of her meniscus and required a cartilage operation in the Hohenlychen SS sanatorium near Ravensbrück. During her stay there, she went to see Oswald Pohl, the chief of the SS Economy and Administration Head Office, in Berlin-Lichterfelde, and convinced him to transfer her back to Ravensbrück. Maria Mandel became the new Oberaufseherin of the women's prisoner camp in Auschwitz. Oswald Pohl instructed the Chief of the Department D of his SS Economy and Administration Head Office, Richard Glücks, to order that duties of protective custody camp leaders in the Women’s Camps shall be executed thereafter by the female superintendents, the Oberaufseherinnen.

Margarethe Buber-Neumann, who became Langefeld's prisoner assistant in Ravensbrück, records that Langefeld was dismissed for excessive sympathy with Polish prisoners; she was separated from her son, taken under arrest to Breslau, where an SS tribunal prepared a trial against her. She never went to trial, and Langefeld was released from her camp duties. She then moved to Munich and started to work for BMW.^[1]

On December, 20, 1945 she was arrested by the US Army. In September 1946, she was extradicted to the Polish judiciary preparing a trial in Krakow against SS personnel in Auschwitz. On December, 23, 1946, Johanna Langefeld escaped from prison and hid in a cloister. She worked in a private home. Sometime around 1957, she returned illegally to live with her sister in Munich. She died in Augsburg, Germany on January 26, 1974, at the age of 73.

[edit] Further reading

Johannes Schwartz, Das Selbstverständnis Johanna Langefelds als SS-Oberaufseherin, in: Ulrich Fritz, Silvija Kavčič, Nicole Warmbold (ed.): Tatort KZ, Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager, Ulm 2003, pp. 71-95.

Johannes Schwartz, Geschlechterspezifischer Eigensinn von NS-Täterinnen am Beispiel der KZ-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld, in: Viola Schubert-Lehnhardt (ed.), Frauen als Täterinnen im Nationalsozialismus, Protokollband der Fachtagungvom 17.-18. September 2004 in Bernburg, im Auftrag des Kultur- und Bildungsvereins Elbe-Saale e.V. in Sachsen-Anhalt (Email: gs-halle@bildungsverein-elbe-saale.de), Gerbstadt 2005, pp. 56-82, ISBN 3-00-017407-9.

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