Emma Zimmer

Emma Anne Zimmer (née Mezel; 14 August 1888 – 20 September 1948) was a female overseer at the Lichtenburg concentration camp, the Ravensbrück concentration camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination/concentration camp for several years during the war.

Mezel was born in 1888 in Schlüchtern. In 1938, Emma became a guard at the Lichtenburg early concentration camp, where she became assistant camp leader under Johanna Langefeld. In 1939 she was assigned to the Ravensbrück concentration camp where she served as assistant chief leader, and in October 1942 she became assistant camp leader at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) as an SS-Stellvertretende Oberaufseherin. ^[1]

On 1 June 1943, one month before her 55th birthday, she was granted permission to stay on staff as a female overseer at Ravensbrück, despite her age. She was one of the first chief woman officers at Ravensbrück from 1939-41 and took an active part in the selection of internees to be gassed during 1941 at the Bernberg Euthanasia Center near Berlin. Margarete Buber-Neumann writes that the block elders record the beginning of 1942 women with "body mistakes", "mental defects" and the "unemployable" in lists Hilde Fischer heard the Deputy SS Oberaufseherin Emma Zimmer on the evening of February 3 1942 read off the name lists. The camp survivors report as the next morning "with tuberculosis, asthma interior, venereal diseases asocial" so-called. "Professional criminals", two so-called. "Defiant" Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and so-called. "Halbjüdinnen" from their beds had to pick, who were forced to undress in the bathroom and were dragged by truck. Emmy Handke remembers, she had to help "create some seriously ill patients on stretchers to the car. They were taken by SS-men" and she was "frozen with horror "was when this" a paralyzed woman like a dead head of cattle threw on the car. " Between 150 and 200 women, mostly German, were in this morning transport.^[2] Zimmer served as a guard at Ravensbrück and was known in the camp for being brutal and sadistic in her guard duties. At Auschwitz, Emma was particularly feared: "Our supervisor was an old and mean SS-woman called Emma Zimmer. She was vicious and dangerous and frightening us constantly with threats, proclaiming in a sadistic voice, “I will report you and then you will go away, you know where? Just one way-up the chimney.” We hated her and were scared of her."^[3]

She was awarded the War Merit Cross Second Class without swords.^[4] Zimmer stood trial at the seventh Ravensbrück Trial and was sentenced to death for her war crimes. She was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows at Hamelin Prison on 20 September 1948; she was 60 years old.

See also

• Female guards in Nazi concentration camps

Further reading

• "Nazi women exposed as every bit as bad as Hitler's deranged male followers", The Daily Mail, 12 February 2009.
• "Nazi She-Devils". Mirror. 21 November 2005. Retrieved 26 September 2012. 

References