A “Beast, Merely Covered in Human Skin”: The Trial Against Erika Bergman in East Germany in 1955 for Her Maltreatment of Female Sinti and Roma Prisoners in Ravensbrück
A “Beast, Merely Covered in Human Skin”: The Trial Against Erika Bergman in East Germany in 1955 for Her Maltreatment of Female Sinti and Roma Prisoners in Ravensbrück

Author(s): Verena Meier
Subject(s): History, Fascism, Nazism and WW II, History of the Holocaust
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: Ravensbrück; Aufseherin; Sinti and Roma; GDR (German Democratic Republic)
Summary/Abstract: In 1955, the former Aufseherin of the Nazi concentration camp for women in Ravensbrück, Erika Bergmann, was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in a trial of the East-German socialist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR). At the time of the German reunification in 1990, when she was 75 years old, Bergmann was still imprisoned after more than 35 years, making her the longest-serving convict of the GDR because of Nazi crimes. Survivors of Ravensbrück described Bergmann as a “beast, merely covered in human skin.” This depiction is based on the horrors that former inmates had witnessed in the camp, particularly Bergmann’s maltreatment of female Sinti and Roma prisoners. The depiction, however, also reflects early postwar portrayals of perpetrators, which highlighted that “ordinary men” – and particularly “ordinary women,” who were supposed to be caring and motherly according to the dominant gender norms – were not capable of committing such atrocities.

• Details
• Contents