holocaust. ss guard?

Question

i have to write a diary in the point of view of an ss guard, it has to cover a long period of time, does anyone have any ideas on what im suppose to write about, just any ideas would be great.

Answer 1

Is his job boring or interesting? Does he get on well with his fellow guards, and his superiors? How does he feel about the prisoners that he watches? Has he ever beaten or killed any of them? Has he ever made friends with any of them?

Is he in a concentration camp where people were forced to perform slave labor, and were the victims of genocide, or did he guard prisoners of war who were captured British, American, or Russian troops?

Because of the rights and protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions, American and British prisoners of war were entitled to receive packages from the Red Cross, which meant that they sometimes had access to foods that the German guards didn't, like chocolate bars and powdered milk.

Have you ever had a job that you loved? What did you love about it? Ever had one that you hated? How did you feel about it? Did you ever feel like you were being forced to do something that was immoral or inhumane?

Try to imagine what life was like in a prison camp or concentration camp back then. Watch some movies or read some books about those kind of places and that period of history. Then picture yourself in the same position. How would you feel? What would you do? What would happen if you kept your nose clean and obeyed orders? What would happen if you rebelled and disobeyed orders? Would you be able to secretly help the prisoners without being caught and punished?

How would you celebrate your birthday, or holidays like Christmas? What could you do to improve your situation, or your rank?

Answer 2

You could do a nice take on this by modeling it on the half dozen SS guards still in the US. These guys got away and hid in the US for years and now that they caught them, no other country wants them back. If you're supposed to do it over a series of years this might work out well, you could write a nice bit on his denial of ever really being involved, etc..
I think it'd be more interesting to have the guard be on periphery of the camp, so he can deny his part in the holocaust. Sure you could write a guy who gleefully joined in, but a conflicted guard would make for better reading.

Answer 3

Well, a good place to start would be to read about the SS guards to get an idea of who they were and what they did. I would look at general websites like wikipedia and research in a library. After that, it should be fairly easy, it will just take some imagination on your part to create a character. When you read, look for personal stories and use those ideas for your diary.

Answer 4

Write about the war, and your hopes for stability and purity for Europe. You could write about your loathing of the prisoners and describe the occasional event in the camp. An escape attempt, some kind of incident of violence with the prisoners, that kind of thing.

Remember that you are writing from the point of view of a man who believes in the Nazi philosophy and is fanatically loyal to Hitler. At least that's the stereotype, there were exceptions even amongst the SS.

Answer 5

Free will is intentionally drilled out and deprived of soldiers, in a totalitarian state it is a risky proposition to question orders or fail in duties, minor infringements were punished by transfer to the Eastern Front (a virtual death sentence), anything more was punished by death (families are not beyond inclusion in the sentence), even today it is a brave man or woman who refuses to obey orders on the grounds of orders being beyond the rights/duties of those giving the order – in the long run they may be vindicated, in the short term it must be an unpleasant experience and that is in an enlightened democracy with free speech and constitutional human rights (Abu Ghraib?).

Answer 6

Guard duty is boring, very very boring. The weather is to hot, to cold or wet. Then there is the bugs and the smell of many people packed into one place with out water. Then there is all the military trivia to contend with. The only advantages to being a guard vs a front line soldier are beer is easier to obtain and unless you screw up big time you will never be sent to the Russian front.

Answer 7

SS guards were equivilant to the CIA in America except they swore alegiance to Hilter and not the country .

Answer 8

For decades, an elderly San Francisco woman kept her wartime stint as a Nazi concentration camp guard hidden from her family, including her late husband — a German Jew who’d fled the Holocaust himself.

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But time and the American government finally caught up with Elfriede Lina Rinkel, 84, who was deported to Germany this month and publicly exposed this week by the United States Department of Justice.

Her brother and her sister-in-law, longtime Berkeley, Calif., residents who spoke Tuesday on the condition of anonymity, said they had just learned her secret that day from reporters. “It knocked us off our feet,” the sister-in-law said.

“We did help her to close up her apartment and helped her to buy her airplane ticket and go to the airport and buy her luggage — but never a word about why she was leaving,” the sister-in-law told the Oakland Tribune. “We thought she was going because her situation in her apartment had deteriorated.” Rinkel had bad arthritis, the sister-in-law explained, and her apartment building’s elevator was often out of service. “She said she just wanted to go back to Germany, and because she told us that, we believed her.”

Federal law requires removal of aliens who took part in acts of Nazi-sponsored persecution, and in June Rinkel signed a settlement agreement admitting that from June 1944 to April 1945, she was a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, built near Furstenberg, Germany, almost exclusively for female prisoners. She omitted the camp from her history when seeking a visa in 1959, and so she was allowed to immigrate. Her brother and her sister in law, who had sponsored her immigration, said Tuesday that she later met her future husband, Fred Rinkel, at a German-American Club in San Francisco and went on to work as a furrier.

Documents released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations say that the Leipzig native used a trained SS guard dog at the camp. The OSI also provided copies of her service card, taken from an SS records office, and bank records showing pay that she received for her service at the camp.

Between its construction in late 1938 and its liberation by the Russian Army at the end of April 1945, Ravensbrück held an estimated 130,000 women and children, of whom about 90,000 perished by starvation, execution, illness or medical experimentation, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Inmates came mostly from Poland and the occupied Soviet territories; almost 15% were Jewish.

Rinkel’s husband died in January 2004; his obituary in J, Northern California’s Jewish weekly, said he was a longtime B’nai B’rith member.

The sister-in-law said that Fred Rinkel almost certainly did not know about his wife’s secret. “He had to leave Germany during all that terrible stuff that happened there and had to relocate in Shanghai; a lot of the Jewish Germans went to Shanghai,” she said, adding that Fred Rinkel was from a prominent Berlin family of doctors and lawyers and had been training to become an opera singer before being forced to flee his homeland. He owned a San Francisco tie shop.

The district of U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, a San Mateo Democrat and Congress’s only Holocaust survivor, reaches to within a few miles of the Nob Hill neighborhood where Rinkel made her home until this month. He issued a statement Tuesday, calling the case’s facts “chilling, compelling, and in some ways hard to fathom.”

“But such is the nature of individuals linked to the Holocaust,” Lantos said. “So much of what happened is difficult but important to examine, even decades after humanity endured this nightmare.”