Women’s Prisons and the Politics of Punishment in Nazi and Postwar Germany

This dissertation is a new line of inquiry in the history of gender, crime, and punishment in modern Germany and during the Holocaust, illuminating the degree to which conventional prisons confined and often terrorized women during and after the Third Reich. Prisons in twentieth-century Germany are largely overlooked, while studies of concentration camps and Soviet forced labor camps have understandably drawn the attention of historians, but their history provides an important and rich template for critical understandings of carceral systems and their enduring power in the modern age. This project has two main objectives: first, to analyze how conceptions of gender shaped the lives of women prisoners and informed the administration of penal institutions, and second, to shed light on the position of prisons in relation to the Holocaust and to better understand the role of prisons in nascent postwar East and West German societies. The ways in which the “outside world” had concrete effects on the “inside world” of prisons are explored throughout this research, with the following interest groups at the core of the narrative: people in prison, staff in prison, families of people in prison, political actors, and broader society. The primary characteristics of the female prisoner population changed with the political, social, and economic climates of the times, as did the methods of punishment and rehabilitation, but the overarching function of prisons as sites of state power was constant. This study reveals that the criminalization of women’s sexuality and class did not falter even as the criminalization of women and their intersections with race, religion, and politics fluctuated enormously from one German administration to another. Underpinning twentieth-century German women’s prisons was a paradox of invisibility and visibility. Although women were not deemed important enough to warrant substantial sex and gender-specific treatment, they were dangerous enough to confine. Women were also the legal system’s afterthought, except for when the government sought to control their sexuality and exploit their labor. Despite the repressive conditions to which women prisoners were subjected, many found ways to resist the isolating and demoralizing effects of incarceration.

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