perfidy

When Margarete Barthel walked into the museum at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1999, she told the docent who she was. She was the first guard ever to admit to returning to the place as a visitor.

A Washington Post story about a German woman who was once a guard at Ravensbruck, the only concentration camp solely dedicated to the penning and slaughter of women, is full of jarring dissonances between beauty and horror, idyllic youth and authoritarian coercion. As with most such stories, the notion of free will is complicated by the workings of the system and the strong instinct of people for self-preservation. It is even more complicated in retrospect, as an old woman searches for an absolution she must surely know she does not deserve. Not a pleasant read, but a most fascinating one.

h/t Gary Farber.