'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

homosexual men, and Afro-Germans; the „ordinary men‟ who became murderers, the
rescuers, the churches, and the bystanders (Ringelheim 344). Ringelheim writes, “When
this omission was questioned, the answer sheepishly offered was, „We forgot.‟ This
answer was given even though panels on the issue of gender were proposed to the
planning committee” (346). She goes on to state that, “One would think that the
importance of the study of gender during the Holocaust would be widely accepted today.
Unfortunately, however, that is not true” (346). One reason why gender has been ignored
in the history of the Holocaust may be that it is seen as a possible distraction from the
main events of the Holocaust itself. Ringelheim proposes that the denial and
minimization of certain aspects of the Holocaust such as rape and sexual assault have
resulted in a line that divides “what is considered peculiar or specific to women from
what has been designated as the proper collective memory of, or narrative about, the
Holocaust” (344). She cites the case of a female Holocaust survivor who experienced
this split in collective Holocaust memory and her personal gendered memories of the
Holocaust. The survivor, in trying to describe her experience of rape during the
Holocaust, found it difficult conceptualizing where her experiences fit in: “Although
Pauline recognized her experiences as different from men‟s she did not know how or
where to locate them in the history of the Holocaust. There was a split between
traditional versions of Holocaust history and her own experience” (Ringelheim 344).
Claudia Koonz, in her book Mothers in the Fatherland (1987), has shown how a
similar split applies to the writing of the broader history of Nazism and the role of
German women within the “Third Reich.” She claims that in many accounts of
Germany‟s Nazi past, German women‟s participation in this history is missing. Nazi
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