Kate Docking – författare

Drawing on a rich and varied corpus of contemporary and post-war sources – including personal letters, legal documentation, camp regulations, and survivor memoirs – this open access book reveals extraordinary detail about the lives of eleven female doctors and nurses employed at the only camp for women prisoners in Nazi Germany. While it may seem unthinkable that medical staff worked in a place of death and suffering, Kate Docking looks at how female medical personnel were hired to work at the camp from September 1939 until its liberation by the Allies in April 1945, highlighting how many women in fact actively sought jobs there. Examining the motivations of these women to work at Ravensbrück, their recruitment, and their behaviour – including their participation in human experiments – from a gendered perspective, Gender and Power in a Nazi Concentration Camp sheds new light on the role of female medical personnel during the Nazi era. Though the Ravensbrück female medical personnel committed atrocities, the majority were not brought to justice in the post-war period, and prosecutors instead portrayed them as victims of the male-dominated Third Reich. By analysing the victimisation narrative, Docking underscores how stereotypes of femininity as ‘naturally innocent’ allowed women involved in Nazi crimes to continue their lives peacefully after the war. This ground-breaking book shows how gender ideals influenced not only the post-war treatment of the Ravensbrück female medical personnel but also their behaviour at the camp, demonstrating the clear need for gender to be considered in explanations of how the Holocaust was able to happen in the process.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, University of Hamburg, Germany.

This open access book demonstrates that thinking ‘beyond binaries’ in its many forms - capitalist/socialist, men/women, interwar/post-war, east/west, normality/pathology - allows for new insights and understandings of how the intersections between medicine, gender, and sex shaped common ideas, policies, and experiences across post-war Europe. These intersections encompass gendered health discrimination, regional disparities in health outcomes, access to abortion and contraception, eugenics and racism, sex and relationship education, and the medicalisation of LGBTQIA+ identities. Each have continued to significantly influence government policies, medical practices, individual lives, and scientific ideas across Europe. The book therefore engages with important histories related to contemporary debates about reproductive rights, medical ethics, and health legislation. Gender, Sex, and Medicine in Post-War Europe brings together scholars working across disciplines and regions in both East and West Europe to shed light on how gender norms and expressions of sexuality permeated health practices, scientific ideas, medical law, and policymaking across ideological and geographical divides. As such, the volume’s contributions enhance our understanding of both individual and collective medical experiences across post-war Europe and the complex relations between doctors, patients, scientists, and law makers.By examining gender, sex, and medicine in the post-war period, this book fosters new scholarly perspectives on Europe as a continent that, to an extent, overcame the socio-political realities of the Cold War period and shared common ground through parallel experiences, policies, ideals, and beliefs.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.