by Wendy Lower
Appalled by the violence of the war and the Holocaust, most female witnesses found ways to distance themselves from it and to minimize their roles as agents of a criminal regime. But for the thirty thousand women certified by Himmler’s SS and police as auxiliaries in gendarme offices, Gestapo headquarters, and prisons, psychological distancing was hardly an option, and the likelihood of direct participation in mass murder was high. In the civil administration of Nazi colonial governors and commissioners, another ten thousand secretaries were spread out across the Nazis’ eastern capitals and district offices in Rovno (now Rivne), Kiev, Lida, Reval (now Tallinn), Grodno, Warsaw, and Radom. These offices were responsible for the dispensation of indigenous populations, including Jews, many of whom had been placed in ghettos and forced-labor assignments managed by these German male and female bureaucrats. Hitler’s Furies were not always agents of the Nazi regime. Often they were mothers, girlfriends, and wives who joined their sons and mates in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and Russia. Some of the worst killers were in this group.
Within this mobilized mass, certain women stand out. Multitasking secretaries were both desk murderers and sadists: some not only typed up liquidation orders but also participated in ghetto massacres and attended mass shootings. Wives and lovers of SS men not only consoled their mates when they returned from their dirty work but, in some cases, also bloodied their own hands. In Nazi thinking, rounding up and shooting Jews for several hours was hard labor, so female consolation extended beyond creating a moral sanctuary at home: women set up refreshment tables with food and drink for their men near mass execution and deportation sites. In a small town in Latvia, a young female stenographer distinguished herself as the life of the party as well as a mass shooter. The entanglement of sexual intimacy and violence was evident as I read the files, but in ways that were more mundane than scenes depicted in vulgar postwar pornography. Romantic outings such as a walk in the woods might bring lovers into visceral contact with the Holocaust. I read about a German commissioner and his lover-secretary in Belarus who organized a wintertime hunt. They failed to find animals, so they shot at Jewish targets who moved slowly in the snow.
Women with official roles in Hitler’s Reich—such as Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the top woman in the Nazi Party—may have been highly visible, but they were largely figureheads, wielding little political power in the formal sense. The contribution of other women in numerous other roles has, in contrast, gone largely unacknowledged and unexplored. This historical blind spot is especially glaring in regard to women in the occupied eastern territories.
All German women were required to work and contribute to the war effort, in paid and unpaid positions. They managed fatherless households, family farms, and businesses. They clocked in at factories and modern office buildings. They dominated in the field of agriculture and in the white-collar “female” professions of nursing and secretarial work. Some twenty-five to thirty percent of the teachers in Weimar and Nazi Germany were women. As the Reich’s terror apparatus expanded, new career tracks opened for women, including employment in concentration camps. While the careers and acts of female camp guards have been scrutinized by journalists and scholars, much less is known about women occupying traditional female roles—women not trained to be cruel—who by chance or design ended up serving the criminal policies of the regime.
Teachers, nurses, secretaries, welfare workers, and wives—these were the women in the eastern territories, where most of the worst crimes of the Reich occurred. For ambitious young women, the possibilities for advancement lay in the emerging Nazi empire abroad. They left behind repressive laws, bourgeois mores, and social traditions that made life in Germany regimented and oppressive. Women in the eastern territories witnessed and committed atrocities in a more open system, and as part of what they saw as a professional opportunity and a liberating experience.
Hitler’s Furies focuses on the transformations of individual women in the inner workings and outer landscapes of the Holocaust—in the offices, among the occupational elite, in the killing fields. Often those who seemed the least likely to perpetrate the Holocaust’s horrors became the most entangled and involved. The women featured in this book came from diverse backgrounds and regions—rural Westphalia, cosmopolitan Vienna, industrial Rhineland—but collectively they form a generational cohort (seventeen to thirty years old). They all came of age with the rise and fall of Hitler.
Sometimes a source allowed me to explore deeper questions. Why were these women violent? What were their postwar perceptions of their time in the East? Without detailed interrogation records, memoirs, and private writings such as diaries or letters, as well as a number of extraordinary interviews, it would have been nearly impossible to determine what the women were thinking, what their attitudes were before, during, and after the war.
After the war most German women did not speak openly about their experiences. They were too ashamed or frightened to tell their stories of what had happened or what they did. Their shame was not necessarily about culpability. Some had good memories of what was supposed to be a bad time. There were ample rations, first-time romances, servants at one’s disposal, nice villas, late-night parties, and plenty of land. Germany’s future seemed limitless, and the country reigned over Europe. For many men and women, in fact, this time preceding Germany’s military defeat marked a high point of their lives.
Their silence about Jews and other victims of the Holocaust also illustrates the selfishness of youth and ambition, the ideological atmosphere in which these German girls grew up, and the postwar staying power of these formative years. As teenagers, eager professionals, and newlyweds, these women were immersed in their own plans, whether dreamed up on a small Swabian farm or in a bustling port city like Hamburg. They wanted respectable occupations and paychecks. They wanted to have friends, nice clothes; they wanted to travel, to experience more freedom of action. When they admired themselves in their new Red Cross uniforms, or proudly displayed their certificates for completing a childcare course sponsored by the Nazi Party, or celebrated their new typing job in a Gestapo office, they became part of the Nazi regime, intentionally or not. It is perhaps not surprising that these young women did not admit to themselves or to us, either then or many years later, in courtrooms or their own memoirs, what their participation in the Nazi regime had actually entailed.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the stark exposure of the worst female camp guards, such as Irme Grese and Ilse Koch, may have stifled a more nuanced discussion of women’s participation and culpability. Trials generated sensationalistic stories of female sadism, further fueled by a postwar trend in Nazi-style pornography. Meanwhile, the ordinary German woman was depicted popularly as the heroine who had to clean up the mess of Germany’s shameful past, the victim of marauding Red Army rapists, or the flirtatious doll who entertained American GIs. Emerging feminist views stressed the victimization of women, not their criminal agency. This sympathetic image, despite the popularity of such novels as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, has largely remained. In the cities of Germany today, one finds statues and plaques dedicated to the “rubble women.” In Berlin alone, an estimated sixty thousand women shoveled and hauled away the ruins of the capital, discarding the past for the future. They were celebrated for inspiring the West German economic miracle and the East German workers’ movement.
Among the myths of the postwar period was that of the apolitical woman. After the war many women testified in court or explained in oral histories that they were “just” organizing things in the office or attending to the social aspects of daily life by managing the care or duties of other Germans stationed in the East. They failed to see—or perhaps preferred not to see—how the social became political, and how their seemingly small contribution to everyday operations in the government, military, and Nazi Party organizations added up to a genocidal system. Female fascists—in Nazi Party headquarters in Kiev, in military and SS and police offices in Minsk, and in gated v
illas in Lublin—were not simply doing “women’s work.” As long as German women are consigned to another sphere or their political influence is minimized, half the population of a genocidal society is, in the historian Ann Taylor Allen’s words, “endowed with innocence of the crimes of the modern state,” and they are placed “outside of history itself.”
The entire population of German women (almost forty million in 1939) cannot be considered a victim group. A third of the female population, thirteen million women, were actively engaged in a Nazi Party organization, and female membership in the Nazi Party increased steadily until the end of the war. Just as the agency of women in history more generally is underappreciated, here too—and perhaps even more problematically, given the moral and legal implications—the agency of women in the crimes of the Third Reich has not been fully elaborated and explained. Vast numbers of ordinary German women were not victims, and routine forms of female participation in the Holocaust have not yet been disclosed.
Generalizations about all German women should certainly be avoided. But how do we begin to get some sense of women’s roles vis-à-vis the Holocaust, from rescuer to bystander to killer, and all the gray areas in between? How can we more accurately place women in the regime’s genocidal machinery? Assigning people to criminal categories such as accomplice and perpetrator does not by itself explain how the system worked and how ordinary women witnessed and participated in the Holocaust. It is more revealing to look at the wider distribution of power in the Nazi system and to identify more precisely who was doing what to whom, and where. For example, a female chief detective in the Reich Security Main Office directly determined the fates of thousands of children, and did so with the assistance of almost two hundred female agents scattered across the Reich. These female detectives collected evidence of “racially degenerate” youths whom they branded future criminals. They devised a color-coding system in their pursuit of some two thousand Jewish children, “gypsy” children, and other “delinquents” incarcerated in special internment camps. Such organizational, clerical skills were considered female, and well suited to the modern, bureaucratic approach to “fighting crime.”
The female witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators featured here are based on research in wartime German documents, Soviet war-crimes investigations, East German secret police files and trial records, West German and Austrian investigative and trial records, documentation from Simon Wiesenthal’s archive in Vienna, published memoirs, private wartime correspondence and diaries, and interviews with witnesses in Germany and Ukraine. The official wartime documentation—the SS marriage applications, personnel records of the civil administration, Red Cross records, and Nazi Party agency reports—proved valuable for establishing the presence of women in various positions, detailing their biographical data, and elucidating the ideological training of the organizations to which they belonged. But such records, while written and typed by individuals, are all but devoid of personality or motive.
Biographical portraits that delve into personal experiences and outlooks over time require a greater reliance on what German scholars aptly refer to as “ego documents.” These are self-representations created by the subject: testimonies, letters, memoirs, and interviews. These mostly postwar accounts pose many serious problems, but as historical sources they are not to be dismissed. Over time one learns how to read and hear them, how to detect techniques of evasion, exaggerated storytelling, and conformism to literary tropes and clichés. And one tries to corroborate them to test their veracity. Yet it is the subjectivity of these sources that makes them especially valuable.
There are significant differences between the testimony given to a prosecutor, an oral history or interview given to a journalist or historian, and a memoir. The narrator tailors her story to meet the expectations of the listener, and that story may change over time as the narrator learns more about her past from other sources and as the questions of the audience change. Oral histories published in the 1980s, for example, do not show the same sensitivity to the events of the Holocaust as memoirs published in the early twenty-first century. The more recent memoirs often attempt to deal with the question of knowledge and participation, since the female witness anticipates that the reader or listener will ask her, “What did you know about the persecution of the Jews? What did you see?” Furthermore, memoirs—usually penned by the elderly—are often a collaborative project shared by a parent and her descendants. The aged wartime witnesses wish to leave a legacy, to record a dramatic chapter in the family history; the knowledge that their memoirs will be read by future generations dissuades them from being candid or graphic in recounting their encounters with Jews, their enthusiasm for Nazism, or their participation in mass crimes. Sometimes the language in these accounts is coded, or only hints are given. In several cases I benefited from direct contact with the memoirist and was able to ask for more details.
One should not assume that memoirists and witnesses intend to deceive or hide facts, and that some terrible truth waits to be uncovered. It is natural to repress what is painful as a form of coping. The women who published memoirs wished to be understood and to have their lives affirmed; they did not want to be judged or condemned. As I waded through multiple accounts, it became clear which ones were more credible than others.
The consensus in Holocaust and genocide studies is that the systems that make mass murder possible would not function without the broad participation of society, and yet nearly all histories of the Holocaust leave out half of those who populated that society, as if women’s history happens somewhere else. It is an illogical approach and puzzling omission. The dramatic stories of these women reveal the darkest side of female activism. They show what can happen when women of varied backgrounds and professions are mobilized for war and acquiesce in genocide.
1
The Lost Generation of German Women
THE MEN AND WOMEN who established and ran the terror systems of the Third Reich were startlingly young. When the forty-three-year-old Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933, more than two-thirds of his followers were under forty. The future chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, was thirty-seven years old when he presided over the Wannsee Conference and unveiled Nazi plans for the mass murder of Jews in Europe. The legions of secretaries who kept the mass-murder machinery functioning were eighteen to twenty-five years old. The nurses who worked in the war zones, assisted in medical experiments, and administered lethal injections were also young professionals. The lovers and wives of the SS elite, whose task was to ensure the future purity of the Aryan race with healthy offspring, were—as required—of fertile, childbearing age. The average age of a female concentration camp guard was twenty-six; the youngest one was a mere fifteen years old when she was posted at the Gross-Rosen camp in Nazi-annexed Poland.
Terror regimes feed on the idealism and energy of young people, molding them into the obedient cadres of mass movements, paramilitary forces, and even perpetrators of genocide. Male Germans who had the bad fortune of maturing at the time of World War I became a distinctive lot, deformed in ways that we are still trying to diagnose. One historian has identified this generation of young men as “uncompromising,” hard-core ideologues and self-convinced professionals who realized their ambitions in the SS elite as developers of the Holocaust machinery in Berlin. A generation of young women also played their part in the genocide, not at the helm, but as the machine’s operatives. What distinguished the female cadre of young professionals and spouses who made the Holocaust possible—the women who went east during World War II and became direct witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators of murder there—was that they were the baby boomers of World War I, conceived at the end of one era and the start of another.
In late 1918, the German empire collapsed in military defeat, soldiers mutinied, and the Kaiser, declared a war criminal, fled to the Netherlands. The patriarchal world of the old regime collapsed, and in its ruins anything seemed politically
possible.
For women, the new order—Germany’s first experiment in democracy, modeled on the American and British examples—brought with it the chance for more individual freedom and power in a modernizing West. German women voted for the first time in January 1919 and achieved formal equality, at least on paper, under the Weimar Constitution. This was an extraordinary change, given that until 1908 German women were banned from political activities and, as the “inferior” sex in German society, held subordinate positions that most German women considered natural. While women had been forced by World War I to enter into the public sphere of war-related work—in factories, streetcars, and government offices—they had little experience in politics, and most were content to call themselves apolitical. With the implosion of the monarchy, the political arena, previously closed to them, suddenly opened.
