by Wendy Lower
Nursing as it was now conceived left little room for humanitarian ideals. A nurse who completed her training in Erfurt was shocked by an instructor’s comment that “hatred is noble.” The traditional virtues of the nurse—sacrifice, discipline, and loyalty—were now to be used to wage war. The nurse’s mission, instructors stressed, was to strengthen the fighting power of the German military by caring for the soldiers, raising their morale and restoring their health. Like ordinary German soldiers, nurses had to take an oath to the Führer. A Red Cross nurse sent to Riga explained before a video camera recently that she had been taught about the “evil people in Russia,” the “Bolshevik communists” who butchered and devoured children. It is apparent in the video that she had started to say “Jews,” but she quickly censored herself and used the words “Bolshevik communists” instead. “We all believed what we were told,” she said.
Red Cross nurses gathered in Berlin for a swearing-in ceremony
When nursing recruiters approached Erika Ohr, a sheepherder’s daughter, in 1938, she was working as a domestic servant and nanny in the priest’s house in Ruppertshofen, Swabia. She did not feel much at home there, especially since villagers looked askance at her—a young, single woman working alone in a priest’s household? Local Nazi Party agitators spoke with the priest, recommending that Ohr join the Party’s League of German Girls. Feeling that she had little choice, Ohr joined. She attended few meetings, however, since many of them took place in the evening, when she was still at work in the priest’s kitchen. She recalled nothing of the ideological content of the meetings she attended—or perhaps she suppressed those details in her recounting—but she did remember receiving the uniform, a crisp white blouse and dark blue skirt.
More decisive for her future was one event, probably also sponsored by the Nazi Party, at which Ohr met two Red Cross nurses. These nurses were also farm girls who, upon realizing that their eldest brother would inherit the family business, had decided to seek an alternative and pursue a profession. Ohr found them inspiring in their Red Cross uniforms and lapel pins. They gave her a plan for escaping the life of a sheepherder or a domestic servant in the priest’s household. As she put it, “I wanted more.”
As soon as she turned eighteen, in 1939, Ohr registered for nursing school in the nearest city. First, though, she had to be released from compulsory labor duties in the Reich Labor Service, and then she had to secure a certificate attesting to her Aryan racial status. Once the bureaucratic documentation was done, Ohr had to convince her employer, the priest, to let her go. When the rumors of her departure circulated, neighbors could not believe that Ohr, the priest’s cook, was to become a Red Cross nurse. Only when her large suitcase was packed and shipped to Stuttgart did they believe it.
With the outbreak of war in 1939 came a growing need for nurses and female health aides. Ohr’s application had arrived at an opportune time. But as she eagerly completed it she could not have imagined that so many young women like her would be sent across Germany and Europe to care for wounded military and SS policemen, and some to work in asylums and camp infirmaries murdering those deemed “life unworthy of life.” In October 1940 she joined nineteen other girls for the fall training course. Her female superiors, the head nurses, were much older; one had served in World War I. They were all extremely efficient, prizing correctness and cleanliness. Some clearly enjoyed giving orders to the young recruits. One insisted that all nurses wear their hair parted down the middle for the proper matronly appearance. But Erika Ohr had her own preference. She parted her hair on the side, and when she returned home for a visit and was photographed in her uniform, that was how she proudly appeared.
Erika Ohr, 1941
After two years of intensive training in several clinics and hospitals in Stuttgart, Ohr was fully certified as a nurse and received her marching orders. All members of the German Red Cross—as well as nurses associated with an array of religious, Party, and government organizations—could be called up for military service. This was official policy as of 1937, when, as part of Hitler’s preparations for war, the Red Cross came under the command of the army. Ohr knew about the policy when she registered for nurses’ training, but it was still alarming to receive those marching orders, which she could not refuse. Perhaps she had made a mistake.
Ohr had met German soldiers in a Stuttgart military hospital and had treated their injuries, but now she would have to work closer to the front and in a foreign land. She could be sent anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe or northern Africa. Ohr had no experience abroad; she had never ventured more than a hundred miles from her hometown in southern Germany. She was nervous when she reported to the district army office in Stuttgart to pick up her official relocation papers, stamped 3 November 1942. She was being sent to Ukraine. Ohr had little time to think about her destination: she was expected to leave for Berlin a few days later. In a rush, she packed and informed her family of her assignment. When she boarded the train that would take her to Ukraine, she realized that she was the only woman among thousands of soldiers. No one waved goodbye to her at the station.
In the summer of 1941, Annette Schücking, a highly educated young woman with a distinguished pedigree, also donned a tailored Red Cross uniform. She hailed from a family of esteemed nineteenth-century literary figures. Her great-grandfather had been the companion of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a literary giant whose heroic protagonists and romantic musings on Westphalia fit the ideals of Nazi culture.
In the Hitlerian state, Schücking was valued for her ancestry but certainly not for her family’s liberal politics. Her pacifist father, an active member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)—the party that had founded the Weimar Republic—was barred from politics when the Nazis assumed power in 1933. At home in intellectual circles and dismayed by her father’s fate, Schücking decided to pursue a law degree despite the highly competitive quota system that restricted women’s access to higher education. A patriot and an idealist, Annette believed that she could dismantle the dictatorship in the courts.
Soon, though, Schücking realized that she was helpless to change the Nazi system and the men who dominated it. At the University of Münster she was one of two women in her class; she and the other woman were routinely mocked by patronizing professors who found their presence in seminars an affront to tradition. Given Schücking’s strong academic performance, however, her professors gave her a passing grade on her first state examinations in July 1941. No matter how well she did, she would not be able to practice law: Hitler had barred women from the judiciary and the legal profession.
Annette Schücking in her nurse’s uniform, summer 1941
In any case, before she could finish her degree, Schücking was called up to fulfill her wartime labor duty. What could she do? Schücking wanted to avoid a routine clerical job, and she was certainly too highly educated to work in a factory. She detested the Nazis and their repression of political rights and freedoms, and her own career dreams had been frustrated, but she was still a proud German with a sense of duty. Her peers, young German men, were being sent into battle and needed to be cared for, and she could not stay at home. At this time a newsreel was being shown in German theaters—Mothers in Mogilev. It showed nurses doing their womanly duty at war in Belarus—greeting Hitler, caring for wounded soldiers, measuring drug doses, and serving refreshments and cake to the young soldiers. After a few months of training, Schücking was assigned to a soldiers’ home in Novgorod Volynsk, Ukraine, close to the destination of Erika Ohr, the sheepherder’s daughter.
Ohr’s ambition and Schücking’s idealism both found expression in nursing. Their employment in Ukraine and Russia, like that of so many of their fellow nurses and army aides, was integral to Hitler’s waging of a genocidal war. These nurses were agents of a criminal regime, culpable by association but not by their individual deeds. Other nurses did commit mass murder themselves, however. Of all the female professions, nursing contained the highest concentration of documented cri
mes, in the euthanasia program and the medical experiments in the camps.
The case of Pauline Kneissler is among the better-known ones of a German nurse-killer. Born in 1900, Kneissler grew up in a well-off ethnic German household in the Odessa region of Ukraine. Fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, the Kneissler family made their way to Westphalia, where Pauline’s father started to work in agriculture but ended up with a job in the German national railway. Kneissler obtained German citizenship in 1920 and studied nursing in Duisburg on the Rhine. In the early 1920s she completed her training at various institutions and then landed a secure position as a municipal nurse in an asylum in Berlin. In 1937 Kneissler joined the Nazi Party. She was also a member of the National Socialist Women’s League, the National Socialist Welfare Association, the Reich Air Raid Protection League, and the Reich Nurses’ League. Besides her active role in Nazi associations and full-time work at the asylum, Kneissler enjoyed singing in a Protestant church choir.
In December 1939 she was summoned by the police to report to the Ministry of the Interior early in the new year. The address given was in fact that of the Columbus House headquarters of the Nazi euthanasia operation. There, she and about twenty other nurses were briefed by Werner Blankenburg of the Führer’s Chancellery. Kneissler later testified:
The Führer developed a “euthanasia” law, which in consideration of the war was not to be published. It was absolutely voluntary for those present to agree to participate. None of us had any objections to this program, and Blankenburg swore us in. We were sworn to secrecy and obedience, and Blankenburg called to our attention the fact that any violation of the oath would be punished by death.
The nurses were assigned to the medieval Grafeneck Castle, situated about forty miles from Stuttgart and near where Ohr had her nurses’ training. The castle—the former summer home of the dukes of Württemberg—is several miles from the nearest town and sits perched on a hilltop. After World War I it was converted into a home for the disabled.
Kneissler’s task was to travel to surrounding institutions with a list of patients who had been selected for transport to Grafeneck. The man in charge of the transports, Mr. Schwenninger of the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care, had the list of deportees to be killed. This list had to be matched against the patient lists in the facilities they visited. According to Kneissler, the patients “were not all particularly serious cases”; many were in “good physical condition.” On a given day, transports with about seventy patients arrived at Grafeneck, and Kneissler was one of the accompanying nurses.
Once at Grafeneck, the patients were placed in barracks and superficially examined by two doctors. Based on a questionnaire, “these two doctors gave the final word whether a patient should be gassed or not . . . In most cases the patients were killed within twenty-four hours of their arrival.” The doctors injected the victims with 2 cc of morphine-scopolamine prior to their gassing; afterward, the doctors dissected many of the bodies. Following cremation, ashes were mixed together and placed in individual urns that were sent to the victims’ relatives with a form letter. To maintain secrecy and protect the perpetrators, the doctors’ names on the condolence letters were fabricated and the cause of death was falsified.
Between January and December 1940, medical personnel murdered 9,839 people at Grafeneck. Kneissler, who witnessed the gassings, found them frightening but not really all that bad, since, as she and her colleagues reasoned, “death by gas doesn’t hurt.”
Kneissler became a career killer at Grafeneck, Hadamar, and other “euthanasia” sites in Germany, assisting with the gassing procedure, starving patients, and administering lethal injections to the mentally and physically ill almost every day for five years. After the war her role as a perpetrator in Germany became well known. What is less well known is the fact that she was briefly posted in the East—a posting that would contribute to the transfer of mass-murder procedures from Germany to Poland and Belarus.
Pauline Kneissler’s profession, perverted under the Nazis, trained her and called upon her to kill. She joined a special unit of killers approved by Hitler. In contrast, the documented killing done by other German women in the East was dictated less by their professional training than by simple opportunity, individual character, and proximity to power and violent settings. Even female guards in the camp and prison system could choose how cruel and sadistic to be toward prisoners and patients. The Nazi regime trained thousands of women to be accomplices, to be heartless in their dealings with the enemies of the Reich, but did not aim to develop cadres of female killers. Particularly outside the terror system of the camps, prisons, and asylums, it was not expected that women would be especially violent or would kill. Those who did kill exploited the “opportunity” to do so within a fertile sociopolitical setting, with the expectation of rewards and affirmation, not ostracism. In the East, it was secretaries and wives, not teachers or even nurses, who were most likely to become direct killers. Those who were close to the crime scenes, and to the men who managed and implemented the mass murder, were unavoidably involved—and, as will become clear, participated more than they had to.
SECRETARIES
Besides the nurses, the largest contributors to the day-to-day operations of Hitler’s genocidal war were the German secretaries and office aides, such as the file clerks and telephone operators working in state and private concerns in the East. Prior to the Nazi seizure of power, another revolution was under way in Germany, one that would prove decisive for this generation of women: the rise of the modern workplace and the surge of single working women who occupied it. By 1925 the number of women in white-collar clerical positions had tripled from the decade before. Between 1933 and 1939, young women increasingly sought work outside the traditional occupations of agriculture and domestic labor. Women filled the ranks of the bureaucratic state and of corporations, the very machinery that sponsored, organized, and implemented the Holocaust. The ordinary young woman of the Weimar era was not a free-spirited flapper, and in the Nazi era she was not a demure housewife in a dirndl. Rather, she was an overworked, poorly paid secretary. Modernity could be exhilarating and exhausting.
Though exploited in the Nazi system, young women found new opportunities in the administrative field. One could work in an office in the Reich or abroad. One could work for a government agency or in the armaments industry. Ilse Struwe was among at least ten thousand secretaries who left Germany to work in the offices of the East.
Ilse had been a lively child—too rambunctious, in fact, for her Prussian household, where, as she later recollected, the watchword was silence. Her bedridden mother insisted that she keep still, be seen and not heard. Her father, a fruit wholesaler and Nazi Party member, beat her when she disobeyed. She soon learned that to be loved and accepted, and to be a brave, good girl, it was best not to challenge authority. Instead, she quietly endured.
At fourteen, Struwe lost her mother. Later she remembered looking at her dead mother’s peaceful face, which seemed to say, “Thank God I am done with this life.” At her mother’s funeral Struwe met three girls who impressed her from the League of German Girls. They invited her into the youth movement when she was alone and grieving. Struwe went to the meetings and enjoyed the acceptance of her peers. She befriended a local boy in the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization (SA) who clowned around and made her laugh. Later, when he was parachuted into Poland during the Nazi invasion, he wrote home to his sweetheart Ilse, boasting that he had cut off the beard of an elderly Jew. Struwe grew to dislike him.
Ilse Struwe, army staff secretary, at her desk, 1942
As Struwe matured, she realized there were ways out of her oppressive household and village. Her miserable mother, dependent for her entire life, had advised her daughter to gain some vocational training. Struwe relocated to Berlin to attend high school and complete secretarial training at a trade school. But why bother with such training when she would get married anyway, her father wondered. He insisted that she come home and
help him with the business. Struwe was prepared to follow his orders, but her uncle in Berlin suggested that she seek a position in the military. New offices were opening in Paris, which the Germans had just occupied. She applied.
Struwe was sent to France in 1940, Serbia in 1941, and Ukraine in 1942, opening mail, typing reports, editing publications, and relaying communications in the operations office of a Wehrmacht sentry. She was to be among some five hundred thousand in the Reich’s military auxiliary service, women occupying supportive roles in the army, air force, and navy. Two hundred thousand of these women were, like Struwe, sent to the occupied territories. When Struwe was transferred to Ukraine, she did not give it much thought. She wanted an adventure and travel, and besides, she had to go wherever she was sent.
Liselotte Meier, in contrast, chose to go east. She grew up in the Saxon town of Reichenbach at the foothills of the Ore Mountains bordering Bohemia. Meier and one of her childhood friends prepared together for white-collar work. They dreamed of careers in the nearby cities of Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin. Both would end up in the same office in Lida, Belarus. Meier had completed two years of a trade school and another two years of a commercial apprenticeship. At nineteen, she had the choice between working at an automobile factory in Leipzig and joining the new occupation administration in the East as a secretary. She chose the second. Along with others poised to become the new occupation staff, she traveled to Pomerania in Poland for a month’s orientation at Crössinsee Castle, mingling with the newly minted imperial governors and receiving both vaccinations and ideological training.
