by Wendy Lower
Like Liselotte Meier, Johanna Altvater volunteered for action in the East. Altvater was a working-class girl from Minden in western Germany, where her father was a foreman in a foundry. The Westphalian town was socially rigid, economically depressed, and piously conservative. There were not many job prospects here in the 1930s. In the modernizing state, marriage was still a primary route to social advancement. But women could also aim for a higher status as a civil servant and were swelling the ranks of Hitler’s state apparatus.
Altvater attended a middle school for girls, and in the local Hitler Youth she developed into one of the “strong, brave women” and “champions of the National Socialist World View.” When the League of German Girls was first established in her hometown, Altvater joined before membership in the Hitler Youth was compulsory. With her female comrades she was put to the test ideologically and physically. Socialization here did not come in the form of traditional female values, and the League was no finishing school. But Altvater—part tomboy, part wisecracking flirt valued for having childbearing hips—came close to the Nazis’ ideal type. She could hold her own alongside male comrades in the racial struggle.
Liselotte Meier, c. 1941
Altvater soon set her sights beyond the stifling atmosphere of Minden. From 1935 to 1938 she trained as a business secretary at a machine-manufacturing firm. Her supervisor evaluated her as “very punctual, hard-working, honest and eager to work.” With this recommendation she was able to obtain a position as a stenographer for the city administration of her hometown. But soon she became restless in her desk job; she wanted to get closer to the action of the war. Her boss in Minden tried to discourage her from leaving, but to no avail.
Realizing that Nazi Party membership would open up opportunities, perhaps in the newly annexed territories of Poland, Altvater filed her application. She was accepted in January 1941. Her clerical experience, single status, ostensible devotion to the Party, and desire to relocate made her an ideal candidate for service abroad. She was tapped by the new Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories to relocate to Ukraine, and left immediately.
Sabine Dick, born as Gisela Sabine Herbst in 1915, was slightly older than Struwe, Meier, and Altvater. She completed Gymnasium, the more competitive type of high school program in Germany, and her route to an eventual assignment in the East was more prestigious than that of the other secretaries. She was nineteen years old when she accepted a position in the recently established Gestapo station in Berlin. From there she was transferred to the Reich Security Main Office. It was a large organization, with a staff that would reach some fifty thousand in 1944. Dick worked in the counterespionage department, where enemies of the state, broadly conceived as “those who endanger the existence of the People’s Community or the vitality of the German Volk,” were investigated and where their arrests, interrogations, and incarceration were arranged.
The secretaries who worked in this most notorious office in the Nazi terror apparatus fit a certain profile. Most were Nazi Party members or were active in Party organizations prior to their employment in the East. They were serious, self-assured women who were not intimidated by the Gestapo building, a place to which Germans were summoned and from which many did not return home. These job seekers saw it instead as an attractive place to work. The pay was better, and perhaps being on the inside felt more secure than being on the outside.
The expansion of Germany into Austria brought more German women into the Nazi system. By the time Hitler annexed his homeland in March 1938, two young secretaries in Vienna had already opted for Nazism. Fanatics, they would later volunteer to work in Gestapo offices in Poland and Ukraine.
Gertrude Segel, born in 1920, was the daughter of an SS second lieutenant and therefore a member of the SS hereditary community (SS-Sippengemeinschaft). Like many of her generation, she completed eight years of grammar school and middle school, followed by a two-year trade school. After working for a few years as a typist in a private firm, she joined the newly established Gestapo office in 1938 and remained there until February 1941, when she requested a better position, working for the commander of the Security Police and Security Service (Sipo-SD) in Radom, Poland.
Described by SS racial examiners as possessing an “open, honest character,” Segel asserted that she was an orderly housekeeper, thrifty and maternal. But she did not appear to be Aryan. She was short, with brown eyes and thick, dark brown hair. An SS doctor determined that her looks manifested strains of the “Dinaric” race, which was still considered valuable German stock of the southeastern variant. For a photograph that would later accompany her application to marry the SS commander Felix Landau, Gertrude chose—oddly enough—to pose in an embroidered blouse, typically worn on special occasions by provincial Slavic women.
The scholar Michael Mann has argued that Nazis outside Germany—most notably in the borderlands of Poland, Bohemia, and Alsace as well as in Austria—developed especially fanatical tendencies in the 1930s. Their desire to become part of a Greater German Reich meant redrawing central Europe’s borders and revolutionizing or even destroying their own countries. In 1933, spurred by Hitler’s appointment and consolidation of Nazi power in Germany, Nazi activists in Vienna aggressively sought to expand their support base. They organized evening social events to lure young single men and women. One of these women was Josefine Krepp.
Gertrude Segel, c. 1941
Josefine Krepp was a twenty-three-year-old typist living at home in an outer district of Vienna. Her family apartment on the Krausegasse was not the best place from which to pursue a career or find a husband. In March 1933 Krepp made the trek into the city to attend a Nazi Party gathering. She paid two schillings to learn more about the movement and to meet other curious young men and women. That two-schilling entry fee became her first payment of Party dues. Krepp applied to join; it would be her first formal association with a political party. But she would have to wait to receive her official Party identification, because after the Nazis launched a series of bomb attacks in Austria, their Party was banned in June 1933. In the meantime, Krepp found a better job in the central police department. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Krepp, who was still considered a Party applicant, was at least allowed to wear her Nazi pin. Her dedication and ambition were recognized, and she was offered another new position, this one in the Gestapo station at Berggasse 43, near the Ringstrasse in the heart of Vienna.
Krepp’s office was just down the street from Sigmund Freud’s home, Berggasse 19, which had been raided in the days following the Anschluss. The elderly Freud fled a few months later to Paris. He was one of approximately one hundred thirty thousand Jews who were able to escape a salvo of anti-Semitic decrees and pogroms that ostracized and pauperized the Viennese Jewish community and left their synagogues, cultural centers, schools, and businesses in shambles. Hitler had a special hatred for Viennese Jews. Many Austrians cemented their future in the Party and the Reich by proving themselves in Vienna in 1938 and 1939. In August 1938 the Austrian SS captain Adolf Eichmann set up his Central Office for Emigration in the former Viennese palace of the Rothschilds. There, he and his staff zealously perfected a system of forced Jewish emigration and expropriation of Jewish property, a model later applied to the mass deportations of European Jews to the Nazi death camps in Poland and to mass shooting sites in eastern Europe.
Josefine Krepp was a direct beneficiary of these historic changes. As a recognized early supporter of the Nazi Party and loyal administrator, she was promoted from the regular police bureau to the elite security agency, the Gestapo. Krepp married Hans Block, an SS officer, and in March 1940 the couple received a nice apartment. It had been vacant since October 1939, when the first fifteen hundred Jews from Vienna were deported to a reservation in Nisko, Poland. Josefine Block’s new neighbor on the Apollogasse was Gertrude Segel.
Secretaries like Block and Segel were not ordinary office workers. If they passed the SS examiners’ test in physical appearance, genealogy,
and character, these young women in Himmler’s headquarters in Berlin and Vienna could fully envision themselves as members of an emerging elite. The route to success could involve service in the East, and many volunteered to be posted in Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine. Some were after a suitable partner to advance their social position, some sought to realize their newfound ideological goals, and some sought a liberating adventure. Many wanted all of the above.
Women who worked as secretaries in the Gestapo or the Reich Security Main Office typically remained in these organizations. As part of the hiring procedure, they took a vow of secrecy. Once they showed that they could be trusted, they were occasionally moved to different stations, wherever a pressing need for stenographers and typists arose. This was to be Sabine Dick’s path. After the war she claimed that she had not been interested in relocating outside of Germany, until her boss lured her with the promise of occupying the coveted front office for the chief of the secret police in Minsk. It was an influential position that paid better than her job in Berlin.
The tremendous growth of Nazi Germany, its proliferating state and Party offices, and its economic and military rearmament depended upon a young, female secretarial force of clerks, stenographers, telephone operators, and receptionists. At the time there was some ambivalence among men and women about this group of emerging female professionals. On the one hand, they were necessary to keep government and businesses running, and since most were underpaid, they were a cheap source of labor. On the other hand, these working women were becoming careerists with a potentially “boundless egoism.” Cantankerous critics complained that they were stealing jobs from men, weakening family traditions, and “failing to meet their obligations as mothers of the nation.” Yet such fears and prejudices had to be put aside once women were needed in the office to take the place of men called into battle. Thus this female contribution to the Nazi system was enormous, but it was publicly minimized. In Nazi ideology and propaganda, the mother remained the heroine of the German race.
WIVES
Thousands of Gestapo secretaries were direct witnesses and administrative accomplices to massive crimes. However, while employed as secretaries, they were not likely to become violent and perpetrate crimes themselves. Paradoxically, some of the worst female perpetrators were women without an official role in assisting with crimes—women who acted out their hatred and expressed their power in informal settings. These were wives who joined their husbands—high-ranking officials in the Nazi Party, the SS and police, and the occupation administration—in the East. Such women demonstrated two understandings of marriage. On one hand, they epitomized the dutiful wife, subordinate to her husband and seemingly content with domestic work and childrearing. On the other hand, when the Führer and the Volksgemeinschaft required it, their marriages became essentially partnerships in crime. In the Nazi power hierarchy, the fact of shared race between husband and wife could trump the inequities of gender. German women mimicked men doing the dirty work of the regime—the work that was necessary to the future existence of the Reich—because they were racial equals.
As SS brides, some 240,000 German women were accepted into society’s new racial nobility. According to Heinrich Himmler’s “Engagement and Marriage Decree,” Germany’s existence depended on the consolidation and reproduction of a superior racial stock of German Nordic men and women with staunch National Socialist convictions. The racial elite would be concentrated in the SS. Heinrich Himmler, whom Hitler appointed Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germanness in 1939, was the chief regulator of German and non-German blood. The numerous organizations under his control, such as the SS Race and Resettlement Office, strove to identify and promote those with pure German blood (which of course could never be medically classified as a type) and a paranoid rejection of its pollutants. Racial mixing between Germans and Jews, or between Germans and “Gypsies, Negroes, or their bastards,” was a crime. Official policy now included forced sterilizations to avoid supposed threats to pure German blood, the criminalization of abortions, and strict regulation of marriage to promote fertile unions.
Looking back on the madness of this ideology, we struggle to grasp how a generation became consumed by it, and with such urgency and seriousness. For those who had to turn Nazi racial ideology into practice, there were inherent contradictions to overcome and fuzzy notions to clarify. To that end, jurists, scientists, doctors, and bureaucrats developed systems, laws, and procedures, such as the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, and the Reich Citizenship Law, otherwise known as the Nuremberg Laws. Sexual intercourse became a form of racial mating that had to be approved by the nation-state. The exacting administrator Heinrich Himmler named himself the sole authority for certifying marriages of SS men, concentrating on the files of his senior officers and the cases of questionable ancestry. From each marriage applicant—the SS man and his proposed wife—Himmler demanded extensive documentation certifying Aryan ancestry (detailed genealogical histories dating back to the 1750s, and often earlier), ideological loyalty, physical fitness, acceptable racial features (height, weight, hair color, nose shape, head measurements, profile), and fertility. Hundreds of thousands of prospective SS brides were subjected to invasive gynecological exams and tested on their domestic skills and maternal instincts. One of the applications for marriage that landed on Himmler’s desk in 1942 was that of Vera Stähli and Julius Wohlauf.
Vera Stähli, soon to become Vera Wohlauf, was already cunning and attention-seeking, perhaps traits acquired in her difficult youth. Her father, a machine engineer, died when she was five years old. Vera and her mother moved from Hamburg to Switzerland to live with relatives, but later moved back to Hamburg, where in 1929, at seventeen, Vera completed her education in a trade school. Even with the onset of the Depression she managed to secure clerical jobs in various firms, but it was not possible to achieve her goal of living on her own.
After her mother died suddenly Vera navigated her own path. She left for England for six months. When she returned to Germany, the Nazis were on the rise. Vera had not been politically active before, but participation in some Nazi Party organization now seemed advantageous. Moreover, the growth of the Party meant that more positions were opening up. From 1933 to 1935 Vera was employed by the Nazis’ German Labor Front, which systematically dismantled and absorbed the trade unions and forced out Jews, socialists, and communists. She became an active member of the Reich Trade Association. Vera was not shy about her accomplishments. On her résumé she claimed responsibility for expanding commerce in the German restaurant industry.
Photos of Vera Stähli in her SS marriage application, 1942
Vera fit the Nazi ideal of womanhood: five foot nine, 160 pounds, “round-headed, blue-eyed, blond-haired, [and] straight-nosed.” She knew how to convince SS examiners that she was a thrifty, resourceful woman who could manage a household. She liked order, had good taste, and was clever. She completed the requisite courses in household management and childcare and was awarded athletic medals.
Vera’s proposed marriage to Julius Wohlauf would be her second. In the mid-1930s in Hamburg she had managed to move up the social ladder, just as many young secretaries fantasized, through an office encounter and then marriage to a wealthy merchant. But to Vera’s disappointment, her marriage remained childless, despite her “most private wishes” to have children. This, she said to examiners in divorce court, was due to “the behavior of her husband,” who was drafted in May 1940 after several years of marriage. She claimed that he could easily have fulfilled her desperate wish to have a child, since he was often stationed close to Hamburg and home on furlough. But he declined. Vera demanded a divorce, and after some time he agreed. In order to expedite the proceedings, Vera accepted all guilt. When she later revealed in court that she had not had intercourse with her husband for the past eight months, the judge questioned her fidelity and asked whether she had embarked on another relationship, which Vera denied. The divorce was made official in June
1942. In fact, a few weeks earlier, she and Julius Wohlauf had filed their marriage application in the SS Race and Resettlement Office.
Vera and Julius were in a rush to marry because Captain Wohlauf, a “take-charge” unit commander of Order Police Battalion 101, was scheduled to leave for duty in Lublin, Poland. Wohlauf was one of Himmler’s trusted field commanders and had just received the prized SS death’s-head ring for his service in the East. The ink of Himmler’s initials on their application was barely dry when the two lovebirds finalized plans to spend their honeymoon together in Poland. They were euphoric. Julius Wohlauf had a beautiful, adoring wife with a large dowry of cash and other assets that more than tripled his own. Vera Wohlauf had been accepted into the new elite of the SS. Racial examiners noted on the marriage application that Vera displayed a National Socialist outlook and championed the movement with courage and vigor. But Vera was not one to stay home. She wanted to be with Wohlauf, who was at the center of the struggle. She decided to join her betrothed in Poland at the end of July.
Photos of Liesel Riedel in her SS marriage application, 1935
Liesel Riedel and her SS fiancé, Gustav Willhaus, were also eager to get married and enjoy the benefits of a raised social status. They submitted their marriage application in 1935. In her handwritten résumé Liesel noted that she grew up around the ironworks of Neunkirchen and identified herself as the daughter of a senior foreman. With a ninth-grade education from a Catholic school, she went to work at a large chicken farm. For three seasons she helped in the household and did occasional odd jobs in the farm manager’s office. Liesel was dissatisfied with menial work on the farm, however, so she enrolled in an eight-month course at a trade school. She developed her skills in household management and cooking. This was enough for her to secure a training position as a cook at an eatery in her hometown, but she did not last there very long either. She jumped from job to job. As a clerk in a trust office, her wages kept her below the poverty line, so she decided to apply for a position sponsored by the Nazi Party at the local newspaper, NSZ-Rheinfront.
