by Wendy Lower
In the rural settings of the Holocaust, resources for the Nazis’ grandiose imperial endeavors were scarce. The few buildings in a town had to serve multiple purposes. A cinema could be a place of entertainment on one day, and on another a gathering place for victims prior to their murder. As one German teacher in Romanov, Ukraine, recalled, many Jews who survived the mass shootings were hiding in the forests, and her husband, the local forester, was aware of their presence. She and her husband did not help these Jews, or at least she did not mention to postwar investigators that they had done so. In her statement she described the mass graves she had often walked by in the woods. There were two large pits in an area “as big as our house, about ten meters wide.” Before being killed, the Jews were gathered in the local school, the school where she worked. In the wake of the massacre, women in the National Socialist Welfare Association did their traditional charity work—collecting, organizing, mending, and distributing the clothing and bedding of the dead Jews who had been hastily buried in the woods near the teacher’s house.
The urban scenery was also altered in ways visible daily. It was common to see bodies hanging from balconies and poles in Kharkiv, Kiev, Minsk, and Zhytomyr. To avoid seeing them, and fearing that they might fall down on her from their precarious perch, the nurse Erika Ohr walked along the inside of the walkway near the doorways and away from the street in Zhytomyr. In Buczacz, a German boy came home from school and reported to his mother that there was a dead Jewish woman in a pool of blood near the sidewalk. The next morning on his way to school, the dead woman was still lying on the street. When he returned home for lunch, he saw the body again. Agitated, his mother went to the local gendarme and complained. Did she disapprove of the murder of the Jewish woman, or of the bloody “mess” on the street that no one had cleaned up and that had upset her son? She does not make this clear in her postwar recollection.
The various cases of women who suddenly found themselves face-to-face with unexpected horror reveal moments of individual realization followed by some adaptation to it. In the summer of 1942, Ilse Struwe, the young secretary who had been trained as a child to be seen and not heard, was stationed with fifteen other young women as a clerk in an army operations office in Rivne, Ukraine. A Jewish girl named Klebka worked in the office. One day Struwe decided to visit Klebka in the “fenced, miserable ghetto, where the Jews were forced to live . . . It was horrible, ramshackle, dirty houses . . . ‘Filthy Jewish nest’ was the term often spoken around Rivne.”
German civilians and officials viewing the bodies of hanged men on a street in Minsk, 1942 or 1943
It was clear to Struwe from the sight of the ghetto that the Jews were in a desperate situation. She was disturbed by this, but all the same she carried on with her work and enjoyed the company of her female colleagues in the special dormitory where they lived together. But there were limits to distancing oneself in the East. The house for the German female staff where Struwe lived was situated across the street from the cinema. German SS men used this cinema as a gathering point for Jews during their relocation from the ghetto to the mass shooting site at the outskirts of town. Ilse Struwe’s room faced the cinema:
One night I was awakened by the hubbub of voices, banging tin cups, and soldier commandos . . . I stood up and went to the window, and looked out onto the street . . . A crowd of people stepped out of the open door of the cinema onto the street, and under the guard they were led away. It was between three and four in the morning. I could clearly recognize men, women, children, elderly and youths. On their clothing I could see that they came from the ghetto. Since September 1941 it was mandatory for all Jews to wear the star. At first I did not understand what was happening there. What are they doing? Why are they throwing pots and pans on the pavement, one after the other, with such rage? Then suddenly it came to me. They are trying to draw attention to themselves: See here what is happening to us! Do not allow this! Help us!
I stood behind the window and wanted to cry out: Do something! That is not enough! Arm yourselves! You are in the majority! A few of you could save yourselves! These persons, according to my estimate, numbered about three hundred—later I learned that it was much more—and they were being led by a handful of soldiers. But the prisoners [the Jews] dragged their feet, muttered with their heads down, along the dim street, capitulated without a fight. And I had a good look until the entire column disappeared. Then I lay down again on my bed. These persons will be killed. I knew it . . . The next morning in the office it was made known that these Jews had been shot a few kilometers from Rivne. We never saw Klebka again.
Ilse Struwe picnicking with colleagues in Ukraine, 1942 or 1943
The female personnel in her office spoke about the massacre. Struwe recalled different reactions. Some objected, complaining about the loss of Jewish labor. One stated under her breath that the Germans would conquer to the death. Another whispered: How awful. Most were afraid to speak out against it and just blurted out that Germany would be victorious. No one was critical of the young security policemen who shot the Jews.
Struwe, like many others, had wanted to see what was happening: she rushed to her window, craning her neck for a better look. Yet German leaders tried to reduce the number of direct witnesses to their crimes. The Final Solution was an official secret—in Himmler’s words, “a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.” Witnesses like Struwe were not supposed to look, let alone record and tell. In a notice to deport the Jews from the Tarnów ghetto, the local German commander ordered all residents who lived on the street along which the Jews would be marched to close the shutters of their windows during the Aktion. But such events aroused curiosity at least, and for many onlookers Schadenfreude. Those at the scene experienced the event in a sensory manner that comes across in their recountings of the cacophony of property destruction, the screaming of victims, the salvo of gunfire. Struwe was confused as an observer, sensing danger but looking on from a comfortable distance. She was surprised that the Jews did nothing to save themselves, but then again, she reasoned naively, their failure to put up a fight surely absolved her of any responsibility to get involved. After they passed by, she returned to her bed and tried to sleep. She could close her eyes, but the images and noises still pervaded her mind.
The entire Aktion, of which Struwe saw a glimpse, was one of several successive regional waves of massacres in Nazi-occupied Ukraine carried out under the orders of Heinrich Himmler, who urged civilian occupation officials to implement the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” fully—“one hundred percent.” In Rivne and the surrounding towns in Volhynia, one hundred sixty thousand Jews were massacred in ghetto liquidations and mass shootings in the second half of 1942. They were hastily buried in about two hundred mass graves in the region.
From Rivne, Struwe was transferred farther east, to Poltava, in the fall of 1942. Now her unease about what she had witnessed in Rivne added to her disillusionment about the war and her role in it. Reports about German casualties in the Sixth Army around Stalingrad were piling up on her desk. She had to say goodbye to her male officemates, who would no longer enjoy the security of an office job; they were being sent to Stalingrad as replacements. New female staff was brought in. As she typed up the secret casualty lists and radioed the figures to Berlin, Struwe realized that defeat at Stalingrad was likely. Conditions and the mood in her office deteriorated. She began to question the war: “What am I doing here, who am I? What am I doing in this man’s war? Men make war. Men kill. And they need women as handmaidens in their war.”
Since her time in Belgrade in 1941, Struwe had become accustomed to seeing gruesome photographs of public executions. German war correspondents in the military took snapshots of the victims before, during, and after their death, and sent the photos to military headquarters for propaganda purposes. Struwe’s job was to open the mail for her bosses, so she saw and read routine correspondence and classified material. One day at work, a folder was placed on her desk with pho
tographs in it. She opened it, and saw dead “partisans” who sat “crumpled down with their arms raised.” And she thought to herself: How can one photograph such atrocities? In Belgrade she had been incensed by the photographs because she felt the images could be used by the resistance—they would jeopardize German security. In Ukraine, she started to question the policy of mass murder.
Struwe put the photographs aside and moved on to the next file. She suppressed her emotions and these upsetting questions. She worked without feeling, like a machine. As she later articulated it, “a part of me was outside of myself.” Another woman working in Minsk expressed a similar reaction, writing to her mother in January 1943: “I have unlearned my Todesangst [fear of death], I live in the moment and in the work, and don’t allow myself to think of tomorrow [or] yesterday. When does one get used to this life? I just want to work, work, work. Not think, not feel!”
But Ilse Struwe’s emotions could not be completely contained, and what she saw could not be totally erased from memory. In her memoir she remembered that she cried incessantly and, isolating herself, was unable to befriend anyone. Only when she was transferred to Italy in 1943 did she break free of the depression she had experienced in Ukraine.
Annette Schücking’s personal photograph of the soldiers’ home in Novgorod Volynsk
A similar disillusionment would come to Annette Schücking, the former law student, whose first shocking encounter with soldiers on the train in Brest paled in comparison with what she was to see and hear when she arrived at her destination in Ukraine. On her first day in Novgorod Volynsk, an old fortress town with about eighteen thousand inhabitants (about half of them Jews), Schücking was told that all the Jews had been killed. A German officer stated this matter-of-factly as they all dined. Local Ukrainians who worked in the soldiers’ home with Schücking told her that about ten thousand Jews in the town and nearby towns had been shot. This seemed incomprehensible to her.
Determined to see for herself, she went to the Jewish quarter and saw the ransacked houses. Hebrew texts were lying on the floor along with other personal belongings. Her German colleagues collected useful items such as candlesticks to use in their local quarters or to bring home as war booty. Her orientation in Novgorod Volynsk had included a tour of the fortress that lay on the bank of the Sluch River, where Jews had been shot the month before, in September 1941. The tour guide, a member of the engineering staff, pointed out the spot on the riverbank where four hundred fifty Jewish men, women, and children were buried.
Everyday life in the soldiers’ home where Schücking was a relief worker meant constant contact with German soldiers; on some days thousands visited the retreat to enjoy German cooking and conversation. Nazi propagandists called these military retreats “islands of home.” In these German-only canteens, soldiers spoke openly about the massacres they witnessed and carried out. “Oftentimes conversations with soldiers got personal fast,” Schücking would later explain. “They were all men who hadn’t been around women for a long time. There were the Ukrainian women, of course, but they couldn’t talk to them—and they all had an intense need to talk.”
One day she was riding in a truck and the German soldier who was driving blurted out his story. He told of an incident not far from the soldiers’ home, in Koziatyn, a village southeast of Kiev. He and his colleagues had locked up several hundred Jews and denied them food and water. Weakening them was a preparatory measure. After two days the Jews were shot to death by a special squad that was active in the region. Schücking, with her lawyer’s training, collected precise details and recorded them in letters she wrote to her parents. German soldiers needed to tell her what they had heard, seen, and done. And she needed to write it down.
A German Red Cross nurse in Warsaw in 1943 listened to a wounded soldier who could not sleep. His company had been assigned to a shooting commando unit. There was a large pit; civilians were led to its edge, where he and his men shot them in the back of the head. An elderly woman at the edge of the pit ran to him. She was terrified and desperate. She had a photograph of herself in her hand. She gave it to him and asked that he give the photograph to her husband. The soldier had kept the photograph in his pay book, and showed it to the nurse.
Such stories are everywhere; soldiers and SS men who bloodied their hands in the genocide often told female comrades of their deeds. One day two executioners entered the private quarters of the Minsk showgirl Brigitte Erdmann, “their eyes burning with hate, the hate of a mortally wounded animal or of an abused child.” One placed his head on her shoulder, and she comforted him. She delighted in the attention of these desperate men, and preferred to console them rather than confront them.
Schücking’s letters home reveal a woman more critical of the violent men she encountered. On December 28, 1941, while traveling in a car, she met a sergeant. He explained that he had volunteered to shoot Jews in an upcoming action near Vinnytsia, Ukraine. He wanted a promotion. Annette advised him not to participate because “it would give him nightmares.” In mid-January she met the sergeant again, and he confirmed that he had taken part in the mass shootings in Khmilnyk, where, on January 9, 1942, German SS policemen, assisted by local army and indigenous auxiliaries, had killed six thousand Jews. According to a Jewish survivor, the German soldiers “went on a rampage; they smashed windows, fired their guns . . . Corpses were strewn everywhere, the snow was red with blood, the barbarians were running around and shouting like wild animals: ‘Beat the kikes! Jude kaput!’”
To make mass murder more economical, German SS and police leaders, regional military commanders, and Nazi Party officials developed a program to confiscate and redistribute the property of Jews. Tons of clothing were stored, cleaned, mended, and given to ethnic German refugees who were colonizing the newly occupied territories. At the end of 1941, Schücking saw clothing piled in a warehouse established by the National Socialist Welfare Association (NSV). She had gone there to find some items for the Ukrainian kitchen helpers in her workplace. Some of the German female colleagues who accompanied her enthusiastically thanked the German officials who opened up the warehouse to them, declaring “Heil Hitler” when they saw all the booty. Schücking was struck by the children’s clothing in the piles, and took nothing; some of her female colleagues were equally uneasy. Schücking wrote to her mother and told friends at home not to accept clothing from the NSV, since it was from murdered Jews.
Every week she drove one hundred kilometers from Novgorod Volynsk to the capital city of Rivne to pick up supplies. It was here that Schücking had her “ghetto” experience. She saw Jewish women and children being led away in July 1942, probably part of the same operation that Ilse Struwe witnessed. Although the two women may not have actually met in Rivne, their lives intersected there, and they responded to the events in a similar manner, despite their very different backgrounds. Like Ilse Struwe, Annette Schücking expressed feelings of helplessness, fear, and frustration. But there were limits to their empathy. Both asked: What can one do, after all? They kept busy and sought amusements—picnics, concerts—with their colleagues. They were among the few German women surrounded by thousands of soldiers; they carefully avoided the rough ones in the crowd, SS men and other notorious occupation officials who brandished their whips and pistols. After a few weeks in Ukraine, seeing the evidence of mass murder in Rivne in early November 1941 and the deteriorating condition of the few Jewish laborers who remained and then were also killed while she was there, Schücking wrote home to her mother: “What Papa says is true; people with no moral inhibitions exude a strange odor. I can now pick out these people, and many of them really do smell like blood. Oh Mama, what an enormous slaughterhouse the world is.”
Among the tens of thousands of single women working in the various military, administrative, and private business offices of the eastern territories, Schücking and Struwe represented the largest category, the bystanders. They were not presented with the choice to participate directly in the violence, or, as some extremi
sts would see it, the “opportunity” to collaborate. They were German female patriots doing their civil service. They were curious; they sought adventure. Once they entered the eastern territories and witnessed the atrocities, such as the ghetto liquidations in Rivne, they articulated emotions of concern and shock.
A secretary in Slonim was awakened at four in the morning by the sound of shooting. For hours she watched from her window as thousands of Jews from Slonim were herded out of the ghetto under constant gunfire and lined up. The ghetto was in flames. The next day, when she was allowed to leave her quarters—the SS and police had declared a lockdown during the action—she saw on the streets at the edge of the ghetto two long rows of charred Jewish bodies. Like Schücking and Struwe, she could hardly avoid witnessing the mass murder. She did not condone it, but she could not stop it either.
4
Accomplices
WOMEN LIKE ANNETTE SCHÜCKING, Ilse Struwe, Ingelene Ivens, and Erika Ohr were not exceptional women during the war. They were exceptional after the war. Of the hundreds of thousands who did go east, few published or publicly spoke at length about the Jewish victims and atrocities they had seen, as these four women did. During the Nazi era, many women were happy to don a uniform and embrace their newfound adulthood and civic identity in the movement. Then, in 1945, they removed and hid their insignias, and tucked their uniforms into drawers and attic chests. They concealed the provenance of items that they had plundered from the East, including the personal belongings of Jewish victims.
