by Wendy Lower
The general silence of German women after the war is rooted in many things, including feelings of shame, grief, and fear. It was certainly in the interest of many women who were in the eastern killing fields to hide the fact that they were near crime scenes. Even if they wanted to speak, there were few who wanted to listen. There is no social tradition that encourages women to tell war stories about the violence they saw, experienced, or perpetrated. In contrast, German women could speak about their hardships and victimization on the home front —about doing men’s work, such as operating street-cars, policing marketplaces, and managing farms; about the devastating aerial bombings of their towns; about homelessness, flight, and postwar famine. Audiences were quite receptive to recollections that affirmed traditional wartime roles for women as staunch defenders, maids-in-waiting, and innocent martyrs.
Their youth explains how so many of these women got swept up in the moment and the movement. Or was this a later excuse? In memoirs and interviews, and even as defendants in the courtroom, German women explained shameful actions with the comment “Oh, I was so young in those days.” As young women they were naive, and they were malleable. But during the war, as each came closer to the horrible reality of the nation’s deeds, each had to make a personal choice. And while there might not be the option to leave one’s post, nor could one avoid being a witness to genocide, there were choices concerning how one behaved during and after the war.
Many German women encountered what happened, in its various stages. They peered into ghettos out of curiosity, discovered mass graves, and, like Annette Schücking, were invited to sort through Jewish clothing and personal belongings. Like Ingelene Ivens, they encountered Jewish refugees seeking aid on the school playground; like Ilse Struwe, they saw from windows that Jews were being led away to the edge of town, and they heard the mass shootings. To protect themselves, most who saw something chose to shut their eyes afterward. But what about the women who were at the center of the mass-murder machinery and could not turn a blind eye?
In Holocaust studies, one type of perpetrator, fashioned after Adolf Eichmann and others who organized deportations of Jews from Berlin headquarters, is the male bureaucratic killer, or desk murderer. He commits genocide through giving or passing along written orders; thus his pen or typewriter keys become his weapon. This type of modern genocidaire assumes that the paper, like its administrator, remains clean and bloodless. The desk murderer does his official duty. He convinces himself as he orders the deaths of tens of thousands that he has remained decent, civilized, and even innocent of the crime. What about the women who staffed those offices, the female assistants whose agile fingers pressed the keys on the typewriters, and whose clean hands distributed the orders to kill?
As Hitler’s empire expanded and contracted, women had to take on more tasks, not only in managing households and farms but also in running government systems and private businesses. In fact, the proportion of women in the Gestapo offices of Vienna and Berlin was unusually high, reaching forty percent by the war’s end. Women were expected to stand by men as well as fill their positions to free them up for the front. The exigencies of war accelerated the labor trends of the interwar period and also reversed the educational policies of the 1930s: women’s access to higher education improved for a time, women swelled the ranks of government offices, and a new female hierarchy emerged, from regular aides to senior staff. But such social mobility came with a price—participation in operations of mass murder.
Women secretaries, file clerks, typists, and telephone operators were attached to the bureaucratic tentacles of the Reich system of rule. Each office or outpost employed at least one German woman from the Reich. If on average there was one female assistant reporting to five male administrators, this would put the figure of female staff in the civilian governing offices of Nazi-occupied Poland at about five thousand, with at least twice as many in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics combined. As administrative accomplices in central offices where the Holocaust was organized and implemented—such as the district governor’s office or the Department of Jewish Affairs of the security police—most claimed that they were “just doing their job.” But their routine procedures generated unprecedented crimes. None could claim ignorance of the human impact of her work.
Little has been written about the internal workings of these offices, in part because of inattention to the revealing testimony of secretaries who were on the inside or to that of the Jewish survivors who interacted with these women and identified them as having been at crime scenes. Within the local hierarchy of German female administrators, the secretary to the district commissar (regional governor) was the person most often seen by his side. The commissars were not numerous (especially if one considers the vast size of the area they governed), but they were notoriously visible, mockingly described as pheasants for the uniforms they wore as they strutted about—a garish mustard-brown, decorated with colorful Nazi patches and pins. Their female assistants earned the label of smaller fowl, Goldammern or “yellowhammers” —sparrow-sized, thick-billed birds that nest in patches of scrub or ditches. In small-town settings such as the Polish-Lithuanian town of Lida, German officials spent a good deal of time together: they and their families shared housing, schools, canteens, and offices, and they swam and picnicked together at local lakes and streams.
Among the elite in Lida was Liselotte Meier, the young woman who chose office work in the East over factory work in Leipzig. Her month-long orientation at Crössinsee Castle in Pomerania, Poland, included training in shooting a pistol. One of the dignitaries at the orientation caught her eye, a handsome Stormtrooper named Hermann Hanweg. Almost twice her age, Hanweg had worked his way up in the Party administration and, like many “old fighters,” was rewarded with a sinecure in the empire. The two spent time together in Minsk and fell in love. Hanweg insisted that Liselotte join him when he was given the post of district commissar of Lida. When they arrived there in the early fall of 1941, a mobile killing squad had already swept through town and massacred the Jewish intelligentsia and patients in local hospitals. Thousands of Jews remained, however, and it was Hanweg’s duty to make the region Judenfrei, free of Jews.
The twenty-year-old Meier learned to stay close to Hanweg and to mix business with pleasure. She followed him everywhere. With her desk positioned in front of his office door, she controlled all access to her boss. She knew the Jewish council members; some twenty years after the war, she could still identify them by name. She was also close to Hanweg’s family, though perhaps not by choice. Hanweg ordered Meier to escort his wife and three children when they relocated to Lida. The children called Meier “Vice-Mama”; the wife of the commissar named her “Brutus.”
In Lida, the Hanweg children attended a special German school and played in the local parks and forests. They routinely accompanied their mother and father on tours of the ghetto workshops, where thousands of Jews tried desperately to stay alive by fulfilling every order and whim of the local Germans. To please the commissar, a team of Jewish craftsmen created an elaborate electric train set for his son’s birthday. They also presented Hanweg with a set of rings, one for each member of the family. Today the commissar’s ring remains a treasured family heirloom. Featuring a large amber stone set in silver, it is decorated with the Hanweg coat of arms—a tiny ax and mace finely carved by an artisan with a keen eye for the minute detail of filigree.
Mounting wartime deprivations in the Old Reich—food and housing shortages—made the riches of the East irresistible. Secretaries may have received letters and special personal items from back home, but by far the bulk of care packages in the postal system were sent not from Germany to the East but rather the other way around. Personnel in the occupied territories shipped trainloads of plundered items to family in Germany and Austria—crates of eggs, flour, sugar, clothing, and home furnishings. It was the biggest campaign of organized robbery and economic exploitation in history, and German women were among its prime agents and benefici
aries.
This indulgence was not condoned by the regime; Jewish belongings were officially Reich property and not meant for personal consumption. Some plunderers, women among them, were punished and even executed for stealing from the Reich. But it is clear that in this particular activity there was little regard for obeying the Führer, especially because the massive theft was part and parcel of the economy of the Third Reich. If one had to do the dirty work of mass murder, one expected to be compensated. The greed of German men and women who gained access to the plunder was seemingly insatiable. The wife of a policeman in Warsaw, for instance, stockpiled so much that she lacked the space to hide it; she simply piled up the booty outside, around her house. The enterprising wife of a police official in Lviv who decided to sell her plunder brazenly established a shop on the very street where her husband worked at police headquarters. Wives of top officials paraded around in stolen furs and demanded superior living quarters, ordering Jewish craftsmen to lay stolen porcelain tiles in lavish bathrooms and to erect custom balconies. The excesses were so blatant, in fact, that they generated a number of critical reports and investigations during the war.
The distribution and consumption of Jewish goods near the mass-murder sites was experienced as a triumph and cause for celebration. Operation (Aktion) Reinhard, the Nazi campaign to murder 1.7 to 2 million Polish Jews (along with Jews of other nationalities) who were sent to the gassing centers of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, produced one of the biggest plunder depots in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. Sitting on this pile of booty near Lublin was the manager of this murder operation, SS Major General Odilo Globocnik, and surrounding him were his “ladies.” According to a former aide, Globocnik’s secretaries “cheerfully” prepared lists of Jewish deportees to Treblinka, lists of Jews who died, and lists of confiscated property.
Globocnik’s lovers and secretaries were not direct perpetrators of the Holocaust, or at least no testimony or documentation has surfaced proving that they committed violent acts. But they were accomplices: they took dictation and typed up the orders facilitating the robbery, deportation, and mass murder of Jews. They performed these duties with the knowledge that they were contributing to the goal of total extermination of the Jewish people. They transmitted Globocnik’s reports to Himmler on the “successful” operations of the Final Solution. As the creators of professional and private havens for the top managers, such as Globocnik, they contributed to the normalization of the perverse.
One day when Hanweg’s son went to the ghetto workshops, where he liked to play, he discovered that no Jews were there. Since Jews in Lida were regularly shot in town and in the neighboring villages, he was not surprised when he overheard adults saying that nearly all the Jews had been killed. The first and largest massacre had occurred on May 8, 1942, two kilometers from town. About 5,670 Jews were driven to the outskirts, forced to undress and kneel before mass graves, and shot. A Jewish work detail spread quicklime and earth over the bodies. Then Hanweg and his deputy forced the workers, who had just buried their loved ones, to bow down and say thank you for allowing them to live. In town, the corpses of the elderly and children littered the streets. These victims had been too frail or small to walk to their deaths on their own.
All the secretaries in the offices saw the commotion and heard the gunfire. But Liselotte Meier was more than a passive witness: she participated in the planning of the massacres and was present at more than one of the shootings that occurred in 1942–43. In fact, postwar statements about crimes committed by the commissar’s office in Lida stressed that Meier was the most knowledgeable person, “better informed than many of the officials in the station.”
A certified bookkeeper, Meier went with Hanweg to the Jewish workshops three or four times each week and kept careful tallies of German orders for goods and deliveries from the Jewish laborers. She discussed the orders with members of the Jewish council and the elder of the council, an engineer named Altmann. She placed orders of her own as well. A former Jewish laborer recalled:
Commissariat officials, German officers, and their relatives took advantage of the workshops and flooded them with orders that were completed on time. A special department handled leather leftovers received from boot factories, and made leather items such as belts, wallets, purses, stripe-colored boxes, and leather jewelry that especially charmed female officials at the commissariat offices.
Jewish laborers catered to Meier’s and Hanweg’s every wish, constructing a swimming pool for their enjoyment, renovating a villa, and serving them postcoital delicacies as they lay naked in bed. In hindsight, it may seem incomprehensible that intimate relationships developed within the maelstrom of genocidal violence. But the violent horrors of the Holocaust were no mere backdrop to Meier and Hanweg’s love affair; they were a central drama igniting its passion. The two were intoxicated with their newfound power and “place in the sun,” a sensation known in German as the Ostrausch or “eastern rush.” It was a euphoria that was expressed in sex and violence.
Hanweg’s secretary-concubine became his confidante. He gave Meier special access to the office safe where the most secret orders were stored. She did not take simple dictation from the commissar, which was mainly the job of the stenographer, but was often told to write up orders and take care of clerical matters with other local German officials, including the gendarme leaders. When questioned after the war, Liselotte Meier could not recall if she had issued an order that authorized the shooting of sixteen Jews who appeared late for work, an order that others later accused her of writing. During secret planning meetings before a mass shooting, Meier took the meeting notes and coordinated the logistics with executioners from the security police (SD), the local gendarmerie, the indigenous mayor, and the deputy commissar in charge of “Jewish affairs.” She was careful about how much she committed to paper. “There was little written traffic about Jewish actions, that was absolutely secret,” she later stated. Her boss simply told the local police chief and office staff when and where the pits were to be dug.
Meier kept the coveted office stamp in her desk drawer; that meant that she could sign on behalf of the commissar. The official stamp and special forms, such as the worker’s identification card (the so-called Gold Card), were potentially lifesaving bureaucratic tools. For a Jewish person, the only way to escape the shooting pits, other than flight and suicide, was to secure a labor assignment. The commissar and his staff had the authority to certify who was and who was not a Jew. They could decide who would be killed, who could be spared. Secretaries who participated in the selection of Jewish laborers and issued the identification cards had their favorites; one of Meier’s was the Jewish hairstylist who came to her private quarters. While this stylist was a useful Jew, most others were, as she put it, “that Dreck”—garbage. In Slonim (in what is Belarus today), another special assistant to the district commissar, the secretary Erna Reichmann, stood before a column of two thousand Jews who were being marched to the mass shooting site. Jewish laborers were pulled out of the line based on a formal list that she and her colleagues had typed up, or they were selected spontaneously. Reichmann spotted a Jewish woman who “had not finished knitting a sweater for her,” so she removed her from the column.
Jews forced to march through Lida before being killed, with German guards—a female official or civilian among them—presumably selecting laborers and appropriating Jewish belongings, March 1942
Yet even these skilled Jewish laborers were, to the Nazi way of thinking, ultimately dispensable. Deprived of any worth or dignity as human beings, Jews became the slaves and playthings of their German overseers. Killing Jews became a source of amusement in Lida, like hunting rabbits. As one Jewish survivor recalled:
On one Sunday all the Jews of Lida were called out to go into the nearby forest to clear out the rabbits hiding in the bushes, and chase them in the direction of the hunters. A group of several hundred men were recruited for this job, and a long line of Jews marched down the road to the forest in
the deep snow, shaking from cold and fear of what they would encounter. Suddenly a group of winter carriages appeared, including the local commissar Hanweg and his staff, senior officials, and women wearing beautiful fur coats. They were all drunk, lying around their seats in the carriage hugging and shouting, their peals of laughter echoing in the distance. The carriages galloped between the rows of marchers, and the shouting grew louder. The wild Germans mocked the Jews, laughed at them, and struck those nearby with whips. One of the drunken officers aimed his hunting rifle and started shooting at the Jews to the raucous pleasure of his staff. The bullets struck some marchers who collapsed in pools of blood.
A “Frau Apfelbaum” with a shotgun in the Lida woods
After the war Meier admitted that she joined her colleagues on these Sunday outings and hunting trips. Jews had become easy targets that brought instant gratification to inexperienced, often intoxicated marksmen. Exhausted and malnourished, Jewish laborers moved slowly in the snow. Their dark figures stood out against the white winter landscape. A lucky few dodged the German bullets and found refuge in the camouflage of the forest. “Trees saved us,” a survivor from Lida would later say. “We had so much confidence in bushes, they could not see us there.” Meier could not have imagined that, twenty years later, Lida’s Jews would reappear to identify and accuse her.
