Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  Historians of the Holocaust have often focused on the first wave of massacres in the Soviet Union, perpetrated by the mobile security units known as the Einsatzgruppen. By the end of 1941 these elite killing squads had gunned down close to five hundred thousand Soviet Jews. So extensive was the documentation of their gruesome work that after the war American prosecutors conducted a special Nuremberg trial against leading Einsatzgruppen members. But little has been said about those who typed up this damning evidence of the Holocaust. There were at least thirteen female typists assigned to Einsatzgruppe A. One of them listened carefully to her boss, Walther Stahlecker, as he dictated numbers adding up to 135,567 Jews, communists, and mentally ill who had been shot in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus in the late summer and autumn of 1941. She helped type, copy, and officially certify the 143-page report to be sent to Berlin from the Einsatzgruppe A outpost in Riga. A special map accompanying Stahlecker’s final report to Heydrich in January 1942 depicted the near completion of the Final Solution in the Ostland. A coffin was drawn for each region, and a tally of the total number of Jews killed appeared beside each coffin on the map.

  Recipients of the Stahlecker reports did not have to bother to read every statement. The tallies were impressive enough, and the visual aid of the coffins communicated clearly the scope of the killing. Women in SS field offices prepared thousands of pages of such reports, received them in Berlin headquarters, and then distributed them across Reich agencies.

  A coffin-decorated tally by Einsatzgruppe A of Jews killed in each region in 1941

  Himmler realized that women constituted a critical labor force for carrying out his genocidal plans. Besides association with the SS as camp guards and fertile brides, women were permitted to join the elite terror organization in a special auxiliary corps of administrators. In early 1942 Himmler ordered the establishment of a female reporting and clerical unit of the SS, the SS-Frauenkorps. He had to convince his subordinates that women should be respected not only for their biological contribution but also for their organizational skills. In a famous speech to SS generals in Poznań in October 1943, Himmler praised his colleagues for sending their daughters, sisters, brides, and girlfriends to the new elite training program. Appealing to the men’s sense of chivalry and honor, he urged them to comply with this integration of women in the workforce as necessary for the war effort. As for the morale of his female recruits, Himmler visited the school and reassured them that their office work in the SS would not degrade them; on the contrary, it would enhance their marriageability.

  The presence and promotion of women in the SS workplace was not without its conflicts and tensions. The woman appointed first SS female superintendent of Birkenau, Johanna Langefeld, greeted Himmler when he visited Auschwitz on July 18, 1942. Her male colleague, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, thought Langefeld was too assertive and questioned whether she was up to implementing plans for the large women’s camp in Birkenau. Himmler insisted that a “women’s camp must be commanded by a woman.” He supported Langefeld’s position as SS senior superintendent and warned that SS men were not to enter the female camp. Career tracks in camp and other bureaucracies opened up for women in the modern Nazi state, not in subordinate roles but in a hierarchy that placed them in commanding positions with unprecedented power, with the revered status of a uniformed government official.

  When female administrators and guards abusively managed the prisoner population at a major camp or typed orders to carry out massacres of Jews and of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian civilians who had been branded partisans, they helped make mass murder standard operating procedure. They lent their organizational know-how and individual skills to the machinery of destruction. In Warsaw, secret police secretaries handled the paperwork on reprisals against Polish political prisoners. What did this actually entail? As one clerk explained, “In the hallway, there was then a bunch of files, say a hundred files or so, and when then only fifty were to be shot it was in the women’s sole discretion to choose the files. Sometimes the head of the division would say, ‘This or that person must go, get rid of that piece of shit.’” Usually, though, “it was up to the receptionists to decide about who would be shot. Sometimes one of the women would ask her colleague: ‘How about this one? Yes or no?’” This inside look at the Warsaw police department captures essential features of the Nazi terror—the paperwork behind it, its magnitude, its ideological fury, its routine randomness—and its dependence on women office workers.

  In Tarnopol (a town in present-day Ukraine, but in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war), a twenty-two-year-old typist in the Gestapo office noticed special meetings during August 1942, attended by all the SS men from the region. After such meetings, her boss informed her that the office would be empty the following day and that the women would have to “hold down the fort.” When the male staff returned, they were in a festive mood and told stories about mass shootings, often in gruesome detail. The killing was done with a large plank, “like a diving board,” which was placed over the mass grave. Jews were made to walk the plank and fell into the grave upon being shot by sharpshooters, who stood at a distance. SS policemen from the young typist’s office carried out shootings in Tarnopol, Skalat, and Brezhany. One of the men approached her after returning from a massacre. He extended his hand to her and asked her to shake it. She refused, telling him it was dirty. “Yes,” he replied, laughing, and he made a gesture as if firing a gun. Then he pointed to his uniform and boots and said, “Look, here is a drop of blood, and here still another, and another.”

  Sabine Dick, the secretary who worked in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin before deciding to take a position in the office of the secret police in Minsk, did extend her hand to her bloodstained boss. When she arrived in Belarus she was a seasoned Gestapo secretary who had been on the inside for almost a decade. She was looking to advance her position and to increase her paycheck. She was promised the best assignment—she was to be personal secretary to Georg Heuser, a former law student, professional detective, and seasoned killer from Einsatzgruppe A. He would later be convicted by a West German court for the murder of 11,103 people.

  Georg Heuser and Sabine Dick ran an efficient office and became friends. According to Dick’s later testimony, when Heuser needed to issue orders for an Aktion against Jews, he would rush to his assistant’s desk: “Sabine, quickly write this up!” Sabine Dick understood the code language of such orders: though Heuser might dictate to her something about the “thorough destruction of a ghetto in some place,” the subject line rarely referred explicitly to Jews. Usually he had her draw up three sets of orders, one for each commander of a shooting squad. She completed the paperwork, and it was Heuser who hand-delivered the orders to his unit commanders. Thus the orders were not widely circulated, and no duplicates were made for the files. Once such orders were issued, the atmosphere in the office was calm or sometimes even festive and relaxed. The men were relieved that they were not being called into real combat in antipartisan warfare. Shooting defenseless Jews was easier.

  Orders issued for waging an antipartisan campaign were different. Many more details were committed to paper, including all the names of participants, the assignment of weapons, and the allocation of food and other supplies. In the orders that Sabine Dick typed for Jewish executions, there was no mention of food supplies. Instead, schnapps was requisitioned and given to the shooters. Those who joined the execution squads often returned drunk from the Aktion and went to the women’s dormitory. Under the pretense that there were more reports to be typed, they dragged women from their rooms and, as another secretary put it delicately, “sought our company.”

  Antipartisan operations could last for weeks; mass shootings usually occurred on one day. All the SS policemen on staff were expected to carry out atrocities against civilians and partisans, but no one was punished if he refused to participate in an Aktion against the Jews or if he chose to stay in the office on the day of the massacres. Neither men nor
women were required to carry out the genocide, and yet the Holocaust could not have been accomplished if a sense of duty had not prevailed over the sense of morality. In favoring perceived duty over morality, men and women were more alike than different.

  Not long after Sabine Dick and her female colleagues arrived in the eastern territories at the end of 1941, they saw that Jews who lived there or who had been transported there from the Reich were being massacred. The Minsk Gestapo office, which employed at least ten female clerks, typists, bookkeepers, and translators, was an epicenter of the Holocaust. Many of the more notorious perpetrators of the Holocaust spent some time there, including Heinrich Himmler, who liked to make decisions on the spot and used killing sites in Belarus to test out murderous experiments with explosives and carbon monoxide. In Sabine Dick’s office there were about a hundred Jewish workers who slept in the basement. The building also contained interrogation rooms and torture chambers. Some Jews were hanged in the courtyard; others were loaded onto gas vans in front of the office. This was the atmosphere of her workplace.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that around the office Jewish deportees and prisoners were spoken of in nonhuman terms. In the culture of consumption, trade, and profiteering, a culture often dominated by German women, Jews were seen as commodities. When transports of Jews arrived in Minsk, the Gestapo office staff enjoyed an abundance of delicacies—which they called Judenwurst, Jewish sausage—stolen from the deportees. Nothing was to go to waste except the “human trash.” Often at the center of organizing and distributing Jewish goods and property, the secretaries in the office handled the plundered “Jewish sausage.” Before or after the Jews were killed, the secretaries prepared it, served it, and ate it with their male colleagues.

  But Sabine Dick wanted more than Jewish food. Colleagues in the office spoke about a big farmhouse in Maly Trostenets, about eight miles outside of Minsk, that was stuffed with Jewish clothes and other personal items. The estate in Maly Trostenets was a labor camp and major receiving area where local Jews and Jews from the Netherlands, Austria, Czech lands, Germany, and Poland were shot in pits, then flattened with tractors. The farm and nearby forests would soon hold the largest concentration of mass graves of the Holocaust on Belarusian territory; estimates of Jews killed there range from sixty thousand to one hundred thousand. Many of those killed at Maly Trostenets were well-to-do and had brought their most valuable possessions with them from Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Vienna. When Dick’s brother was killed in the war and she needed a mourning dress, she naturally thought of the depot in Maly Trostenets as a place where she could find one. SS Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch—Heuser’s boss—remarked that it would not be appropriate for her, a German woman in her position, to wear Jewish things. She agreed and abstained from taking the dress. Gold was different. Sabine secured a document from her dentist certifying that gold was needed for fillings in her teeth, and presented the certificate to Georg Heuser. He gave her three Jewish wedding rings from the stash of gold kept in the office safe. After the war Dick claimed that the rings were lost in the chaos of the Allied plundering of her family home. But investigators did not ask her to open her mouth.

  The secretaries Liselotte Meier and Sabine Dick were at the very center of the Nazi murder machinery, and they, like so many others, chose to benefit from their proximity to power, plundering in depraved ways. The complicity of teachers, nurses, social workers, and resettlement advisors in the East was not as routine and widespread as that of secretaries (and, as we shall see, of wives). But it was significant nonetheless, and worth examining for the evidence it provides on how the genocide drew women into its operations, often in an ad hoc manner.

  In mapping the presence of German women in the East, one can find them in large numbers in regions with high concentrations of ethnic Germans: in parts of Lithuania, Ukraine, and eastern Poland, and in settlements of tsarist Russia where German farmers and craftsmen had lived since the eighteenth century. With Hitler and Himmler envisioning these colonies as future Aryan utopias and Reich strongholds, young German women were charged with building up these settlements as the Führer’s missionaries, also known as “culture bearers.”

  One such ethnic German stronghold was wedged between Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia, where Hitler and Himmler established their top-secret headquarters in the summer of 1942. About one hundred women from the Reich arrived to transform local ethnic German youths into Hitler loyalists. As official representatives of the National Socialist Welfare Association, these colonial enthusiasts established forty-one kindergartens and several birthing centers and nursing stations. Midwives instructed young mothers about “racial hygiene.” Social workers and educators taught ethnic Germans that the Jews had set out to destroy the German people, and that the war was being fought against Jews who had surrounded and threatened to starve the Germans. They advised youths to protect the German race by following the Führer’s example in not smoking or drinking. They distributed photos of Hitler and swastika flags, and they taught young people Nazi songs. These ethnic Germans were often destitute but also quite receptive to the concepts of anti-Semitic scapegoating and vengeance: they had experienced Bolshevik terror in the 1930s, and they connected Jews with Bolshevism. German women, as culture bearers who worked diligently to indoctrinate ethnic Germans, were deadly enablers of the vengeance.

  We have seen that within German occupation society was another female group, the wives of SS men. What is especially striking about these wives is that, unlike the secretaries, teachers, nurses, or “culture bearers,” they were not officially given any direct role in the division of labor that made the Holocaust possible. Yet their proximity to the murderers and their own ideological fanaticism made many of them into potential participants. Others served as enablers.

  Nazi leaders tried various measures to keep marriages intact during the war, such as laws against adultery. Wherever possible, they also encouraged wives of officials to go east for brief visits with their husbands. To travel, one had to possess a special pass to enter the occupied territories, which was arranged by the invitee, usually a husband, relative, or a boss in a government agency.

  Vera Wohlauf, whose first marriage to a Hamburg merchant she had parlayed into a second one with an SS police officer, arrived in Poland in the summer of 1942. She and her new husband, Julius, had quickly made arrangements for a wedding ceremony during his furlough in late June, and Vera wasted no time in joining him in the East afterward.

  Julius was scheduled to command one of three companies of Order Police Battalion 101 assigned to the liquidation of the Miedzyrzec-Podlaski ghetto on August 25–26, 1942. Over the course of these two days, more than eleven thousand Jews were gathered in the marketplace. Those who could not walk or who resisted deportation were beaten and shot. Many collapsed in the summer heat. The corpses of young and old, men, women, and children, approximately 960 bodies, lay scattered and in piles on the streets. After being herded to the train station, where nearly sixty railway cars stood ready, the surviving Jews were shoved into the boxcars, as many as 140 people per car. Many were crushed and suffocated by the lack of space and air. Those who survived this deportation massacre were transported to Treblinka, where they were gassed upon arrival.

  The morning of the massacre, Julius Wohlauf was late for duty. When his comrades arrived at their captain’s residence, out strolled Vera, who jumped in the front seat of the truck, which was part of the convoy headed to Miedzyrzec. Perhaps there was still a morning chill in the air, or perhaps Vera wanted to dress the part, but she wore a military coat over her summer dress, and a cap.

  Vera was not the only woman present at the massacre. Other wives of German officials and German Red Cross nurses were also there. The nurses were not tracked down after the war when Order Police Battalion 101 was investigated. The wives of some of the order policemen were. Vera was asked about this massacre in Miedzyrzec. She described it as a “peaceful, nearly idyllic resettlement to an eastern work camp.” There
were, however, witnesses who eventually testified otherwise. Vera Wohlauf was unusually conspicuous at the marketplace where the Jews had been assembled for deportation. She did not stand aside but circulated among the victims, demonstrating her power and humiliating them. Allegedly brandishing a whip, a status symbol for Nazi colonizers in the East, Wohlauf was also described in postwar testimony as being pregnant. Vera, a confirmed attention-seeker, placed herself at the center of the bloodshed in town. From the perspective of the Jews who had already suffered violent beatings and wild shootings in the Nazi roundup, Vera appeared as a persecutor, as “one of them.”

  The history of this Aktion has been studied by the Holocaust scholars Christopher Browning, Gudrun Schwarz, and Daniel Goldhagen. Each has analyzed the events and drawn different conclusions about one unusual aspect of this horrific massacre—the presence of Vera Wohlauf. In Browning’s analysis, the men felt uncomfortable about her female presence at the massacre, which conjured up feelings of shame. Goldhagen, in contrast, stresses that the men of Police Battalion 101 were proud of their acts against Jews; Vera’s incongruous pregnant presence merely reminded them that the dirty deeds of genocide were “man’s work.” But Browning and Goldhagen both analyze Vera’s presence and actions in relation to the German men, the killers, rather than examine her own agency at Miedzyrzec.

  Two months before the massacre, Vera had the medical exam required for her to marry Julius. The doctor noted that Vera had menstruated in May 1942 and that she showed no signs of being pregnant. Vera gave birth in early February 1943, which means that during the August massacres she was in her first two months of pregnancy, with her first child. She would not have been visibly pregnant at this early stage, contrary to what was prominently featured in postwar recollections by Julius Wohlauf’s comrades and recounted by the wife of another order policeman in the unit. The information of her “condition” may have been revealed by Vera at the time of the massacre, or it may have been stressed in hindsight.