by Wendy Lower
The wife of a lieutenant in the battalion testified after the war that the police commander held a “public” meeting after the Miedzyrzec Aktion “before a rather large gathering of officers and NCOs, and in the presence of various wives who were staying with their husbands as visitors, including also me.” The commander, Major Trapp, explained that killing actions were off-limits to women, since it was “outrageous that women who are in a state of pregnancy should witness such a thing.” In Hitler’s Germany, the female badge of honor was the pregnant belly. In the biologically driven culture of the Reich, German women were valued for their fertility. Women’s bodies and health were not their own private business; they were the subject of public discussion.
Vera Wohlauf’s pregnant presence was understood at the time and afterward as a double affront to the gender roles of men and women. An upstanding German woman at the center of the massacre was problematic enough for the men, who enjoyed the company of their wives on the front but wanted to set certain boundaries concerning women’s direct involvement in the bloodshed. Holocaust perpetrators and soldiers fought the war to defend Germany, epitomized in the image of the fertile mother. Embodying the home front, Vera crossed into a war zone and the genocidal violence of the Holocaust. The reaction of Wohlauf’s comrades revealed confusion, perhaps a form of cognitive dissonance. The Jews as an abstraction, a phantom force, had to die so that Germans could live—so reasoned a Nazi perpetrator. Yet how could a habitual killer in a police unit in Poland rationalize the blood on his hands in the face of this young bride who mimicked his brutal actions? To uphold his honor and loyalty, he was supposed to carry out the grim task so that she could remain innocent.
Perhaps what disturbed Julius’s comrades most of all was that Vera, by all appearances a woman, behaved like a man. Her presence in Poland, along with that of the multitude of other German women who joined their husbands or worked in the occupation administration, tested and reshaped standards of conduct and sexuality. What women learned to do abroad was unacceptable behavior at home. This revolution was not a smooth process; it was fraught with tensions and conflicts, many of which continued to punctuate postwar testimonies and recollections of the genocide. While interesting to study on its own, the dissonance has also obscured the history of what Vera actually did as a direct participant in the Holocaust.
There were many German women who out of curiosity, cruelty, or other motives went to the crime scenes. As accomplices, they incited their male mates to kill while acting out in their own abusive ways. They spurned Jews in the ghettos and at railway stations. They confiscated and consumed Jewish personal belongings. They hosted parties when Jews were forced to leave their homes to face certain death at the mass shooting pits and extermination camps. Photographs from the ghetto liquidation at Hrubieszow show smiling German onlookers. As the Jews were marched to the train bound for Sobibor, the wives of overseeing SS policemen enjoyed coffee and cake. Photographs from a personal album of a member of Order Police Battalion 101 show Vera drinking beer with her husband and his colleagues. The photo was taken when she visited him in the summer of 1942. Was it taken on August 25 or 26, after the massacres in Miedzyrzec?
Mundane everyday activities and social, often intimate interactions were intermingled with the genocidal violence of the Holocaust. The fact that Vera and Julius spent their honeymoon in the settings of the ghettos, mass executions, and deportations around Miedzyrzec, or that coffee and cake was served to the executioners and their wives as they watched the beating and deportation of Jews, demonstrates how systems of mass murder can become embedded in everyday life. The embedding, and the normalization that accompanies it, allows such crimes to occur unimpeded.
Vera and Julius Wohlauf enjoying refreshments, summer 1942
Female accomplices such as Liselotte Meier, Sabine Dick, and Vera Wohlauf were more than witnesses to the mass murder; they contributed in some capacity just short of pulling the trigger. Professional relations between men and women who developed efficient systems in their offices; the intimate dynamics between colleagues; the unholy alliances between Nazis and their lovers and spouses; the ambitions and anti-Semitic ideas of female professionals and Nazi fanatics—these were all forces that turned the utterances and declarations of Hitler and the sinister policies of Himmler into the horrific, everyday realities of the Holocaust.
The large number of female collaborators—who stole from the Jews, administered the genocide, and participated at the crime scenes—are missing from our collective memory and official histories. The role of German women in Hitler’s war can no longer be understood as their mobilization and victimization on the home front. Instead, Hitler’s Germany produced another kind of female character at war, an expression of female activism and patriotism of the most violent and perverse kind.
5
Perpetrators
THE FIRST NAZI MASS MURDERESS was not the concentration camp guard but the nurse. Of all the female professionals, she was the deadliest. Centrally planned mass killing operations began neither in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau nor in the mass shooting sites of Ukraine; they began instead in the hospitals of the Reich. The first methods were the sleeping pill, the hypodermic needle, and starvation. The first victims were children. During the war, nurses gave thousands of deformed babies and disabled adolescents overdoses of barbiturates, lethal injections of morphine, and denied them food and water.
All of this was done in the name of progress and the health of the nation. In the late nineteenth century, the modern science of genetics spawned the international field of eugenics, a term defined in the subtitle of a 1910 book by an American leader in the field, Harvard-educated Charles Davenport—Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding. In German circles eugenics was also known as racial hygiene, and it was aimed more specifically at policies to increase the Aryan population. Inherited “genetic” defects and traits were understood as racial or group manifestations that defined humanity’s different civilizations, some deemed more advanced than others, all of them competing for survival. Racism, like nationalism, was viewed positively. Progress, imagined in German ideals of beauty and conduct, could be achieved only by removing humanity’s blights. In the hands of revolutionary zealots, Nazi men and women of action, this science of human inequality had to be taken as far as it could go. Biological manipulations and sterilizations were insufficient to achieve the goal of Aryan perfection through social engineering, and segregation was not enough either. The only total, “final” solution to the problem of racial degeneration was to destroy the contaminant, starting with “defective” Germans. Misleadingly termed “euthanasia” or “mercy killing,” the top-secret program was personally authorized by Adolf Hitler and carried out under the cover of war.
From its beginnings in the Reich before the Nazi invasion of Poland, the “euthanasia” program involved the recruitment of female midwives and of medical personnel, both doctors and nurses. These professionals would eventually murder more than two hundred thousand people in Germany, Austria and the annexed Reich borderlands of Poland, and the Czech lands. Close to four hundred medical institutions would become stationary murder operations of racial screening and selection, cruel experimentation, mass sterilization, starvation, and poisoning. In the weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Reich Ministry of the Interior demanded reports from physicians and midwives identifying newborn infants and children under the age of three with severe physical and mental disabilities. Mothers were pressured to hand over their “diseased” children to so-called pediatric clinics, which became processing and killing centers. As many as eight thousand children were killed in Germany and Austria before the program was expanded to target adults. The categories of “incurable” illnesses and disabilities—including “feeble-mindedness,” “criminal insanity,” and “dementia”—became ever more blurred.
Mass shootings of Polish psychiatric patients began in Kocborowo (in German, Konradstein) in September 1939.
In October 1939 came the unprecedented mass gassing of patients from the asylum in Owińska (Treskau) who were brought to Fort VII in Poznań, where a rudimentary stationary chamber had been sealed with clay—an experiment that Himmler himself would observe in December 1939. SS and police mobile killing units swept through Poland, and later through the Baltics, Ukraine, and Belarus, shooting thousands of patients in asylums and hospitals and gassing others in mobile vans. Back in the Reich, in the asylums at Grafeneck and Hadamar, hospital clerical staff typed up death notices and, as we’ve seen, processed shipments of common ashes to the victims’ families. With Hitler’s backing, medical health professionals and their technical experts developed a new genocidal expertise, which they applied to ever-larger operations of mass murder in the more remote eastern territories. In late 1941 and early 1942, scientists, engineers, “crematorium stokers,” drivers, and medical staff were transferred to Belarus and Poland to implement stationary gassing methods first tested on Soviet POWs and later used against Jews in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the Operation Reinhard killing centers. Human beings became cargo, guinea pigs, and ashes.
Granting “mercy” deaths to German soldiers on the eastern front may also have been part of these mass-murder operations. According to postwar testimony of a member of a top-secret mission, selected agents of the “euthanasia” program who had taken an oath of secrecy to the Führer were mobilized for eastern service and brought to field hospitals near Minsk, where they “relieved the suffering” of German soldiers. In December 1941 and January 1942, Viktor Brack, an SS officer who made his mark in the Nazi system as a gassing and sterilization expert, led a team of doctors, nurses, and technicians on this eastern mission. It was suspected by informed Germans at the time, and has been suggested by historians since then, that medical teams killed critically wounded and mentally and physically disabled German soldiers who were casualties of the failed Moscow offensive. One of the first to mention this deployment was the nurse and career killer Pauline Kneissler, whom we met in chapter 2.
In a postwar court, Kneissler disclosed that she was sent to Minsk to care for the wounded, though in the same testimony she bemoaned the fact that she was not permitted to serve as a “regular” nurse with the German Red Cross in a field hospital. This contradiction in her testimony lends credence to a statement that she is alleged to have made to a friend, not in the courtroom. While she was in the East she gave lethal injections to brain-damaged, blinded, and mutilated troops. Those killed were “our own,” she told her friend, referring to Germans. Apparently when Kneissler shared this information, she justified the action by asserting, as she had about the gassings at Grafeneck Castle, that the patients died painlessly.
The possibility that German medical teams killed the Reich’s own soldiers was—and still is—a taboo topic, and we do not know for certain that it happened. But if the regime was already killing adult German men who were disabled or diagnosed as insane, why would officials bother to transport severely disabled or shell-shocked German men from the eastern front back to the Reich? Under the cover of war in the East, these injured soldiers could be reported as combat casualties, granting them a hero’s death that would be mourned but not questioned by the family. Perhaps it was the ideological hard core of the nurses’ corps, the Nazi Party’s “brown” nurses, who carried out such actions. With their aprons filled with morphine vials and needles, they were certainly equipped to give gravely injured and shell-shocked soldiers a “mercy” death. In 1942, Hitler’s physician Dr. Karl Brandt, who co-led the euthanasia program in the Reich, was promoted to the position of Commissioner General for Health and Sanitary Matters. In this capacity he oversaw an expansion of the killing of patients (known as Operation Brandt), targeting hospitals and similar nursing facilities that were needed for military purposes. By war’s end the German victims of euthanasia who were transferred from hospitals and nursing homes to gassing centers included geriatric patients, people who had nervous disorders and other injuries from aerial bombings, and traumatized soldiers.
After patients in asylums and hospitals in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and Poland were killed by mobile units or medical personnel, the facilities were usually taken over by regional authorities and converted into Hitler Youth clubs, barracks for German soldiers, clubs for SS officers, and dormitories for female staff. But a few of these emptied facilities in Poland were used as killing centers for new groups of victims. In 1942 Hitler’s euthanasia staff organized deportations of patients from the Reich to an asylum in Meseritz-Obrawalde, a German-Polish border town. Transports from twenty-six German cities arrived there between 1942 and 1944, usually under cover of night. Those sent from Hamburg in late 1943 and early 1944 contained 407 handicapped patients—213 men, 189 women, and five children. Few survived. Meseritz was supposed to accommodate about nine hundred patients, but during the war the transports just kept coming and it “became a place of immense misery,” as the female head doctor later said. Two thousand were crammed into the building, subjected to daily sufferings similar to those in a concentration camp—a roll call, forced-labor assignments, and regular selections. Doctors and nurses killed patients who, according to postwar prosecutors, “caused extra work for the nurses, those who were deaf-mute, ill, obstructive, or undisciplined, and anyone else who was simply annoying,” as well as those “who had fled and were recaptured, and those engaging in undesirable sexual liaisons.” Estimates of the number killed at this one site range from six thousand to eighteen thousand.
The female nurses who later confessed to killing patients at Meseritz had not signed an oath of secrecy concerning the euthanasia program, as Pauline Kneissler had. One explained that it took at least two nurses to kill a patient, since the victims resisted taking the large doses of medicine and shots. Meseritz-Obrawalde was one of several “wild” euthanasia sites deliberately located on the Reich’s eastern frontier, where larger transports could be received and the victims killed indiscriminately and disposed of out of view.
The Holocaust, including the euthanasia campaign, was a state-sponsored policy. The killing was organized and carried out by employees and contractors of the state and Nazi Party organizations, and it took place in state-run institutions—specially constructed killing centers, concentration camps, asylums, and hospitals. Within these public institutions one finds many women working as clerks, detectives, overseers, and guards, and one finds female nurses and doctors who did the murdering themselves. The examples of female killers to follow, however, move the crime scenes outside of these official sites of terror and incarceration, to the perimeter of camps, to the rural ghettos of the East, to the households of SS policemen, to the gardens of private homes and estates, and to the open marketplaces and fields of small towns in eastern Europe.
The frontier, a European stage where Hitler and his supporters fulfilled their imperial fantasies, was also a space for them to carry out criminal policies with impunity. Several of the female perpetrators in this chapter did just this as well. They slipped into another role—a hybrid character that embodied the stiff Nazi patriot, brazen cowgirl, and cold-blooded anti-Semite. They carried whips, they brandished pistols and rifles, they wore riding pants, and they rode horses. The transformation was extreme.
Johanna Altvater, the ambitious business secretary from stifling Minden, was twenty-two years old when she arrived in the Ukrainian-Polish border town of Volodymyr-Volynsky. A county seat, with thirty thousand inhabitants, the town was surrounded by wheat fields and forests delineated by the marshy banks of two rivers, the Bug and the Luga, where Germans liked to go boating and picnicking. The town was also an important military-industrial juncture with soldiers’ barracks, a radio station, an airport, fuel depots, a brick factory, a textile mill, and a clothing factory. For the Jews in town, these installations were critical to their survival as laborers.
A few months before Altvater’s September 1941 arrival, members of an SS and police special commando unit had already initiated the fir
st anti-Jewish measures in Volodymyr-Volynsky. With the help of the local German military commander, they formed a Jewish council, then publicly humiliated its members and buried them alive. The Jewish council chief committed suicide with his family. On September 30, Yom Kippur, a larger massacre occurred. Altvater’s boss, a “gimlet-eyed runt” named Wilhelm Westerheide, arrived to take over as regional commissar. It was immediately clear to the Jews who had survived the first wave of massacres that life would not improve under Commissar Westerheide. He started “target shooting” of individual Jews who were loading fuel barrels at the railway station.
In April 1942 the ghetto was sealed off with barbed wire. Until then Jews had been required to wear badges and live in a designated quarter but could move in and out of that area. Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles interacted in the local “black market” economy. Once the ghetto was closed, a Jewish police force was formed. Along with the Jewish council, the Jewish police were expected to fulfill all German demands. Westerheide and his staff forced Jews to give up their money, jewelry, furniture, and other valuables in return for bogus promises of protection. Wood and coal, necessary for surviving the harsh winter, were confiscated as well. In June 1942 the ghetto was divided into two communities, as one survivor saw it: the “dead” one of non-laboring Jews, mostly women, children, and the elderly, and the much smaller “living” one of skilled workers. Ukrainian police auxiliaries guarded the perimeter of the ghetto.
