by Wendy Lower
In the summer of 1942 and fall of 1943, waves of German-led mass shooting actions reduced the Jewish population in the entire region from about twenty thousand to four or five hundred. These massacres began at the end of August 1942, when Westerheide returned from the commissars’ conference in Lutsk. There, he and the other district governors in Nazi-occupied Ukraine had learned that their bosses expected them to carry out the Final Solution “one hundred percent.”
Though the order was of course not issued directly to “Fräulein Hanna,” Johanna Altvater decided to do her part. She often accompanied her boss on routine trips to the ghetto; she was seen hitching their horses to the gate at the ghetto entrance. On September 16, 1942, Altvater entered the ghetto and approached two Jewish children, a six-year-old and a toddler who lived near the ghetto wall. She beckoned to them, gesturing as if she were going to give them a treat. The toddler came over to her. She lifted the child into her arms and held it so tightly that the child screamed and wriggled. Altvater grabbed the child by the legs, held it upside down, and slammed its head against the ghetto wall as if she were banging the dust out of a small carpet. She threw the lifeless child at the feet of its father, who later testified, “Such sadism from a woman I have never seen, I will never forget this.” There were no other German officials present, the father recalled. Altvater murdered this child on her own.
During the liquidation of the ghetto, the German commander of the nearby POW camp saw Fräulein Hanna, in her riding pants, prodding Jewish men, women, and children into a truck. She circulated through the ghetto cracking her whip, trying to bring order to the chaos “like a cattle herder,” as this German observer put it. Altvater entered the building that served as a makeshift hospital. She burst into the children’s ward and walked from bed to bed, eyeing each child. She stopped, picked one up, took it to the balcony, and threw the child to the pavement below. She pushed the older children to the balcony of the ward—which was on the third floor—and shoved them over the rail. Not all of the children died on impact, but those who survived were seriously injured.
Altvater did not act alone in the infirmary: she was there with one of her friends, the German gendarme chief named Keller. Keller had the authority to order the Jewish nurse, Michal Geist, to go down to the pavement to verify that the children who lay motionless were actually dead. The wounded and other children in the infirmary were placed in a truck. Their work nearly completed, Altvater and Keller drove off, presumably to the death pits at the edge of town.
Altvater’s specialty—or, as one survivor put it, her “nasty habit” —was killing children. One observer noted that Altvater often lured children with candy. When they came to her and opened their mouths, she shot them in the mouth with the small silver pistol that she kept at her side. Some suggested that Altvater and Westerheide were lovers, but most derided her as Westerheide’s “she-man” companion (Mannweib). Altvater did not get along well with the other women stationed in town, including a German Red Cross nurse and another secretary in her office. She visited the soldiers’ home to socialize, but the other women “did not think highly of her since she was always strutting around in her brown Nazi Party uniform and behaved like a typical butch.” She had a large frame and a close-cropped “man’s haircut.” Jewish survivors and German character witnesses recalled her masculine features, which they linked to her aggressive behavior. In these depictions of Nazi violence, Johanna Altvater is portrayed in an ambiguous, indeed repulsive, male-female form. Her exceptionally male appearance became a way to explain her horrifically violent acts, just as—via a different mechanism—Vera Wohlauf’s ultra-feminine state of pregnancy made her violence especially repugnant. But in neither case does gender alone explain the extent of the violence committed.
From the Volodymyr-Volynsky ghetto, Jews were driven to the fields of Piatydny. There they discovered wide trenches shaped like crosses; Jewish laborers had been forced to dig their own mass graves. In the two weeks that followed, as many as fifteen thousand Jews were shot here. Westerheide, who later bragged about “bumping off” so many Jews, was seen there on horseback, as was Altvater’s colleague Keller, later identified as “one of the worst.” Near the mass shooting site, Westerheide and his deputies caroused at a banquet table with a few German women. Altvater was among the revelers, drinking and eating amid the bloodshed. Music playing in the background mixed with the sound of gunfire. From time to time, one of the German executioners would get up from the table, walk to the shooting site, kill a few people, and then return to the party. Polish farmers who were working in the fields near the site, some picking pears, heard the screaming and shooting and warned Jews hiding in the forest not to return to the ghetto.
The three thousand Jews who survived were crammed into small huts behind rows of barbed-wire fencing. Sleeping several to a bed and on floors, without any heat, they received a daily ration of no more than 390 calories, or less than 100 grams of bread (about three slices); it was not enough to fend off illnesses, and a typhoid epidemic raced through the ghetto. One of the children who entered the ruins was ten-year-old Leon Ginsburg. He searched for his family but learned that the Germans and their collaborators had killed most of them. Jews in the ghetto explained to Leon what had happened. They described a “Polish woman, the lover of the Commandant,” named Anna, who had “the first pick of women’s shoes and clothing.” In the ravaged ghetto, black-and-white photographs lay scattered on the unpaved streets, smiling faces of Jews enjoying prewar weddings, holidays, schools, and birthdays. Now they were all dead and stared at him like ghosts. Realizing that he had to leave, he planned his escape to the woods.
Had Leon stayed, he probably would not have survived in the ghetto. Westerheide, Keller, Fräulein Hanna, and their colleagues in the SS were relentless. In the first half of 1943, they organized another mass shooting, in which twelve hundred Jews from the ghetto and surrounding area were murdered. One thousand craftsmen and their families were retained until the last days of the German occupation, when Westerheide’s office evacuated in December 1943. In fact, the last known massacre of Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine occurred here on December 13–14, 1943.
Nazi leaders understood that they might lose the military campaign but were determined to win the war against the Jews. Completing its final sweep westward from Russia back to Germany with orders to kill all remaining Jewish populations, a special commando unit brought the last Jews to a “wooded area after a motorized platoon of Gendarmerie and Ukrainian auxiliaries had cordoned off the area. The rails for a pyre to cremate the bodies had been prepared there in advance.”
At the end of 1943, before the Volodymyr-Volynsky office was shut down, Johanna Altvater was already back in the Reich. After serving as the personal secretary for the highest authority in the district, she was transferred to the regional capital of Lutsk. According to her rec- ord, she was reassigned for disciplinary reasons. Altvater explained after the war that the reason for her transfer to Lutsk was an incident; after a night of partying she and her carousers drove a “cow” into the ghetto. It is not clear what sort of game they were playing. She went home for Christmas leave and did not return to Volodymyr-Volynsky. The Soviets reoccupied the region in January and February 1944. Still hopeful that she would have a future in the East, Altvater applied to enter a civil service program for training the colonial elite.
Erna Petri at her Grzenda estate, with her son in the fields (top) and riding in a carriage in front of the villa (bottom)
When Johanna Altvater postured as a Nazi official, and when she became violent, she took on a male appearance. Vera Wohlauf wore a military coat and cap to go to the Miedzyrzec-Podlaski massacres and deportations. Such mutations were not total and irreversible, but they are illustrative of the malleable roles that women in the East slipped into and out of. As individual women navigated the multiple war zones of the East, and as some became conditioned to do what was considered man’s work, traditional presentations and roles became confused. N
owhere was this mutability more chillingly apparent than in the cases of the SS wives who became perpetrators. These women displayed a capacity to kill while also acting out a combination of roles: plantation mistress; prairie Madonna in apron-covered dress lording over slave laborers; infant-carrying, gun-wielding Hausfrau.
Himmler’s SS officers and their wives stationed in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics enjoyed the freedom of the East, the sense of adventure, the riches of the fertile land, the plunder of items confiscated from the “natives,” and the power of the whip. By the end of 1942, the SS controlled nearly one and a half million acres of farmland between the Black Sea and the Baltic. Within the constellation of plantations requisitioned by the SS was Grzenda (Hriada), once the grand manor house, or dwór, of a Polish noble, outside today’s Lviv.
In June 1942, Erna Petri, who had memorably sat astride her motorbike back home in Thuringia, arrived at Grzenda with her three-year-old son. Set amid rolling hills and meadows, the white-pillared manor overlooked the surrounding villages. Visitors passed through an ornamental wrought-iron gate onto a road leading to a circular drive and an array of stables, chicken coops, and servants’ quarters. A century before, craftsmen had carefully laid small black, white, and terracotta tiles on the floor of the north portico and vestibule. Ornate balustrades decorated the staircase and the veranda. One can imagine the excitement and pride Erna Petri must have felt upon arriving in this impressive home, such a stark contrast to the oppressive family farm in Thuringia.
Within two days she saw her husband, Horst, beating his laborers. He sexually assaulted the female household servants. Local farmers called him a sadist who enjoyed violence; he laughed as he flogged Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Horst did not see himself as such. Rather, he was establishing his authority. Even as the war dragged on and victory became unlikely, Horst and Erna became only more brutal as they sought to maintain their grip on the estate. In summer 1943 they hunted down Jews who had fled from ghetto liquidations and railway cars headed to the gassing centers. Horst initiated raids in neighboring villages. Erna—who lived at Grzenda from June 1942 until early 1944—also started to beat the workers, including the blacksmith, whom she slapped in the face. Violence was woven into the everyday domestic setting of bucolic life on the plantation.
The Petris’ new estate comprised lovely gardens and other places to stroll on Sunday afternoons. Many high-ranking officials from the nearby capital, Lviv, known in German as Lemberg, liked to visit. One Sunday, the wife of the most senior SS officer in the region arrived with two aides, a chauffeur and an assistant. While the Petris led their visitors through the garden, one of the aides suddenly appeared and reported that four Jews who had escaped from a train headed to a gassing center near Lublin had been caught on the estate. The chauffeur and Horst discussed what to do with them. Horst told his wife and her female guest that this was men’s work, nothing the women should be concerned about. As the women walked away from the garden back toward the house, they heard four pistol shots.
Several months later, in the summer of 1943, Erna Petri was returning home from Lviv. She had gone into town to pick up some supplies. It was a sunny day. She reclined in the horse-drawn carriage while her coachman handled the reins. She saw something in the distance. When the carriage drew closer, she saw that it was children crouching along the side of the road, dressed only in shreds of clothing. It occurred to her that “these were the children who broke out of the boxcar at the train station Saschkow.” As she would go on to explain:
At this time all remaining Jews who were in several camps were being transported to the extermination camp. In these transports often and especially at the train station at Saschkow Jews would break out and try to save themselves. These Jews were all naked, so that the Ukrainians and Poles living in the area could be distinguished from them; the Jews were easy to recognize.
The children were terrified and hungry. Petri beckoned to them and brought them home. She calmed them and gained their trust by bringing them food from her kitchen. All Jews who were roaming the countryside were supposed to be captured and shot; she understood that. Horst was not at home at the time. She waited, but Horst did not return, so she decided to shoot the six children herself. She led them to the same pit in the woods where other Jews had been shot and buried. She brought a pistol with her, one that her father had kept from World War I and given to her as a parting gift as she left for the “wild east” of Ukraine.
Erna Petri told the children to line up facing away from her, in front of the ditch. She held up the pistol about ten centimeters from the first child’s neck and shot the child, then moved on and did the same to the second. After she shot the first two, “the others were at first shocked and began to cry. They did not cry loudly, they whimpered.” Erna would not allow herself “to be swayed”; she shot “until all of them lay in the gully. None of the children tried to run away since it appeared that they already had been in transit for several days and were totally exhausted.”
Erna was alone when she committed this crime, but she was far from alone at the estate. Besides her husband, her two small children lived at Grzenda—the son whom she brought with her to the estate in 1942, and a daughter born there in January 1943. Her mother-in-law and an uncle were visiting, trying to escape the bombing raids and rationing back in the Reich, and in addition she was surrounded by peasants working the fields. The best view of the area was from the hilltop villa’s second-floor balcony, where Erna, the quintessential German Hausfrau-hostess, served Kaffee und Kuchen to Horst’s colleagues in the military and the SS and police. While pouring coffee Erna had overheard the men speaking about the mass shootings of Jews. She had learned that the most effective way to kill was a single shot to the back of the neck. When she led those children to the mass grave on the estate, she knew exactly what to do.
Domestic violence took on another, expanded meaning in the Third Reich. Female killers carried out heinous acts in or near their homes. Most common was shooting from the balcony, and in the presence of family members and lovers.
In the spring of 1942, Liesel Willhaus, the Catholic steelworker’s daughter from the Saarland, arrived with her daughter in Lviv. They went to the Janowska camp, where her husband, SS Untersturmführer Gustav Willhaus, was appointed commandant. Liesel and Gustav were still working their way up the Nazi system, still eager to shed their working-class heritage for a new life of riches and power in the East. Gustav’s promotion was their big break. Liesel inspected their new home. The villa stood at the edge of the slave labor and transit camp. A machine factory housed some selected Jewish laborers in the camp, while the railway lines brought most of the Jewish population of Lviv to the gassing facility of Belzec, which began receiving Jews from Lviv in March 1942, about the time that Gustav Willhaus arrived at Janowska. Some three hundred thousand Polish and Ukrainian Jews died in Janowska or passed through it, making Janowska the biggest Jewish labor and transit camp in Ukraine.
Not long after arriving at his post, Gustav Willhaus became known as the “bloodthirsty camp commandant.” Holocaust survivors called him a “natural-born killer” who murdered people without hesitation but also without much enthusiasm. He slayed his victims like a “chaff cutter.” His wife developed her own reputation. First Liesel insisted that their villa required renovations and demanded the construction of a second-floor balcony where the family could enjoy afternoon refreshments. She found ample Jewish slaves to do whatever she needed at home, including the gardening work. Liesel kept a close eye on them from the balcony. She used this vantage point to shoot prisoners—for “the sport of it,” one Jewish eyewitness stated. “Willhaus’s wife . . . also had a pistol. When guests came to visit the Willhaus family, and sat on the spacious porch of their luxurious house, [she] would show off her marksmanship by shooting down camp inmates, to the delight of her guests. The little daughter of the family, Heike, would vigorously applaud the sight.”
Liesel Willhaus’s preferred weapon was
a Flobert gun, a French parlor rifle that looked fancy but was cheap to produce. Flobert rifles were in wide circulation at the time and typically used for target practice. It was the classic example of a “domesticated” weapon, displayed in stuffy Victorian sitting rooms and used in the garden to kill pests. Its range was limited (about a hundred feet), but the impact was powerful enough to result in lethal injuries. In Ukraine, the parlor rifle was fitting for the self-styled female pioneer.
Death was often not instant for those who fell victim to one of Willhaus’s shooting sprees. One time she fired a single shot at a Jewish laborer who was walking by the house. Her husband was standing next to her on the balcony. On another occasion, a morning in September 1942, she appeared on the balcony with her husband and a few guests and shot into a group of Jewish prisoners who were about sixty feet away, picking up garbage around the house. One of the prisoners killed was a thirty-year-old from the village of Sambor.
In April 1943, on a Sunday, Willhaus appeared again on the balcony. With her child at her side, she shot into a group of Jewish laborers in the garden. At least four Jews fell down on the spot, including Jakob Helfer from the village of Bobrka. One day that summer, she aimed at a group of laborers farther away in the camp. They were huddled together, trying to trade. About five were killed. Not long after this incident, Willhaus shot Jews during roll call, aiming more precisely at their heads. According to postwar investigators, Willhaus also aimed at the hearts of Jews sick with typhus. She shot them at close range.
