by Wendy Lower
The entire atmosphere in and around the Willhaus villa was one of bizarre contradictions. The juxtaposition of a repressively well-appointed bourgeois German home contrasted with the gunfire and suffering of the Jewish inmates. The balcony “shooting gallery” was actually one of the “cleaner” methods practiced by the Willhauses and their colleagues. Sadistic spectacles were more their specialty: public beatings, hangings, sexual organs severed, children’s limbs torn off.
Wives of SS men, including the wife of a commandant of Auschwitz, claimed after the war that they did not know what was going on behind the walls and barbed wire of the camps. They insisted that their homes were completely separate sanctuaries of normality where their husbands could find refuge from their stressful work. But the camp and the home were not separate worlds; they overlapped. Wives visited their husbands at the office—Liesel Willhaus, for instance, was often seen entering the Janowska camp—and husbands brought callousness and techniques for killing Jews home with them. It is not possible to believe that SS wives saw nothing, and it is not possible to believe that some, like Erna Petri and Liesel Willhaus, did not choose to participate in the killing.
We have seen that in the madness of the East, sadistic violence, domestic routines, and intimate relations intermingled. Both Liesel Willhaus and Erna Petri came to the East as married women, but for unmarried women, the incestuous, tight-knit community served to make the German-only outposts into “marriage markets” for ideologically attuned and often morally corrupt mates. Office romances were common, and marriage was not the only result. Many children were born out of wedlock. Such promiscuous behavior was not frowned upon; on the contrary, propagation of the Aryan race was a patriotic duty. The children of the new elite in the East were not sheltered from the violence. There are a few documented cases of fathers involving their sons in the killing, and of mothers like Liesel Willhaus involving their daughters. The story of the growth of female violence during the Reich is intertwined with a sexual revolution that tested boundaries and definitions of matrimony, procreation, childrearing, femininity, and pleasure.
The stories of two additional women killers, onetime Viennese secretaries Gertrude Segel and Josefine Krepp, are further illustration of how violent partnerships were forged in formal office settings but acted out in intimate ones. In these cases the women met their SS husbands as secretaries in the Gestapo offices that contained an Austrian Nazi network. Many had come to know one another in the aftermath of the Anschluss, when the Nazi Party and its supporters fully infiltrated and took over the Austrian state. As the Reich expanded eastward, many of these Austrians ultimately felt at home occupying offices in the former Habsburg lands of Galicia and Yugoslavia.
About forty miles south of Lviv, in the small city of Drohobych, the Gestapo secretary Gertrude Segel also shot Jewish laborers in her garden. When Gertrude met Felix Landau, commander of the Sipo and SD in Radom, Poland, in February 1941, he was married with two small children. Within a few months they became lovers, and Gertrude called off her engagement to an Austrian soldier, away at the front, who was not an SS man. Felix Landau, too, was sent into combat—in the Nazi “war against the Jews,” in occupied western Ukraine.
While committing mass murder in Ukraine, Landau kept a diary revealing his swings from forlorn lover to cold-blooded killer. He composed his text in the form of letters to his “Trude.” Addressing “his lovely bunny” on July 5, 1941, Landau described his victims in gruesome detail, perhaps rationalizing his actions by explaining that one Pole who was covered in blood motioned to the Germans to fire faster to end his suffering. Landau wanted to impress Gertrude; he stressed that this human slaughter was hard work. He also worried that she would leave him. In his entries of July 12 and 13, 1941, Landau referred again to the incessant demands of the mass shootings: “I hardly got any sleep . . . Finally I managed to read all my post . . . Trude wrote that she doesn’t know whether she can keep her vow to me [to be faithful]. Why does this have to happen to me with a person I love so much? I have to see her and talk to her, and then my little Trude will be strong again. She must come here [to Drohobych].”
Drohobych —populated in 1939 by roughly ten thousand Poles, the same number of Ukrainians, and fifteen thousand Jews—was once a boomtown in the late nineteenth century, its sudden wealth spurred by the discovery of nearby oil fields. Landau had set himself up in style, in a comfortable home, and he desperately wanted Gertrude to join him. He made arrangements for her transfer from Radom while he initiated a divorce against his wife, who was also a former secretary in his Gestapo office. His wife returned to the Reich, leaving Landau and their two toddlers in Drohobych. Segel took up a new secretarial job in his office in Drohobych and moved into his home, where they hoarded piles of valuables confiscated from the Jews, such as furs, paintings, and china. They forced the talented Jewish artist Bruno Schulz to paint murals in the children’s nursery. These were beautiful, fanciful paintings, the fairy-tale characters bearing the faces of members of the Jewish community in Drohobych, including Schulz himself, who was later shot by a rival of Landau’s in the Gestapo office.
Like the Willhaus and Petri families, Gertrude Segel and Felix Landau had a balcony on their villa. According to the testimony of a Jewish witness, on the Sunday afternoon of June 14, 1942, Gertrude and Felix were playing cards on their balcony. The radio was turned up and the sun was shining. They reclined on upholstered chairs. Gertrude wore a bathing suit; Felix was dressed in a white suit. A small group of Jewish men and women were working in the garden below, spreading soil. Suddenly Felix stood up and grabbed the Flobert long gun. He started to shoot pigeons. Gertrude also gave it a try. At this point either Gertrude or Felix turned the rifle down onto the Jewish gardeners, and shot a worker named Fliegner. They laughed as they left the balcony and reentered the house.
On the streets in town, Felix Landau was also known for his open shooting sprees. One of the largest was in November 1942, when he and his men killed more than two hundred Jews, among them leading intellectuals and professionals, such as a Jewish professor named Szulc and a Dr. Loew, the personal dentist of another sergeant in the Gestapo office. In town Landau was the notorious “Jew-General” who presided over massacres from the very first days of the occupation through 1942 and 1943, reducing the local Jewish population from more than fifteen thousand to a few hundred by war’s end.
The hedonism of Felix and Gertrude also became well-known, especially as it was expressed in raucous parties. The Jewish survivor Jacob Goldsztein testified that Landau and Segel hosted drunken fests with other German occupation officials at the local riding hall. One of these was probably their wedding party on May 5, 1943. Gertrude danced on the tables and slapped the hands of the SS men seated at the table. After a night of carousing, Landau returned to the hall because Segel’s gold necklace was missing. Landau found Goldsztein and another Jewish man who were cleaning up, and accused them of theft. Landau ordered Goldsztein to report to him the next day, and pressed Goldsztein about the necklace, telling him calmly that he should give it over. Goldsztein pleaded that he did not have the necklace and that he would never do such a thing as stealing a necklace.
Segel was present during the interrogation, reclining on the office couch. “Don’t be such an idiot, you pig of a Jew, you took the necklace!” she yelled at Goldsztein. Now Landau became angrier. His “Trude” was upset and expected him to act. He started to punch Goldsztein, then kicked him and trod on him. He ordered Goldsztein to get up. He preferred to beat him standing, which he explained was more convenient than bending down to the floor. Later Goldsztein learned that an SS man who was flirting with Gertrude had stolen the necklace. (The man would eventually return it.) The necklace had originally belonged to a Jewish woman; Landau had confiscated it during a massacre and presented it to Gertrude as a gift.
Jewish survivors also testified that Gertrude ordered the deaths of her household help—three maids—and that she trampled a Jewish child to death. But in
the late 1950s West German and Austrian investigators did not bother to pursue these incriminating eyewitness statements against her.
Segel’s Austrian friend Josefine Krepp, now Josefine Block, joined her husband in Ukraine in 1942. In Drohobych, Josefine Block was not officially an employee of the Gestapo, but she hung around the office. Her husband was happy to give his little “Fini” her own projects, like overseeing the community garden and expanding the workshops with Jewish laborers. She became pregnant in the summer of 1942, but she wanted to do more than mother the small child the couple already had and the baby to come.
When two hundred “gypsies” were gathered in town, Block was seen with her whip ordering the Ukrainian militiamen to hurry up and kill them. Night was falling and the “prisoners” had to be shot before dark, she said. Another time Block appeared at the local garden market, summoned four Jewish girls who appeared too weak to work, and told one of her husband’s employees to shoot them in her presence. Block often came to the market to pick up vegetables, and her arrival always struck fear in the Jewish workers. When the ghetto was liquidated in June 1943, she appeared again, this time at the collection point where Jews were gathered for deportation. She had on a gray ladies’ suit and wore her hair loose; she held her camera and a riding crop. Occasionally she lashed out at a Jewish prisoner with her riding crop; the terrified deportees were subjected to further humiliation when she photographed them. A seven-year-old Jewish girl approached her, crying and begging for her life. “I will help you!” Block declared. At which point she grabbed the girl by the hair and beat her with her fists, then pushed her to the ground and stomped on her head. After Block walked away, the girl’s mother lifted the lifeless child into her arms, trying unsuccessfully to revive her.
Desperate Jewish laborers often approached Block to ask for help. They assumed that as a young woman and mother she would be sympathetic. But Block kept a weapon within reach, and in an instant could change roles—from a calm, attractive mother to a Nazi brute. She was seen using her baby carriage to ram Jews whom she encountered on the streets of Drohobych; two witnesses would later state that she had actually killed a small Jewish child with the carriage. Locals complained about her, but her husband, the Gestapo chief, deferred to his wife, explaining that he could not make any decisions without her.
The wartime and postwar documentation placing wives in these Nazi outposts is scattered across archives and private papers. It is mostly through the testimonies of German, Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish witnesses that we have learned about the presence and violent behavior of these women. Accustomed as we are to thinking of killing, war, and the perpetration of genocide as male activities, in the absence of accessible evidence to the contrary we remain blind to the extent of women’s participation. We know that Holocaust victims experienced humiliation, deprivation, pain, and even death at the hands of German women, yet many minimize this fact by insisting on various conceptions of genocide that are historically inaccurate and biased.
Historically, most mass murder occurs in the open and is therefore not confined to particular state institutions. This was true for Germans in the Nazi killing fields, who were caught up in the killing themselves while also drawing others into it. Many individuals whose regular, everyday work had little to do with Nazi anti-Jewish policy, let alone the killing of Jews, were recruited and persuaded to kill. Commissar Westerheide, for example—Johanna Altvater’s boss—approached fellow Germans as they walked down the street and simply asked whether they might be interested in assisting in an Aktion. An official invited a German colleague for some recreational shooting, expressing his pleasure at the prospect of using live Jews as targets. It was not only the men who were recruited; women and girls were approached to fulfill a variety of ad hoc tasks connected with killing. Ukrainian girls were routinely used at mass shootings to assist in the collection and mending of victims’ clothes. As “packers” in the pits, girls pressed down on corpses with their bare feet; as “hemp collectors,” they gathered hay and sunflower stalks to be used for hastening the burning of the corpses.
In the Nazi war against the Jews in eastern Europe, the spatial divide between the battlefront and the home front was nonexistent. Crime scenes included the balconies of villas, the grounds of rural estates such as Grzenda, and banquet tables near the killing fields. For women such as Erna Petri, Liesel Willhaus, Gertrude Segel, Johanna Altvater, and Josefine Block, contributing to the war effort went beyond consoling, protecting, and supporting a male mate or a fanatical boss. These female perpetrators were incredibly, indeed shockingly, adept at slipping in and out of roles, from the unbridled revolutionary to the meek, subservient wife. Many female murderers held positions in the professional world—secretaries and nurses, for example. Trained and socialized at a particular moment in time, in Hitler’s Germany, they exploited their power as imperial overseers and careerists.
Will we ever know more precisely how many German women behaved so violently, even murdering with poison-filled needles, guns, attack dogs, and other lethal weapons? Numbers alone cannot explain events, but they can be revealing. For example, scholars and laypersons have long assumed that the Nazi camp system amounted to a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, internment sites. But researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have determined recently that there were more than forty thousand sites of detention in Nazi-dominated Europe. The camp and ghetto system, usually seen as a universe separate from the rest of society, can now be understood as merging into local communities. The concept of camp walls as a distancing barrier is eroding. Although the higher number of camps does not imply a significantly greater number of victims, since individual victims typically experienced several types of camps and ghettos, it does tell us that there was a significantly higher number of perpetrators, accomplices, and witnesses who created, operated, and visited these sites. More people participated than we thought; more people knew about the systematic persecution and killing of others. And “more” applies across the board: more men, more women, and more children were involved than we knew. The large number of camps, and their integration into local communities, underscores the social dimension of the history of the Holocaust.
Can we approximate how many German women became killers in the East? We might start by following methods applied to estimating male perpetrators. But the estimates we have for male German perpetrators are rough, and based mainly on records from institutions charged with implementing the Holocaust. Combining personnel lists that place men in criminal organizations with investigative records on particular individuals in separate units of those organizations, such as Order Police Battalion 101, historians have estimated that some two hundred thousand German (and Austrian) men were direct agents of the Nazi genocide in the open-air shootings, ghetto liquidations, and gassing centers.
For women we do not have comparable sources. There exist incomplete lists of female camp guards in 1944 and 1945, but these records offer only snapshots of female involvement and provide information only on camps administered by one arm of Himmler’s agencies (the Economic and Administrative Office of the RSHA). In any event, these records reveal that about thirty-five hundred women (most of them trained at Ravensbrück) worked as camp guards during these years. Until now this figure was the one usually attached to estimates of female Holocaust perpetrators. But of course not all female camp guards were killers and, conversely, not all female killers were camp guards: a huge number of victims in the East were killed outside camp walls. The personnel list of female guards trained at Ravensbrück, or stationed at about a dozen main camps mostly in the Reich in 1944 and early 1945, is—like the list I found in Zhytomyr—the tip of the iceberg. Could a history of male perpetrators confine itself to guard records from Dachau? Over the past few decades the lens focused on male perpetrators has widened to include ordinary Germans and non-Germans, in police units, regular army units, and civilian garb. My examination of women killers and of the situations in which they killed should simi
larly expand our view of female perpetration.
The documentation I surveyed on the deployment of female professionals and family members in the East accounts for several hundred thousand women. In a peaceful society, women commit on average about fourteen percent of all violent crime and about one percent of murders. In peacetime, women killers act alone, and they act against individual victims (usually relatives and mates), not against entire groups. In a warring, genocidal society, the number of men as well as women engaged in violent acts is much higher, and each individual act may lead to a larger number of deaths. After rounding up Jewish children in the ghetto infirmary, for example, Johanna Altvater killed some herself on the spot; others she forced onto a vehicle that took them to a mass murder site where they were shot by male police units. Statistically, if we took the percentage of homicides committed by women in peaceful society and applied it to the genocidal East, where women made up roughly ten percent of the population of Germans, then the estimate of female killers there would be about three thousand. In other words, we could multiply Erna Petri by three thousand. But if we assume, as is likely, that women in genocidal societies—women who are empowered by the state, with “enemy” groups as their targets—are responsible for a greater percentage of murders than women in peacetime societies, then three thousand begins to look unrealistically small.
When it comes to killers like the secretaries, wives, and lovers of SS men in this chapter, we will never have a precise number. But the evidence here does give us new insights about the Holocaust specifically and genocide more broadly. We have always known, of course, that women have the capacity to be violent, and even to kill, but we knew little about the circumstances and ideas that transform women into genocidaires, the varied roles they occupy inside and outside the system, and the forms of behavior they adopt. Now it is possible to imagine that the patterns of violent and murderous behaviors uncovered here occurred across wartime Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and other parts of Nazi-dominated Europe. German women who went east embodied what the expanding Nazi empire was becoming: ever more violent. Ordinary young women with typical prewar biographies, not just a small group of Nazi fanatics, went east and became involved in the crimes of the Holocaust, including killing.
