by Wendy Lower
Fortunately, with the military defeat of Germany, the heyday of the perpetrators would come to an end; the Nazi machinery of destruction would stop. The lives of these German women did not end, however. They returned home to the rubble of the Reich and tried to bury their criminal pasts.
6
Why Did They Kill?
Their Postwar Explanations and Ours
GERMAN MYTHS OF FEMALE innocence and martyrdom were born in the Reich’s collapse and surrender to the Allies. The horrors of the regime had been experienced by Poles and other majority populations in the occupied East since 1939, and by Jews and other targeted political and racial victims in Nazi Germany since 1933, but for ordinary German women the bad times arrived with the unraveling of the Reich. In the immediate aftermath came the physical ordeals and moral dilemmas of evacuations from the East, the violence of the Soviet Army, and the struggle to survive in what remained of their German homeland and war-torn families under Allied occupation.
One young schoolteacher in Ukraine who faced the advancing Red Army as it pushed toward the Dnieper River in the summer of 1943 recalled her evacuation. There were so many children in the school, all of them orphans. She and her colleagues assumed that the children would be killed by the Soviets, but they decided to abandon them nevertheless. The children cried; fearing for their lives, they clung to their teacher and would not let her go. But, she insisted, “we had to do it.” She left Ukraine with other female personnel and headed for the Polish-German border. When she was given her work-release papers by the Gestapo, she had to sign an oath that she would remain silent about all that she had done and seen in Ukraine. After the war this teacher learned that the Red Army occupation of Chernihiv was indeed a “bloodbath”; she heard that all men, women, and children who had had anything to do with the Germans were shot.
The entire staff of the hospital in Zhytomyr where Erika Ohr worked as a nurse was evacuated at the last minute in December 1943. The small convoy of trucks with medical personnel and wounded soldiers steered through the mayhem of soldiers rushing eastward and westward, on foot, in trucks, and overhead in loud planes. In the fields along the road German tanks rolled over the fresh graves of German soldiers, destroying the individual markers that bore names and unit numbers. Those unit numbers could have provided Soviet intelligence with useful information for tracking German troop movements.
After months of stopovers in western Ukraine and Poland, Ohr eventually arrived in Hungary, near Pécs. It was May 1944. She noticed that the locals there were not very friendly. Ohr and her colleagues later figured out that only a few days before their arrival, the Jewish population had been “transported away.” But some Jews remained. There was a ghetto with women and children near the nurses’ dorm. Intruders had entered their dorm and had stolen things. From the proximity of these two places, Ohr inferred that the intruders were ghetto residents. Some desperate Jews did steal, of course, since the Nazis had taken everything from them—but Ohr does not offer evidence for her assumption or seem aware of the Jews’ possible reasons for such an action. It was common in the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda to conflate Jews and criminals, a theme that Hitler and Goebbels hammered to the bitter end. Perhaps it had made a lasting impression on Ohr.
By the end of the war, Ohr had become accustomed to treating and burying German soldiers. She was less prepared to deal with sick civilians. Ethnic German women, children, and elderly, who were fleeing on foot from the East to Germany, were among the wounded and ill. They crowded into a hospital near Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic), which was overcome by an outbreak of measles. German children were dying each night. Ohr was not sure what to do with their small corpses. They could not remain among the living, next to their ailing mothers and siblings. This makeshift hospital had been placed in an empty school. Next to the main hall where the German refugee families lay ill on the floor, Ohr discovered a room filled with hooks. It was the school coatroom where, weeks before, students had hung up their jackets and removed their boots. Ohr decided to place the child corpses here. As she left the coatroom, she made sure to close the door behind her.
Ohr contracted the measles and was unable to evacuate when her colleagues left in mid-April 1945. A special transport had to be arranged for her. She lay alone in the main hall with a high fever. She heard the air-raid sirens and feared that she had been forgotten. She did not want to be left behind.
Whether innocent or guilty of Nazi crimes, German women expected to be the targets of revenge and objects of sexual plunder. In Hitler’s April 15 proclamation—his last—to all the soldiers on the eastern front, in which he referred to the recently deceased President Roosevelt as the “greatest war criminal of all time,” he argued that the final defense of Germany must be to protect the Volk, above all German women and girls:
For the last time, the deadly Jewish-Bolshevik mortal enemy has set out with its masses on the attack. He is attempting to demolish Germany and to exterminate our people. You soldiers from the East know yourselves in large measure what fate threatens above all German women, girls, and children. While old men and children are murdered, women and girls are denigrated to barrack-whores. The rest are marched off to Siberia.
The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels tried to mobilize the resolve (and fear) of the German masses with images of Red Army soldiers as “Asiatic hordes” savagely raping German women. Those frightful pictures became reality. Reports of mass rape were confirmed by the millions of German evacuees who trudged westward in a chaotic, humiliating about-face. Estimates of women who were raped —and certainly not all of them were German women—range from one hundred thousand to two million. Girls and the elderly were not spared.
The Nazi regime laid down its arms unconditionally on May 8, 1945, officially marking the end of an era in Europe. For women who came of age in the Third Reich—who experienced adolescence, professional training, first jobs, first relationships, and birth of first children during it—the defeat meant that ambitions were thwarted, dreams dashed, and the future uncertain. One could not completely erase what was witnessed and done. Some loyalists and fanatics could not imagine life without Hitler. A few German women, either fearing Allied retribution or deeply ashamed, saw no choice but to commit suicide. Women who returned from the East hoped that their pasts would remain there. One woman, a self-identified believer and patriot, lamented in her diary that her world had crashed down around her. Were these German women returning from the East able to find refuge within the masses of victimized German women, the aggrieved widows and mothers who had suffered the aerial bombings on the home front, the mass rape by Red Army soldiers, and the hardships of their defeated country?
Allied leaders made it very clear in a number of speeches—such as the Moscow Declaration of 1943—that those who committed crimes would be punished. Upon the liberation of the Nazi-occupied territories, military tribunals and kangaroo courts sprang up. German officials and their local collaborators were rounded up, subjected to quick proceedings, and hanged. The trials began with the highly publicized one in Krasnodar, Russia, in July 1943 and culminated in the remarkably restrained and thorough proceedings at the international military tribunal at Nuremberg, where the chief U.S. prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, recognized the victors for agreeing to “stay the hand of vengeance” by submitting “their captive enemies to the judgment of the law.”
German female prisoners detained in Kassel, Germany
American, British, French, and Soviet forces established their military governments in zones of Germany and Austria and introduced new legislation for punishing war criminals and “denazifying” German society under the common terms and decrees set forth by the Allied Control Council. Denazification was meant to punish Nazi criminals, and to reeducate by exorcising the evils of Nazi ideology from German society and institutions—that is, rooting out the bad seeds. There were significant variations in how the different Allied powers dealt with suspects. Within a decade most of those in
the western zones of Germany were released. The highest-ranking female leader of the Nazi Party, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, had cleverly escaped Soviet custody but was later arrested by the French for forging her identity documents. Apparently she was not a sympathetic defendant, because the French kept her in jail for four years and imposed a ten-year ban on her journalistic, political, and teaching activities. Not long after the ban was lifted, this inveterate Nazi published a self-congratulatory account of German women in the Third Reich.
All women in uniform were swept up in the Allied dragnet and placed in internment camps. In the territories occupied by the Soviets, German women were dealt with harshly. Some twenty thousand were arrested in the East and deported to inner Russia; they were not among those sent back to Germany in the late 1950s during the political thaw of pardons and amnesties. They were executed or died in captivity.
Ilse Struwe was relatively lucky. This Wehrmacht secretary was interned by the Soviets until December 1946 but not deported to the Soviet Union. She was more useful as a secretary in the Soviet Military Occupation Administration. She did not speak about what she saw that night from her bedroom window in Rivne, and she did not talk with others about the photographs of atrocities she had seen. If she said anything to anyone about what she had witnessed, she reasoned, “I might as well hang myself on the highest pole.” She waited until the 1990s to publish her memoir.
Erika Ohr was also swept up by the Allies and interned in the summer of 1945—in her case, in an American camp. Here she allegedly saw German POWs being tortured; they were made to stand in dirt up to their necks. Ohr was not sure why they deserved such a punishment. The only explanation she could offer in her memoir was an anti-Semitic one. In Ohr’s view, since many of the Americans running the internment camp spoke German, they must have been related to the Jews who had been forced to emigrate. Now they were taking revenge on these German soldiers.
Since German women were not in the leadership, other than in women’s organizations of the Nazi Party and in some medical establishments as doctors, they did not sit in the dock with the most prominent Nazis, such as Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg, who were tried at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. The Allies had bigger fish to fry; they devoted their scarce investigative resources to tracking down top Nazis. Some women were tried in the zonal courts. The Soviets (and later the East Germans) convicted female guards from the largest women’s camp in the Reich—Ravensbrück—and the British went after the “Beasts of Bergen-Belsen,” including the twenty-two-year-old Irma Grese, who was executed by a military court. There were two German women in the American Nuremberg zonal trials. The first was Dr. Herta Oberheuser, who was sentenced to twenty years for her cruel medical experiments but released after seven. (She resumed her medical practice as a pediatrician in Schleswig-Holstein, until she was discovered and stripped of her medical license.) The other woman was a state-sponsored kidnapper named Inge Viermetz. A secretary who climbed the ranks within the SS Race and Resettlement Office to become a departmental chief, Viermetz stood trial for the deportation of hundreds of Polish and Yugoslav children. She pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing. Viermetz’s insistence that she had performed charitable welfare work was convincing to the judges. She was acquitted in 1948.
One of the more famous prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials was Robert Kempner. When he returned to Germany with the U.S. Army (after having been forced to emigrate from Germany as a Jewish attorney in 1935), he looked up his old secretary in Berlin, Emmy Hoechtl. She had worked during the war in the Reich Security Main Office for the head of the criminal police, Einsatzgruppe B leader Arthur Nebe. Emmy Hoechtl helped Kempner find some of the most incriminating documents in the German files, contributing to the prosecution and conviction of fellow Germans. But when she was formally interrogated in 1961 as part of West German investigations into the deployment of gas vans in the East, Hoechtl claimed that she could not remember anything about the crimes themselves or about the criminal activity of her bosses.
Robert Kempner also collaborated with his wife, Ruth Kempner, on an official study, “Women in Nazi Germany.” This research was commissioned by the U.S. government as an information source for the denazification of German women. The Kempners warned U.S. occupiers in Germany that German women were fanatical supporters who had been integrated into all aspects of the government, including being formed into police units to monitor marketplaces in Germany and to manage the correct distribution of rations. They estimated that seven million German women and girls had been indoctrinated into the movement. Sixteen million had been mobilized by the Reich Labor Front. Placing the women in categories according to the degree of “public danger” they posed, the Kempners determined that about six hundred thousand German women were still dangerous because they were politically active leaders and indoctrinators. The Kempners advised U.S. authorities to pursue a thorough purging and reorganization of the educational and administrative apparatus of the German state, which had been infiltrated by female Nazis. It was a tremendous task of ideological transformation, which they believed could only be undertaken with patience, and “without illusions about the limitations of their [German women’s] personality range.”
German women were indeed very active supporters of the Third Reich, as the Kempners discerned early on, and the passage of time revealed that more were involved in the crimes of the regime than the officials at Nuremberg and in the denazification courts realized, or cared to know. Illusions about the behavior of female perpetrators persisted, as did confusion about their motives.
Probing the depths of individual motives demands more than the reconstruction of a biography or of a crime scene. The narratives of the women who had lived in the occupied eastern territories and who were confronted by postwar interrogators to divulge their experiences, or who later reflected on them, offer clues about their motives, but the narratives are far from transparent. While not all women intentionally deceived, the self-portraits in these memoirs and testimonies are intended to appeal to an audience, whether bureaucratic examiners, zealous prosecutors, supportive family members, or curious historians. Naturally the self-representations exaggerate, mislead, self-glorify, or mollify. Shameful or unlawful acts, indiscretions, embarrassing mistakes, regrettable affiliations, and negative sentiments such as hate are usually glossed over or omitted.
Nurses’ memoirs, a large portion of the total, contain valuable information about female experiences in the war, but they can be misleading. Reading them, I was not sure if the authors were genuinely naive or unobservant as youths, or if their innocence had been embellished for present-day readers. How could Erika Ohr describe in detail a toothache or a meal that she had in Poland in 1944, but only vaguely recall the sense behind a lone “partisan” being shot in the cloister of a field hospital? “It could not be established who he was and what he had planned,” Ohr wrote dismissively, continuing, “In this war there were so many ambiguities on both sides.” Moral relativism and thoughtlessness reflect the thinking at the time and after the war.
How did nurse defendants explain their motives and violent acts? In Allied and German courtrooms, they often fell back on their institutional affiliations and training as caregivers as a kind of proof of proper intentions. They repeated the assertion that they had to fulfill their duty. In the postwar investigation of the crimes at the Polish asylum of Meseritz-Obrawalde, a nurse explained to a German court that it was her superior, a doctor who was the director of the asylum, who demanded that she and the other junior nurses assist with the killing injections. The nurse claimed that at first she refused, but the director told her there was no point in refusing—that “as a civil servant of many years standing,” she had to perform her duty, “especially in times of war.” Then he tried to appeal to her soft side, reassuring her that the injections would end the suffering of the patients. Isn’t that what she wished, to relieve her patients? The nurse insisted when she testified that she was just d
oing what was expected of her. One nurse charged with poisoning patients in Poland explained:
I would never have committed theft. I know that one is not supposed to do that. In the bad times [prewar depression years] I was a saleswoman, and I had in those times easy opportunities to do that. But I never did such a thing, because I simply knew that it is not permitted. Even as a child I had learned: you are not allowed to steal. The administration of medication for the goal of killing a mentally ill person, I viewed as my duty, which I was not allowed to refuse.
In her mind, she was not a criminal. She had a good upbringing and learned that stealing was a crime. Doing her duty was not a crime, she believed, even if doing that duty meant killing another human being.
Besides sharing tools of violence (the hypodermic needle, the whip, and the gun), a passionate commitment to an ideological cause, an immoral perception of duty, and pacts of loyalty and secrecy, German male and female perpetrators exhibited similar psychologies of denial and repression. Those confronted with their misdeeds replied along standard lines. I don’t know; I know nothing about that. I can’t remember; I had to follow orders; I was on furlough. I heard from others about certain actions against Jews, but I did not see any Jews. When I arrived at my station, all the Jews were gone. Female defendants were aware of male testimony, were well versed in the art of verbal self-defense, and also developed their own strategies.
