by Wendy Lower
Of course anyone being questioned by a prosecutor or investigator for a major crime will be circumspect and will try to avoid punishment. In fear and desperation, to save oneself and to spare one’s family added shame and burden, one might lie, especially if the crime was committed in a place and time far removed from that of the trial, and is thus hard to prove. Many did lie. Is it so surprising that, among the more than three hundred thousand Germans and Austrians investigated across Europe, very few confessed?
More complex than the basic strategy of flat-out denial was the defense of being the martyr or victim. As the nurse Pauline Kneissler put it, “I never understood mercy killing as murder . . . My life was one of dedication and self-sacrifice . . . Never was I cruel to persons . . . and for this today I must suffer and suffer.” Perpetrators who deny their crimes do not see themselves as evildoers who deserve punishment. It is the victim and the prosecutors who believe otherwise. In his exploration of evil, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that perpetrators “may see something wrong in what they did, but they also see how they were affected by external factors, including some that were beyond their control. They see themselves as having acted in a way that was fully appropriate and justified.”
Erna Petri did not deny her killing or overtly assign herself victimhood, but she did attribute her deed to circumstances at the time, not least to the influence of her husband, who was certainly a brutal man. When she was pressed to explain why she herself shot Jewish men and children, she stated:
In those times, as I carried out the shootings, I was barely 23 years old, still young and inexperienced. I lived among men who were in the SS and carried out shootings of Jewish persons. I seldom came into contact with other women, so that in the course of this time I became more hardened, desensitized. I did not want to stand behind the SS men. I wanted to show them that I, as a woman, could conduct myself like a man. So I shot 4 Jews and 6 Jewish children. I wanted to prove myself to the men. Besides, in those days in this region, everywhere one heard that Jewish persons and children were being shot, which also caused me to kill them.
If Erna stressed her role as an SS wife, should it not follow that her husband would shoulder some of the guilt associated with the initiative she took in carrying out the killings? In fact, after the Stasi forced Erna Petri to confess, she stated that she had denied her crimes during earlier interrogations because she had assumed that her husband would cover for her. But he did not.
One of the more difficult motives to document was paradoxically the most pervasive: anti-Semitism. In the Third Reich, anti-Semitism was an official state ideology, which added to its unassailability. It became a defining element of the Reich. It permeated everyday life, shaped professional and intimate relationships, and generated criminal government policies. Was there a female form of anti-Semitic thinking and expression, specific to women’s roles, their place in the Nazi system and society—as secretaries, wives of officials, nurses, and teachers?
During the Nazi era, the emotional desires, material needs, and professional ambitions of German women—such as trying to curry favor with a superior, compete with a colleague or mate, keep one’s job, secure a comfortable villa or a “new” dress—determined the life or death of a Jew. In retrospect, these concerns, desires, and ambitions are easy to dismiss as petty and insignificant when placed against the consequences of premeditated anti-Semitic hate and sadism. But the mundane and the grandiose intermingled.
A driving force behind the radicalization of violence in the Reich was expressed by Erna Petri, and it applied to men as well as women. When Erna Petri, Johanna Altvater, and others callously killed Jewish children, they manifested a Nazi anti-Semitism so profound that it reduced the value of even an innocent child’s life to nothing. When the interrogator asked Petri, as a mother herself of two children, how she could shoot innocent Jewish children, she replied:
I am unable to grasp at this time how in those days that I was in such a state as to conduct myself so brutally and reprehensibly—shooting Jewish children. However earlier [before arriving at the estate in Ukraine] I had been so conditioned to fascism and the racial laws, which established a view toward the Jewish people. As was told to me, I had to destroy the Jews. It was from this mindset that I came to commit such a brutal act.
In a setting ever closer to the front, within the partisan warfare zone, and in the midst of the Holocaust, German officials with their wives and female assistants tried to uphold the Nazi racist, imperialist mission and relied on violence as the primary instrument of control. It may have been a “man’s world” in the East, but women were able to adapt to it and then fiercely rationalize their actions in it.
Petri’s testimony is rare. There are few wartime and postwar rec- ords of ordinary German women expounding on their views of Jews and the Holocaust. More common was a colonialist discourse about how stupid, dirty, and lazy “the locals” were, referring to Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, or veiled references to the dark terrain infested with “Bolsheviks,” “criminals,” and “partisans,” or to the infantilized native who is clever but inferior, and thus dispensable. In their accounts (both in court and in memoirs), women tried to minimize the Holocaust and the extent to which it was fueled by their own anti-Semitism; they referred to the Holocaust as “that Jewish thing from the war,” or said that “it was just that some Jews were being shot,” or explained that the “Jews want to take revenge on us.” Josefine Block suggested that the Jews were guilty for not saving their own kin. Erika Raeder, the prominent, outspoken wife of the incarcerated admiral of the navy, who was desperate to get her ailing, elderly husband out of jail, went so far as to argue that “the treatment we Germans have had to endure is worse than anything that has happened to the Jews.” Raeder’s comparison was and is morally reprehensible and wrong. Yet Raeder gained the sympathy of British and American leaders and the West German press. Her husband, who had been serving a life sentence, was released with many other high-ranking Nazi criminals in 1955. Pardoning the perpetrators may have been an act of political expediency, helping to integrate West Germany into the Western alliance. For conservative Germans, Nazis, and neo-Nazis, however, Allied amnesties affirmed their self-perceived victimization and prejudices. Comparing German and Jewish suffering, and shifting the blame for the war to the Jews, were more than defense strategies to deny Nazi crimes and culpability. The Holocaust denial associated with these strategies did not originate in the postwar courtroom; it had its roots in the ideology of the Third Reich. Most Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices—and even many witnesses to the crimes who suppressed what they saw—could not empathize with the Jews, during the war or after.
How did observers at the time and afterward account for the extremely violent, even sadistic behavior of some women? The wartime witnesses who observed female perpetrators and the postwar prosecutors who questioned them were in fact dumbfounded by their cruelty. When survivors tried to articulate what a world turned upside down by genocide looks like, those who listened to their testimony found it almost beyond comprehension. Recall the survivor who witnessed Altvater’s cruelty: “Such sadism from a woman I have never seen, I will never forget this.” The female killers stood out in survivors’ memories, in their actions and appearance. It was expected that the mass of uniformed, crewcut German soldiers and police could and did kill—but women? How could women act this way? That a seemingly maternal, caring figure could in one instant console tenderly and in the next instant harm, even kill, was and is one of the most befuddling aspects of women’s behavior in this history. And yet such behaviors were often embodied in the nurses, mothers, and wives who were accomplices and perpetrators.
To assume that violence is not a feminine characteristic and that women are not capable of mass murder has obvious appeal: it allows for hope that at least half the human race will not devour the other, that it will protect children and so safeguard the future. But minimizing the violent behavior of women creates a false shield ag
ainst a more direct confrontation with genocide and its disconcerting realities.
How might some “experts” explain what these women did? The nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso, known for measuring the heads of his subjects to determine their behavior, claimed that female killers had smaller brains and were unusually hairy, likening them to underdeveloped primates. Sigmund Freud presented the deviant behavior of women as rooted in their desire to be men, a form of penis envy. Another dubious theory posits that women have committed more crimes than have been documented, given that women are “naturally deceitful” and secretive. The “evidence” provided is women’s skill at concealing menstruation and faking orgasms.
But how extreme are the biological differences between men and women when it comes to violent behavior? Recent studies of animal behavior —mostly of primates—have shown that males are more violent. When threatened, females bond with other females for protection. Males dominate social hierarchies, but females are the source of mediation and reconciliation. They are key in bringing about a de- escalation when relations among male primates become tense. Can we apply theories of animal behavior to the Holocaust? When comparing Nazi perpetrators to animals, one is reminded of the eminent Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer’s comment that applying terms like beastly and bestiality to the Nazis is “an insult to the animal kingdom . . . because animals do not do things like that; the behavior of the perpetrators was all too human, not inhuman.” Genocide as an idea and an act is a human phenomenon. Perpetration of genocide requires human cognitive abilities, an ideology of hatred with all its mythic and emotional power, and well-developed systems for organizing and implementing it. Humans are the only animals that commit genocide. The work of Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist, supports the fact that the majority of women in the Third Reich were not instinctively violent. But they were also not the mediating, empathetic agents of de-escalation that are found among female primates.
In non-genocidal societies, men commit, on average, almost nine-tenths of all violent crimes. Women who commit violent acts do so usually in the form of domestic violence, and rarely against other women. Some theorists attribute the preponderance of male violence to character traits such as higher self-esteem among men, “the arrogance of the ‘male ego,’” as contrasted with “female patterns of insecurity, lack of assertiveness, and depression.” If violent behavior can be explained by such character traits and socially constructed expectations, then the devaluation of individual life in Nazi Germany changed these traits and expectations, encouraging women as well as men to be assertive or even arrogant and spreading an inherently violent ideology of racial superiority. The violence of Nazi Germany was not an aberration, an inexplicable departure from typical female behavior or nature. On the contrary, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt stressed, totalitarian movements use violence as an instrument, applying it manipulatively to gain and hold on to power. The female perpetrators of the Holocaust employed guns, whips, and lethal needles to achieve a mastery that was not otherwise available, to lord it over victims of the regime rendered powerless.
A recent study of female criminals (based on 103 inmates in a U.S. jail) found that “the callous and unemotional component of psychopathy is comparable in both males and females,” but the manner in which this antisocial behavior is exhibited differs. In other words, men and women may have an equal measure of the emotional traits that potentially cause violent behavior, such as lack of empathy and impulsivity, but women are usually conditioned to be less socially aggressive. The expression of traits that may be predictive of violence is influenced by other sociocultural experiences of a particular time and place, such as education and upbringing. Thus Johanna Altvater’s sadism in the ghetto of Volodymyr-Volynsky was a product of nature and nurture, of biological and situational factors.
Other studies, including Theodor Adorno’s work on the authoritarian personality, suggest that empathy results from an upbringing of moral socialization. If a child is taught the negative effects of her actions on others, this increases empathy. If, on the other hand, she is disciplined not through reasoning but through “harsh authoritarian or power assertive parenting practices which rely on the use of punishment,” then stereotypic thinking, submission to authority, and aggression against outsiders or deviants may be the result. Moral socialization is not developed in these cases, and therefore little empathy. Fear hinders empathy. Historians cannot put their subjects on the couch or into a laboratory, of course, but I think it is worth pointing out that most Germans of the Nazi era were raised in authoritarian households where regular beatings—certainly not inductive reasoning—were employed to discipline and motivate children.
The idea of the authoritarian personality has another application here. For many women of the Nazi era, the father, the husband, and the Führer were all authoritarian figures that shaped their lives in different stages. Erna Petri’s father disapproved of Horst, her Nazi husband, but eventually Erna chose to align herself with a brutish mate instead of a protective father. The postwar testimony of many female defendants exhibits a fear of authority and the belief that one must obey or fulfill one’s duty.
During the Nuremberg trials some male defendants underwent a series of psychological tests fashionable at the time, such as the Rorschach inkblot test. A psychologist who studied SS Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, the head of Einsatzgruppe D, who confessed to killing more than ninety thousand men, women, and children, concluded that Ohlendorf must be a “sadist, a pervert or a lunatic” because he spoke about his cruelties in such a matter-of-fact, unflinching manner. When asked by the judge whether he would kill his own sister if he were ordered to do so, Ohlendorf said he would. But he was no brainless automaton; he was a well-educated, fully informed follower of Hitler and Himmler. Another Nuremberg court psychologist subjected Nazi leaders to various tests and concluded that such persons are “neither sick nor unusual; in fact they are like any other person we might encounter in other countries of the earth.”
Such psychological experiments were conducted largely on the Reich leadership and on SS men. If tests were done on women, they have not been published. And yet those who actually bloodied their hands were not the leadership and mostly not SS men; thus the psychological assessments are not historically representative of the diverse combination of perpetrators, male and female, German and non-German. I interviewed the senior prosecutor Hermann Weissing, who was chief of the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi War Criminals in North Rhine–Westphalia and who questioned thousands of suspects between 1965 and 1985 (including Johanna Altvater Zelle). He explained that he did not encounter anyone who could be described as psychopathic. “The individuals were not insane, it was the Nazi system that was crazy,” he told me. Weissing was convinced that many of the perpetrators whom he investigated, including Altvater, had committed the crimes, but he also concluded that they were no longer a threat to society. They were “normal,” law-abiding citizens in the new democratic Germany.
Studies of perpetrator motivation explain that those who incite acts of hate are seeking to rid themselves and the world around them of its unsettling, messy ambiguities and complexity. The perpetrator mentality is one of “splitting”—that is, all-or-none, black-and-white thinking. Perpetrators often see themselves as enlightened, as holders of a greater truth, superior to their foes, above reproach and accountability, struggling to break free of a world of dichotomies. The interwar German generation experienced the glaring extremes of war and peace: unbridled capitalism and state-regulated communism; the individual and the collective; the past and the future. Germans sought to transcend these conflicts, and yearned for a superior, utopian existence founded on something that seemed tangible and essentialist—biological racism. From our perspective, the Holocaust’s machinery of destruction was a bureaucratic jungle of competing factions, entangled agencies, and bloody, irrational madness. To the perpetrators it was “smooth,” determined, systematic, necessary, sop
histicated, exact—unpleasant, perhaps, but humane. The enemies—the Jews and other so-called racial defectives—were to be removed with surgical precision once and for all. Threats to Germany’s existence would be overcome, the struggle resolved. In the minds of Hitler, his followers, and many German patriots, the Final Solution was a defensive act of liberation from the encroaching power of a globalizing Jewry.
The crimes committed by female perpetrators occurred within a web of professional priorities and tasks, personal commitments and anxieties. The perpetrator who accepts the perceived necessity of killing could in the course of one day shoot Jewish children and then arrive home to coddle her son or daughter. There is no contradiction here in the mind of the perpetrator; there is, rather, a startling degree of clarity. Nurses and doctors rationalized their lethal injections as ending suffering; the “patients” were unhealthy, incurable, in a physical state of limbo. The patient’s ambivalent state had to be resolved through a “merciful” death. Of course, the so-called Jewish threat was in reality nonexistent. Yet naked Jewish boys seeking shelter on the Petris’ estate or toddlers in the ghettos of Volodymyr-Volynsky were murdered because their mere presence was anathema to the German fantasy of a utopian Lebensraum. In the perpetrator’s mind, Germans and Jews could not coexist. Female killers, like their male counterparts, developed this conviction after years of conditioning in the Reich, absorbed it from a general climate of popular and state-condoned anti-Semitism in Germany and across Europe.
