by Wendy Lower
There is general agreement among scientists that the environment is the most important factor in determining whether one will become a perpetrator of genocide. Without certain settings and experiences, individuals with the proclivity to commit crimes would not commit them. In the course of their lives, and even in the course of an hour, perpetrators like Erna Petri could dramatically change their behavior, at one moment feeding Jewish children and reflexively taking on the role of mother, and shortly thereafter placing a gun to the children’s heads as executioner. Johanna Altvater, who bashed a toddler’s head against a ghetto wall and was described as “masculine” and “ice cold” —“someone you would not want to encounter on a moonless night”—worked in a child-welfare office after the war. The callousness shown toward Jews who were trapped in cattle cars, then marched to the edge of town to be shot, is not evidence of a unique German predisposition to kill Jews. German men and women, and their collaborators, first had to learn how to adapt to mass murder, including all its methods and rationales. The varied experiences of German women and men in the eastern occupied territories as they became direct witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators of the Holocaust broadened and deepened their anti-Semitic behavior. Anti-Semitism there took on many forms, more elaborate and extreme than in the Reich, where sustained, visible violence was not tolerated and the “Bolshevik” threat was not directly encountered. Judeo-Bolshevism was, as we have seen, a powerful mobilizing ideology of the war. Yet most women who went east were not rabid anti-Semites; in fact, most identified with other convictions and ambitions. The eastern experience proved transformative. It was in the eastern territories that Nazi anti-Semitism found its fullest expression and most profound development, and for some the anti-Semitic ideas absorbed there were not discredited by the defeat of Hitler’s Germany.
Can one apply the typology of male perpetrators in Holocaust studies to women? The research here on female witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators shows that women did exhibit the same behaviors and motivations as men. Though women were not organized into mobile killing units like the Einsatzgruppen or the Order Police battalions, some did undergo militarized training as camp guards with the sole purpose of inflicting terror or, as they saw it, disciplining enemies of the Reich. The focus here has been on women who became perpetrators in other professional and private capacities, in the field offices and hospitals of the Reich, and in their homes. Here, in these varied roles and settings, we find that immoral, violent behavior was manifested in diverse forms.
There were women in the elite ranks of the scientific and medical professions, women who conducted “research” in the ghettos and asylums where genocide occurred. The female version of the desk murderer was found in the routine but lethal work of the Minsk Gestapo chief’s secretary, Sabine Dick, and the Lida governor’s secretary, Liselotte Meier. In Josefine Block and Johanna Altvater we see the female version of the sadist. The female version of the sniper-murderer was revealed in Liesel Willhaus and Gertrude Segel; of the executioner, in Erna Petri. Like their male counterparts, Hitler’s Furies came from several backgrounds: working class and well-to-do, educated and uneducated, Catholic and Protestant, urban and provincial. They were all ambitious and patriotic; to varying degrees they also shared the qualities of greed, anti-Semitism, racism, and imperialistic arrogance. And they were all young.
In the typology of female killers, there is a final group to be considered. Earlier work presenting women through pornographic caricatures, like the sex maniac in the film Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, were offensive distortions. But there is an element of reality in these exaggerated depictions. We must account for the dynamic of male-female relationships as a causative factor, whether the energy was purely sexual or conjugal. Even in the most basic mating ritual, males and females perform for each other, and as a pair their behavior continues to be shaped in private and public settings by their relationship and sexual attraction. For many couples—the Petris, the Landaus, the Willhauses, the lovers Hanweg and Meier, and many others—the violence of the Holocaust was part of the dynamic of their relationship. Of course these relationships did not cause the Holocaust, but they were an integral part of the everyday terror that individual Jews and their families faced in the ghettos, camps, and even at mass shooting sites. On top of the daily deprivation, loss of family members, and physical torture they faced, Jews in the East had to cope with the bewilderment of what many survivors described as a world turned upside down, where German rulers who professed a higher civilization conducted themselves with the utmost depravity and barbarism. Women were often at the center of these puzzling scenes.
Commissar Hanweg (with a rifle) and an unidentified woman forcing a young Jewish man out of hiding
German amusements, “recreation,” and debauchery in the ghettos and near the mass shooting sites were part of that world turned upside down, and again women were there. The hedonist does not act alone: pleasure is often pursued in pairs and groups. The Ostrausch—intoxication of the East—was an imperial high that increased the violence of the war and genocide. Hedonism and genocide went hand in hand, and women and men were its agents, its partners in crime.
Many personality types and professions helped the Nazis’ machinery of destruction operate and expand. It was a German invention but one run by many non-Germans as well, and these non-German participants proved just as opportunistic and anti-Semitic. By its very definition, genocide is a mass crime perpetrated by a collective, by an entire society against another group, usually a vulnerable minority. Political systems and government institutions are its mechanisms and organizational frameworks, but its force originates in the will of the people, as Hitler recognized. Genocidal regimes undertake violent revolutions that pit one group against another in what both groups believe is an existential struggle for their existence. In this form of total war, all men and women participate, and traditional roles are perverted in the militarization of society. Moral codes of conduct are retooled—a phenomenon that is empowering for those in control, but disturbing, horrifying, and deadly for those who experience its force.
As we have seen, at least half a million women witnessed and contributed to the operations and terror of a genocidal war in the eastern territories. The Nazi regime mobilized a generation of young female revolutionaries who were conditioned to accept violence, to incite it, and to commit it, in defense of or as an assertion of Germany’s superiority. This fact has been suppressed and denied by the very women who were swept up in the regime and of course by those who perpetrated the violence with impunity. Genocide is also women’s business. When given the “opportunity,” women too will engage in it, even the bloodiest aspects of it. Minimizing women’s culpability to a few thousand brainwashed and misguided camp guards does not accurately represent the reality of the Holocaust.
7
What Happened to Them?
AMERICAN PROSECUTORS AND their staff were under enormous pressure in the postwar period to narrow a list of about two million German offenders down to a few hundred major war criminals. Men and women in the Allied internment camps were waiting release; their detention was interfering with the reconstruction of Germany. Though the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had declared the SS a criminal organization, it decided that clerks, secretaries, stenographers, cleaning staff, and other low-level support staff working in the Gestapo and other SS offices would be exempt from indictment. These underlings, according to Allied leaders’ calculations, made up thirty to thirty-five percent of the SS staff, or 13,500 people. Female detectives across the Reich and in the East who examined Jewish women and children, searching their personal belongings on train platforms or as they entered camps, or the former secretaries who transmitted killing orders, selected laborers, and plundered Jewish belongings—personnel in these categories would not automatically be investigated as war criminals. Despite the alarming data compiled by the Kempners, criminal investigators and denazification courts reasonably concluded that women in the white-
collar state machinery were not threats to postwar German society. German defense lawyers argued convincingly that desk clerks in the Gestapo offices, including female stenographers, had little knowledge of the criminal policies, and that they lacked the authority to commit crimes and conspire with their superiors.
The record of justice against Nazi perpetrators, male and female, is rather poor. Most German women who participated in the Holocaust quietly resumed normal lives. We’ve seen that postwar literary constructions and imagery stressed the image of the burdened German Hausfrau, the “rubble women” who were the backbone of West Germany’s rapid economic recovery (Wirtschaftswunder) and who struggled to provide for fatherless families with little food and shelter. This idea of German women as martyrs was at odds with the evidence of women participating in the evil deeds of the Third Reich. Those who were confronted after the war by survivor witnesses and brought to trial were portrayed either as appalling freaks of nature, or as naturally innocent and incapable of such monstrous acts. Intentionally or not, female defendants could exploit the latter prejudice to their advantage. Interrogators and investigators judged women based on their emotional responses. Court officials noted when women cried during the questioning or proceedings. Such a display of emotion seemed to indicate humanity, sensitivity, and presumably an empathy that was consistent with the nature or instinct of female innocence and caring. And indeed, since most women were not sadistic murderers, such a bias was not unfounded.
After the war, Annette Schücking, the Red Cross nurse with the law degree who documented the “slaughterhouse” of Ukraine in letters to her parents, was able to put her education to good use. In 1948 she became a founding member of the reconstituted German female lawyers’ league; the Nazis had disbanded the earlier league in 1933. A self-proclaimed feminist, she successfully advocated legal reforms to curb domestic violence. She served as a judge in the civil court of Detmold for several decades. One case that landed on her desk involved a man who mentioned in his résumé that he had been a policeman in Novgorod Volynsk during the war. Schücking presented herself to war-crimes investigators and shared detailed information about the perpetrators she had met in Ukraine. She urged prosecutors to track down Sergeant Frank, the man who told her about his shooting of Jews in Khmilnyk, but Franck could not be found. In her opinion, her attempt to help had been rebuffed: “It was impossible to talk openly in the court system with any colleagues who had been in the East. Former Nazis were everywhere.” Nothing came of her attempt to assist war-crimes investigators. In 2010, haunted by the images of Jewish children she saw being “led away” to their deaths, she asked again, “But what could I have done?”
Comparing investigations and trials in postwar Austria and the two Germanys, historians have found that there were female defendants in various categories, though they were in the minority. During the high point of prosecution in Germany and Austria—that is, in the first decade after the war—twenty-six women were sentenced to death for crimes committed in medical facilities and concentration camps. With one highly publicized exception (the SS policewoman who placed Anne Frank and her family on the deportation list to Auschwitz), German women were not pursued after the war for their role as administrators of the Holocaust in Gestapo offices and regional outposts in the East or occupied territories. As for violence that occurred outside of institutional settings, there were a handful of cases against women who brutalized forced laborers in their private homes, farms, and businesses, and fewer than ten indictments of German women who committed murder or were accessories to murder in mass shootings and ghetto liquidations. A female Nazi trying to escape prosecution in Europe would have found Austria even safer than Germany. The largest number of German female Nazis tried for murder or accessory to murder was in East Germany, with 220 female defendants tried between 1945 and 1990. The Austrians have not tried and convicted a Nazi war criminal (male or female) since the 1970s, a sad irony given Simon Wiesenthal’s prominence as a Nazi hunter based in Vienna.
What do the postwar fates of the women featured in this book reveal about the prosecution of the crimes of genocide? As will be seen in this chapter, the accomplices and perpetrators featured in this book faced investigators after the war, but only one was judged guilty. Most who were working in places such as Belarus, where the killing was an open secret, where the thousands of fresh mass graves marked the landscape, claimed that they saw and knew nothing. Most investigators and prosecutors were not very aggressive in their pursuit of female Nazis; German witnesses were not anxious to provide more information than was necessary, especially anything self-incriminating; and the judiciary in West Germany and Austria was not thoroughly denazified.
Shared participation in the dirty work of mass murder cemented relationships that extended well beyond the wartime years. Wives remained loyal to husbands; often they were grateful just to have a husband, given the struggles of the many war widows with children to feed. Vera Eichmann registered a fake death certificate to hide her husband, SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. This was more than an act of conjugal love: it was a cover-up concocted by mates who had something to hide and something in common. On the eve of his execution in Israel, Eichmann expressed no guilt or shame about his role in the Final Solution and credited his wife for upholding his self-perception of innocence. As mirrors, women have magnified men’s feelings of power and superiority as well as deflected the face of evil. Blind to the immorality of the violence, or perhaps not wanting to see it, most wives focused on their Christian duty to uphold their marriage vow and continued to serve as accomplices. As they had first emboldened their husbands to commit crimes, they maintained the innocence of their men to the end.
In Bavaria, prison chaplains counseled the wives of incarcerated defendants to support their husbands unconditionally. If the men had sinned, they could nevertheless find forgiveness with God’s grace. The loving, loyal wife might lead her man to redemption, or so the chaplains hoped; the pursuit of justice in the courts was almost an afterthought. Neither the prosecutors nor the chaplains were able to persuade perpetrators to publicly confess to their crimes. Who knows what husbands privately confessed to their wives, but most wives did not see many options beyond staying married, even if they felt betrayed or loathed their violent husbands. Bavarian pastors and ministers discouraged divorces on the grounds of war crimes; the person seen as the moral failure was the wife who initiated such a separation, not the criminal husband. In the words of one chaplain who refused to grant a wife’s request for divorce, those guilty of war crimes had committed an “act of fate that affects both marital partners equally . . . This act of fate must be shouldered by both marital partners together.” Wives refuted charges against their perpetrator husbands, insisting on the upright and kind characters of these men, the fathers of their children.
Male perpetrators who found new mates after the war hid their crimes until investigators came knocking. When I telephoned a member of a special mobile killing unit that rampaged across Ukraine and Russia, his wife answered the call and refused to allow me to speak to her husband. She described her own suffering, explaining that during the war she had been a nurse. Then she began to sob. She had met her husband, a brewer, immediately after the war and learned decades later that he had been in an Einsatzgruppe. But she could not leave him: they had already started a family.
Pacts of loyalty extended from the home to the workplace. The Third Reich was defeated and discredited as a criminal regime. But the perpetrators continued to value oaths of loyalty and secrecy, not to their dead Führer but to one another. In the postwar era, loyalty was a pact of protection against prosecutors and Nazi hunters. Such bonds developed within killing units like Order Police Battalion 101, as well as between secretaries and bosses, and among networks of female colleagues and acquaintances. When the secretary for the district commissar in Slonim was asked to provide testimony about the war crimes of her boss, she received a letter from her boss’s wife, who begged the former secre
tary to stand back and not influence the proceedings. Of course, not everyone abided by this pact or succumbed to the peer pressure that was rooted in the wartime experience. Harsh interrogations and blackmailing, especially in the East German police state, yielded detailed accounts and confessions. Bonds of secrecy could be broken down under pressure or by expanding the search for witnesses.
Secretaries who covered for their bosses were both distancing themselves from the crimes and protecting themselves from being smeared as “denouncers.” One of Adolf Eichmann’s secretaries in his Berlin office (Department IVB4) had been contacted in the 1960s when German prosecutors launched an extensive investigation of the Reich Security Main Office. This secretary remained tightlipped about her former colleagues, their escape routes from Berlin and Prague, and their systematic destruction of top-secret documents. In 1967 her immediate boss, Fritz Woehrn, was indicted by a West German court, and later he was convicted as an accessory to murder for the incarceration and ultimate death of “half-Jews” (those in mixed marriages), Jewish hospital patients, and Jews arrested for violating Nazi anti-Semitic bans on such things as owning a bike, going to the movies, or visiting an Aryan hairdresser. In a rare conviction of a “desk murderer,” the Berlin state court established that Woehrn’s motive was anti-Semitic hate and that Woehrn was one of the most “radical and notorious” functionaries in Eichmann’s office.
I contacted Woehrn’s secretary about her work and her former bosses in Department IVB4. She was determined to keep her vow of secrecy. She insisted that she was apolitical, that she applied for the job in Eichmann’s office simply because she dreamed about things like new shoes and needed a job. When pressed about her actual work in the office, she blurted out one word repeatedly, “Erledigt!” (Done!), as if rubber-stamping a document.
