by Wendy Lower
For her, at eighty-four years of age, this history was finished, and she wanted no more to do with it. Perhaps she had inadvertently articulated a deeper memory of her experience in the Third Reich, an era when deported and killed Jews, at least half of them women, were euphemistically described as erledigt, or finished off. Listening to her, I imagined a young female clerk in a powerful office in Berlin, satisfied not to be working in a factory or on a farm, routinely typing and stamping deportation lists or case files concerning Jews, “asocials,” and other enemies of the Reich, daydreaming about her social plans after work and those pretty shoes that she had seen in a shop window that morning. She was just “doing her job,” and eyeing its material rewards.
Sabine Dick, the onetime career secretary in the Gestapo, was more forthcoming. To West German investigators she offered detailed information about ostensibly mundane administrative procedures, often revealing key pieces of information about the bureaucratic routines of genocide. But she refrained from negative portraits of her bosses, either praising them as decent, warmhearted, paternal figures or describing them sympathetically as overworked officials. Suspects like Dick had reason to fear Nazi hunters and prosecutors, and became skilled at stymieing investigations. Time was on their side. There was the statute of limitations on Nazi crimes other than murder, and even murder was harder to prove as the memories of witnesses faded and witnesses died.
Still, despite her best efforts to protect her boss, Georg Heuser, and her own reputation, Dick’s testimony had the opposite effect. She was questioned several times between April and October 1960. First she tried to divert attention away from the crime scenes in Minsk. She named former colleagues and presented details about the Berlin headquarters but said she could not remember much about Belarus. When she was asked who was in the shooting commando units in Minsk, first her memory failed; then she declared that she was no denouncer. She also claimed that she feared retribution. She speculated that the German democracy would collapse again, another dictatorship would emerge, and she would be the target of vengeance. This seems rather far-fetched but, given her biography, perhaps not entirely outlandish. She had lived through “the age of extremes”; she had suffered the rise and fall of Nazism, had witnessed the terror of Stalinism, and was being interrogated at the height of the Cold War. But the prosecutors were neither convinced nor sympathetic; they were simply annoyed that she was less than helpful in their pursuit of her boss, who was indicted for the murder of more than ten thousand people. They noted that Dick was paranoid and emotional, that she broke out in tears during the questioning.
There was another issue. Dick’s husband had been a noncommissioned officer in the Waffen-SS, and he too worked in the Minsk office. Dick and her husband had sworn that they would not incriminate each other by admitting that both worked in the Gestapo office with the defendant, Heuser. The prosecutors reminded her that perjury was a crime, that she could be sentenced to fifteen years in jail for committing it. Dick tried a different tack. On one occasion she brought her thirteen-year-old daughter to the police station where she was being questioned, perhaps hoping to display her maternal side to police investigators. But this also backfired: her daughter complained loudly about being “dragged into this shit.” Dick was smarter than her husband, who boasted about having built up the police station in Minsk. But investigators did not seem to care that he was still a Nazi; they were just glad that he answered their questions. Sabine Dick, the erratic wife, annoyed them. In the end she did offer incriminating details about their main suspect, her boss, and she was not prosecuted.
Gender bias of many kinds crept into the entire judicial process, beginning with the pursuit of criminals, continuing with the questioning, and concluding with the sentencing. Whereas male defendants were judged by their place in the hierarchy and administration, their political ideology, and their personal motive—as Hitler’s “primary accomplices,” as desk murderers, as excessive sadists—the female defendants were judged with other considerations in mind. The influence of the husband or other male figure was considered similar to the role of peer pressure experienced by men in police and military units. A male defendant was not asked, How much did your wife or lover influence your hatred of Jews or pressure you to commit violent acts? No Lady Macbeth, goading her husband to commit murder as a display of his manhood, emerged in the courtroom. The defense attorneys effectively played up the presumed apolitical development and outlook of the women, whose ideological motivation, anti-Semitism, and racism were—like men’s—difficult to document. Typically the motives, whether for killing disabled or Jewish children or for denouncing neighbors to the Gestapo, were attributed to personal desires and emotions, such as jealousy, loneliness, greed, revenge, sex, or being “blinded by love.” A woman who behaved like a man, shooting with a pistol, cracking a whip, riding around the killing fields of Poland and Ukraine on horseback and wearing pants and a manly haircut—such a female figure was unimaginable to most, passed over by the courts, and not discussed in the testimony. Women like that were loathsome reminders of a failed regime and the descent into fascist barbarism. If Germany and Germans were going to pursue a path of normalization and shed their Nazi past, then the traditional female figure with its moral, aesthetic ideals had to be restored, not redefined.
Liselotte Meier, the secretary in Lida who was seen with her boss, Hermann Hanweg, and other German officials as they shot Jews from their carriages, admitted after the war that she had joined Hanweg on winter hunts. They shot at prey in the snow, she testified, but she could not remember if their targets were animals or Jews. Hanweg could not corroborate or refute her testimony: the Soviets had already tried and executed him. But Hanweg’s deputy was still in Mainz, living above a bicycle shop with his wife. He was arrested and, in a rare demonstration of justice, sentenced to life in prison in 1978. The prosecutor who interrogated Meier was persistent, more aggressive in his questioning than most in West Germany. Perhaps his zeal stemmed from his own wartime experience; as a soldier fighting near Leningrad he had witnessed mass shootings of civilians. The prosecutor traveled to North America and Israel to collect testimony from Jewish survivors. He personally arrested Hanweg’s deputy, dragging the man from his home in the early morning while his wife screamed obscenities. The prosecutor questioned the Hanweg family, including Hanweg’s wife and children, who tried their best to recount events in detail, drawing sketches of murder scenes and recollecting names of Jewish laborers and events in the ghetto. When the prosecutor confronted Liselotte Meier with survivor testimony that identified her as having been with other German shooters, Meier feigned only a faint recollection of the event. In an obvious attempt to evade the question, she offered a confused jumble of “I cannot remember,” “I cannot recall the details,” and “I cannot say if the people who were shot were even Jews”; nor did she know “if the people were targeted or if someone was shooting in the snow.” After the war Meier admitted that she went with Hanweg to the Jewish workshops three or four mornings a week, and that she regularly walked through the Jewish quarter. It is revealing that she tried to hide the love affair she had had with Hanweg, which seemed to haunt her more than her role in the Holocaust. She sobbed during the questioning when pressed on the subject of her lover. Observers of her tears would have been justified in suspecting that it was not the loss of Jewish lives in Lida but rather her own loss of Hermann Hanweg that she mourned.
Johanna Altvater Zelle (upper left) in an album used by Israeli investigators to identify her
In the history of the West German pursuit of Nazi war criminals, there was one publicized trial of a German secretary in the East accused of murder. This defendant was Johanna Altvater. During the 1960s, dozens of Holocaust survivors living in Israel, the United States, and Canada presented their testimonies about a German woman they called Hanna. Non-Jewish witnesses came forward from East Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. Seeking some form of justice for the mass murder of an estimated twenty thousand Jews in t
he town of Volodymyr-Volynsky, survivors identified four perpetrators by name, although of course there were dozens more who had had a direct hand in the population’s destruction. “Fräulein Hanna” was among those four. Twenty years after the events, survivors recounted her horrible deeds.
What happened to Altvater after she left Ukraine at Christmas of 1943? She returned to her boring job at the city administration in Minden. She was not seriously questioned after the war about her activities in the East. “She can be usefully employed,” her denazification documents noted. In the Minden city administration, she was promoted to welfare caseworker for youth. After 1945, former members of the Nazi Youth in Minden had reunions and sang the old songs. Many had come of age there in the 1920s and 1930s; they did not accept the Nazi regime as a criminal one, and avoided any critical reckoning with their own pasts. Altvater was in that group. She married in 1953, taking the name Zelle (which, ironically, means “prison cell”). Her husband was an intern in the district youth office in the neighboring town of Detmold. While he rose in the ranks of the civil administration of Detmold, Frau Zelle took over the care of a six-year-old boy whose education at a boarding school she sponsored. When this boy, whom she adopted, was a young man, he regularly attended her trial.
During the public trial proceedings (September 18–October 31, 1978), both Johanna Zelle and her former boss, the district commissar Westerheide, smiled at the cameras and insisted that they were innocent. Westerheide began to brag about his authority in Ukraine, as if those times were the peak of his career. He consistently spoke about Volodymyr-Volynsky as “his city” and referred to “his Jews,” whom he had to place in a ghetto because, as he explained, there was a military depot in town that had to be secured from those “suspicious” ones. The defense attorney warned him, “Herr Westerheide, please remember that you no longer find yourself in the Nazi period. You were not as important as you present yourself. Were there not others with more power who carried out the actual tasks?” The judge also tried to rein him in, advising him to stick to the facts and not expound on Nazi ideology.
Both Zelle and Westerheide were charged with murder and complicity in the murder of nine thousand Jews during the ghetto liquidations and mass shootings of September and November 1942. Both defendants were seen as responsible, in their official roles, for implementing policies that brought about deprivation, loss of property, and loss of life. By the time the trial occurred in West Germany in the state court in Bielefeld, the statute of limitations had run out for all crimes except murder, and aiding and abetting murder. According to German law, in order to obtain a murder conviction the prosecution had to present convincing evidence that the accused demonstrated excessive cruelty, deceitful behavior, and base motive (such as race hatred). In assessing the guilt of the accused, the court privileged documentary evidence over survivor witness accounts. Probably more decisive, however, was the general reluctance of judges of this immediate postwar generation to convict, let alone harshly punish, defendants accused of Nazi crimes. The testimony against Westerheide and Zelle was extensive, and wartime documentation placed them at the scenes of the crimes. Nevertheless, the two would be acquitted.
As the accused, Johanna Altvater Zelle presented herself as a sensitive woman who abhorred violence. She admitted that she had witnessed deportations but said she had only heard about shootings. Trying to gain the sympathy of the court, she pleaded that during the war she was just a young woman, only a secretary who had been sent to the East. This image clashed with newspaper articles that described the grin on her face as she listened to courtroom testimony about the “blonde murderess” with a whip who had forced Jews to their death. Excerpts from testimony about her luring children with candy and shooting them, and throwing children over balconies and against walls, also made it into the press coverage.
The prosecutor argued for multiple life sentences for both defendants and a warrant for their immediate arrest, since the two were not incarcerated during the trial. Both requests were rejected. When the judge, Dr. Paul Pieper, acquitted them, he cited “insufficient evidence.” The verdict was announced in Bielefeld in November 1979, and a public protest ensued, organized mainly by the Association of the Victims of Nazism (VVN). Eight hundred demonstrated in the city center. A University of Bielefeld professor gave a stirring speech that condemned the German justice system for avoiding the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, for discriminating against witnesses, and for tolerating neo-Nazism. Referring to the Brown Book, an East German publication that sought to expose former Nazis in the West German government, the professor asserted that the justice system in Bielefeld was controlled by former Nazis.
In July 1980, the Federal Supreme Court (Criminal Appeals Chamber) decided that the case should be reopened. Judge Pieper, it was argued, had not weighed the evidence properly, discounting witness statements. Neither had he pressed the defendants—especially Johanna Altvater Zelle—about their alibis. Questioning the logic of the decision, the Supreme Court noted that if Zelle was seen at the ghetto liquidation, if she admitted being there, and if the court accepted that she was there, then one must accept that she was at a crime scene. Yet the court had not sufficiently questioned her about why she was there or what she was doing.
The proceedings moved from Bielefeld to Dortmund, the location of a central office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes. The chief prosecutor in this office, Hermann Weissing, who had failed to obtain a life sentence in the court of Bielefeld, was under pressure to bring more evidence and witnesses to the new trial. Weissing sought help from Israeli police, Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna, and the World Jewish Congress in New York. By March 1982, when the second trial started, Weissing had secured twenty additional witnesses, but some of their statements contradicted ones from the first trial or statements made decades earlier. At this point the process of collecting witness statements against Westerheide and Zelle had gone on for almost twenty years.
The proceedings ended in November when, to everyone’s surprise, the prosecutor himself asked the court for an acquittal. “Despite strong suspicion of criminal deeds,” Weissing reasoned, “the believability of the surviving victims is in doubt.” In later reflections on the proceedings, Weissing commented that the cases against Nazi perpetrators were no different from any others. He believed that the survivors’ stories were true, but “their statements were not objective evidence,” despite the large quantity of them. That Zelle and her colleagues were anti-Semitic was also indisputable, Weissing concluded, but there was still not enough evidence to convict them of murder.
In December 1982 Zelle and Westerheide were acquitted for the second time. Another protest took place, followed by a flurry of critical press commentaries in Germany and abroad. Zelle died in Detmold in 2003, about a week before her eighty-fifth birthday.
In the case of Johanna Altvater Zelle, a lack of written wartime evidence led to her acquittal, even though the prosecutor believed that she had brutally killed Jewish children in a ghetto in Ukraine, and even though she admitted that she had gone to the ghetto liquidation on her own initiative. Testimony from dozens of eyewitnesses was considered insufficient evidence. With such reasoning, few could be held accountable. An all-powerful genocidal regime of male and female perpetrators who acted as masters of life and death was vindicated by the totality of the system—or, as Hannah Arendt put it, by the “rule of Nobody” (which became the “responsibility of nobody” in the postwar courtroom). Zelle’s victims, children whom Zelle shot in the mouth or bashed against the ghetto wall, did not die an “ordinary” death; thus, logically speaking, Zelle was no “ordinary” woman. According to German law, however, she was ordinary, and so were her alleged crimes.
There is another irony in the legal history. Men in the system could use their formal positions in the hierarchy as a defense that they were following orders, or claim putative duress (albeit mostly unsuccessfully). Female killers could not use this defense. In a genocidal system of shared perpetratio
n, it is difficult to document and prove individual base motive. But women like “Fräulein Hanna” displayed just this: when they murdered, they overstepped their authority, thus showing individual initiative—a demonstration of the excessive behavior that by German law constituted first-degree murder. But that is not how West German prosecutors made their case against such women, and ultimately not how judges crafted their verdicts.
Prosecutors could place secretaries at crime scenes in their official positions in the Nazi administration. It was more difficult for prosecutors to find hard evidence against the wives of SS men, women who made their way to the East outside formal channels. Usually SS wives came to the attention of prosecutors because their husbands had committed crimes and victims who survived came forward with statements incriminating the wives. What happened to the SS wives we’ve followed here—Gertrude Segel, Liesel Willhaus, Josefine Block, Vera Wohlauf, and Erna Petri?
In Austria, criminal investigators first arrested Gertrude’s husband, Felix Landau, and then opened a separate case against her. Gertrude Segel Landau was detained in 1947 and 1948. When questioned, she evaded, lied, and denied. Pressed about events that occurred just five years earlier, she stated that so much had happened since then, it was hard to remember anything. Landau presented herself as the naive girlfriend of a Nazi SS officer—she was Felix’s lover at the time, not yet his wife—and as a mere secretary, an insignificant cog in the machine.
Yes, she admitted, she and Felix were on their balcony on a summer Sunday in 1942, but it was only to shoot at birds. They were playing an innocent game, making fun of their neighbor across the street, who was a veterinarian and had pigeons on his roof. Gertrude still seemed amused by this game. She claimed that she scolded Felix when he turned his gun on the Jewish laborers in their garden, since, as she said, turning directly to the examiners as she spoke, “it was not right to shoot human beings.” Then, according to Gertrude, Felix said to her, “Come on, it is just a Flobert gun, nothing can really happen.” When questioned about the Flobert, which was seen in her hands, she protested that Felix had bought it for his four-year-old son. Trying now to remove herself from the murder scene, she claimed at first that she had gone inside the house before Felix shot the Jews in the garden. Then she admitted that she was on the balcony next to him. She drew a sketch of the scene and of the bullet for the prosecutors. The entire event, she told them, was Felix’s fault.
