by Wendy Lower
The Petri case offers a rare example of how gender factored into the treatment of war criminals in East Germany, as well as a glimpse into the psychology of a female perpetrator of the Holocaust. Although Erna tried to shield her husband from her own crimes, the judge was of the opinion that Horst Petri was responsible in part for his wife’s behavior. The court explained the sentencing by stating that “between the two defendants there are differences” and that in Erna’s case one must consider that she became a murderer because of her husband’s profound influence. In addition, “the constant interaction with the SS beasts in Grsenda [sic] was a considerable factor in causing her to commit crimes.” Above all, the court argued that her crimes were not as extensive as those perpetrated by Horst Petri, who routinely killed and abused on his own initiative, without direct orders. That warranted the death penalty, the court explained.
Erna gained the sympathies of some officials, who noted that “from time to time she showed human emotions,” but she was judged harshly by most. She confessed to murdering six Jewish children between six and twelve years of age. It is clear in the interrogations and judgment that what the attorneys, the interrogators, and ultimately the court found so reprehensible, almost beyond imagining, was her capacity to kill children. As one interrogator asked in response to her confession, “How could you do this with two of your own small children at the estate?”
When Erna Petri was arrested, she had denied committing any crimes. She admitted only that she had heard about Jews who were shot in the woods on their estate. About a month into her incarceration and questioning, however, she began to crack under the pressure. On September 15, 1961, she was subjected to an interrogation that began at eight A.M. and finished at one A.M. the next day, with a one-hour break for lunch and another for dinner. The chief interrogator, named Franke, began, “Which crimes did you commit during your stay in Grzenda?” Petri replied that she was indeed at this estate from June 1942 until early 1944, and that she had beaten workers, including the blacksmith who was now serving as a witness against her. As the barrage of questions continued, she eventually admitted that she remembered the shooting of Jewish men who had been caught on the farm after they escaped from a train headed from Lviv to Lublin.
In his questioning, Franke referred to statements made by Polish eyewitnesses that Erna had singlehandedly shot Jews with her own pistol. Franke extracted the details from Erna. Before ending the session he asked, “Why have you denied shooting Jews yourself until this point?” Erna replied that she feared punishment and that she thought her husband would admit to those murders on her behalf.
At the trial, Erna and Horst told the judge that during the war they had decided to keep quiet about Erna’s shooting of the Jewish children. Horst had reassured Erna that shooting them was the right thing to do, but he did not want everyone to know about it. There was a chance, since Erna was not officially authorized to kill Jews, that she might be questioned by an SS investigator. Plus, Horst said, he did not want his wife to be the subject of local rumors. A male sadist was acceptable, even effective, in “keeping the natives down.” But a female sadist was potentially a problem, a target of revenge, even an embarrassment. Erna herself seemed unsure about how her actions would be received. She explained at length that she had fed the children before killing them, apparently expecting the court to be touched by her kindness and by her frank admission. Yet she also got caught up in her own lies and “memory lapses.” The judge admonished her and branded her a liar. Erna laughed nervously. The verdict came as a shock: her husband would be guillotined, and she would spend the rest of her life in prison.
But Erna Petri did not resign herself to her fate. From her jail cell she retracted her earlier statements. Her pleas for release, and those of her children on her behalf, were roundly rejected. She wrote letters to the prosecutor’s office, long, detailed reflections and explanations. Her colleagues and family reassured her that former Nazis received amnesty; surely she would be released too. She expressed no remorse about her wartime deeds but instead began to spin a large web of stories and excuses. In numerous letters to attorneys, she complained that the court interpreter mistranslated testimony that implicated her. In one appeal of September 18, 1963, Erna insisted that she did not kill anyone and had never handled a gun. Out of love and fear—aus Liebe und Angst—she had falsely admitted to murdering the children, in the hope of protecting her husband’s future.
Then she tried another tack. She had heard about Jews who were being deported to the Lublin district and gassed, she said, and it had shocked her at the time. She protested the deportations, telling Horst that “those people [the Jews] are human after all,” but her brute of a husband silenced her and warned her that if she did not shut up, she would get in trouble. Erna was now desperate to establish herself in the eyes of the law as an anti-Nazi. In 1938, she said—alluding to Kristallnacht—she had made a critical comment about the unfair treatment of Jews. It was only because she was pregnant that she was not arrested right then and there.
In a politically riskier appeal, Erna described her unfair treatment by East German interrogators. She had been tricked during one session, she said. The ploy that was used was typical of Stasi methods. She was presented with a confession signed by her husband, which she later realized was a forgery. The confession stated, according to Erna’s recollection of 1963, “I admit that my wife shot Jewish children and persons.” When Erna saw this confession, she “was full of indignation,” since “I never did such things that he accused me of.” But then, thinking it over, she realized that her husband did not wish to do her harm—“he is in danger and needs my help.” Erna decided to accept the blame, to lie on his behalf. Or so she said now. But could she really have made up the details about how she shot the six Jewish children, the graphic account of where and how she did it and how the children responded, all for the sake of her husband?
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall, officially known in the former East Germany as the “anti-fascist protection barrier,” came down. Erna Petri, by then sixty-nine years old, sat in her cell at the notorious Hoheneck prison in Saxony. For decades Erna had been retelling her story with variations and contradictions. Would the West German lawyers who were to review her case upon the collapse of the German Democratic Republic see her in a more sympathetic light than the East German jurists who had convicted her? The beginning of her incarceration had coincided with the construction of the wall in August 1961, and now, with its collapse, Erna stood a chance of being released.
In a December 1989 letter seeking a review of her case, Erna wrote to West German attorneys about the unlawful interrogations of the Stasi and presented yet another version of what had happened in her time at Grzenda. No, she had not killed Jews, but she had taken regular trips to Lviv, where she went to pick up supplies. As part of her errands, she visited the Janowska camp to select Jewish laborers and brought them back to Grzenda. She remembered having Jewish female household help, but she did not know what had happened to them. (In her statements of 1961, she had described these Jewish women as troublemakers. ) Insisting that she was innocent, Erna wrote, “I sacrificed myself for my husband, the man my parents warned me about.” Horst was justifiably punished, she said. His execution was warranted because he did kill Jews.
In the next few months and years, German jurists, mostly from the former West German system, would begin to review Erna’s case and others to determine their judicial integrity. Some East German political prisoners were released; others enjoyed reduced sentences. Families of deceased prisoners sought compensation and the rehabilitation of their family names. Erna’s children lobbied for the release of their mother, who was among the few female prisoners serving a life sentence for Nazi war crimes. They wrote pleas to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, U.S. President George Bush, and Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. They petitioned members of the German parliament. Their mother, they argued, was an innocent victim of Stasi methods of interrogation and torture
. Her confessions had been extracted under duress. Hadn’t she suffered enough for twenty-five years in the terror chambers of the medieval Hoheneck fortress, separated from her family and grieving the loss of her husband, guillotined by the East German state in 1962? The children’s pleas mentioned nothing of their mother’s wartime past in Nazi-occupied Poland. Nonetheless, the jurists decided to uphold the East German court’s life sentence.
Erna Petri, although not rehabilitated or pardoned, was eventually released from prison. She came home in 1992, for health reasons. One account claims that an underground SS organization, Stille Hilfe (Silent Aid), made a successful case to the district court in Stollberg, the location of the prison, to release Petri. Silent Aid may have paid for Petri’s apartment when she was released, and may also have been responsible for her being invited to Bavaria, where she enjoyed the Alpine mountains and lakes with Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler and a prominent member of Silent Aid. Erna died in July 2000; she had celebrated her eightieth birthday a few months earlier. Two hundred people—everyone in the village and a number of others whom the family did not know—came to her funeral. Many people sent flowers and condolence cards anonymously.
If Petri had resided in West Germany, where conviction rates of Nazi war criminals were low by comparison, she would probably not have been tried; and if she had been tried, she would probably not have received a life sentence. She would most likely have slipped back into society and gone unnoticed, an ordinary Hausfrau. A detailed confession of her crimes in Poland would not have been documented. There would be no trace of her misdeeds, or of her victims. In Erna’s own pleas to the court, she blamed her husband for her wartime cruelties. It is true that Erna’s marriage transformed her from an ordinary German farm girl into the Missus of the Grzenda plantation, but Horst was not the sole reason why Erna became a murderer.
Explaining the causes of women’s genocidal behavior is as difficult as trying to pin down the motivations of their male counterparts, and, given the gender bias then and now, arguably more complicated. The images of Nazi propagandists continue to resonate and distort. Goebbels’s films presented German women as hysterical supporters of the regime, driven by their irrational emotions, not their individual ambitions. Such portraits of wild fanaticism distort the political convictions and “correct” composure of most German women. Goebbels famously remarked that “men organize life: women are their support and implement their decisions.” Nazi Germany was a participatory dictatorship in which women fully contributed, and our standard for measuring this contribution should not be defined exclusively by power as we know it in a “man’s world” of political office and social standing. Rather, understanding the roles and behavior of women who were agents of a criminal regime should begin by identifying who they were, what they did, and whether they were held accountable for their actions.
Even though mass murderers created false narratives about their experiences, these narratives tell us something. Erna Petri’s husband wrote in his last letter to his wife and family on the eve of his execution that he was a victim of the East German system, which had betrayed him, the honest, hard-working farmer-socialist. Erna Petri, on the other hand, claimed that she was a victim of Nazi propaganda and had acted under the pressure of men who surrounded her, including her husband. “Euthanasia” nurses presented themselves as upstanding medical professionals who heeded the authority of the doctors, fulfilled their duties, and ultimately suffered for doing their job. These explanations are similar to countless written pleas submitted to the courts by the wives of Nazi perpetrators, in which they stressed their own struggles as single mothers who were subjected to a victor’s justice, or to the revenge of the Jews. The persistence of anti-Semitism is also not to be underestimated. According to the research of the historian Katrin Himmler, some female perpetrators and their descendants who fumed about the meddling prosecutors and the victors’ justice saw “the new enemy as the old enemy: world Jewry.” The German victimization narratives of World War I, which incited the Nazi movement and anti-Semitism of the Holocaust, continued in postwar defenses of male and female perpetrators.
The female biographies studied here are based largely on postwar investigations and trials. But very few women were prosecuted after the war; even fewer were judged and convicted. Witness testimony of survivors, often the only available evidence, was not considered strong enough, and many of the female defendants, especially those who appeared matronly and meek, did not seem capable of committing such atrocities. The physical appearance of the women and gender stereotypes held by the mostly male investigators and judges usually worked in favor of the female perpetrators, whose acts were in some instances as criminal as their male counterparts. The fact that thousands of women worked in agencies such as the SS, which was declared a criminal organization, was also not taken seriously. The enormous amount of material booty that German women in the East either took themselves while stationed there or received from husbands, like Gertrude Segel’s gold necklace, was also not the subject of investigations against women—this in spite of the fact that many personal possessions of persecuted and murdered Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians ended up in German households, the primary domain of women.
Furthermore, the relatively few women who were tried after the war were featured in sensationalistic press coverage, portrayed as beasts, sadists, and seductresses. Much of this coverage perpetuated pornographic images of Nazi women that distorted their violent behavior as a form of sexual deviance. As the historian Claudia Koonz has observed, we live in a culture that has “sensationalized Nazism by locating evil in eroticized women.” The multitude of roles and professions and the range of German female perpetration were not grasped at the time. Generalizations about female innocence prevailed.
Criminal police and prosecutors had specific goals—to establish the occurrence of the crime, to identify and apprehend the suspect, to collect testimony and evidence, to indict and secure a conviction, to put a law-breaking threat to society behind bars. The entire postwar history of female perpetrators was as much political as it was judicial. The contexts in which the investigation occurred—immediate postwar Austria, 1960s East Germany, or 1970s West Germany—mattered a great deal, and could determine who was investigated, what testimony and evidence could be collected and was deemed credible, what crimes could be prosecuted, and whether judges would issue mild or stiff sentences. German women were caught up in this tangled web of international and national justice. What happened to them? The short answer is that most got away with murder.
Epilogue
After reading thousands of pages of wartime documents, court records, and testimonies, I decided to visit a wartime crime scene. The archival record of Erna Petri’s trial contained sketches and photographs of the Grzenda plantation in western Ukraine. Names and addresses of Ukrainian and Polish peasants who gave testimony concerning Petri’s crimes were listed. I copied the material, thinking it might be useful. This would not be my first trip to Ukraine. Years before, I had traveled through the part of Ukraine where Petri’s wartime house was located, and spent some time in Lviv, but I had not seen the landscape with the history of the Holocaust in mind. At that time, the city and its surrounding villages still looked like architectural conglomerations of bygone eras—drab Soviet socialist-realist edifices, crumbled Jewish synagogues and cemeteries, glimmers of Austro-Hungarian fin-de-siècle ornamentation, sturdy foundations of ancien régime Polish rule. But when I returned to research the Holocaust, there were new billboards in yellow and blue proclaiming a vibrant Ukrainian nation. Scarved Ukrainian babushkas with tanned, deeply wrinkled faces sat at roadsides with plastic buckets of apples for sale—and now some of these peasant women could be seen talking on cell phones.
I was not sure what I would find at Grzenda. I did not know if the place actually still existed, or what I would do once I got there. I persuaded two colleagues to join me; one spoke fluent Ukrainian, the other one Polish. We found the location
on a local map, a short taxi trip from Lviv heading north. Our car’s path paralleled the same railway lines that had taken hundreds of thousands of Polish and Ukrainian Jews to the gassing facilities of Belzec and Sobibor. We turned down the same road that Erna Petri took that fateful day when she spotted the Jewish boys who had fled from the boxcar. We entered the long driveway leading to the manor, which had changed from a stately home to a decrepit structure overgrown with weeds. The porch was two pillars with a sagging middle, precariously standing on cinderblocks. Given what I knew, the place felt haunted, but to the poor, elderly Ukrainians who eked out an existence there, it was home. The gilded ironwork on the terrace where Petri had served cake and coffee was rusted and flaking like brittle bones crumbling at the joints. Clean laundry had been hung there to dry. The women living at Grzenda immediately appeared when they saw us, strangers in city clothes with cameras, stepping out of a taxi.
Stalin completed the demographic engineering that Hitler started in Ukraine, and these women were the result. The Polish minority had been moved out of the region, and Ukrainians from Poland relocated there. Chronic housing shortages in the Soviet Union transformed historic manors such as this one into public housing for multiple families. The peasants we spoke with knew nothing of the wartime events in the home. Ironically, Soviet postwar population exchanges accomplished what Hitler’s henchmen had desired: a displacement of local memory.
