Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  [>] women set up refreshment tables: In one especially revealing piece of testimony, an ethnic German cook from Lida told of having been put in charge of feeding the local policemen. One day the German gendarme captain asked her to quickly prepare meals for one hundred people who would be arriving in town the next day for a special action. In the early morning hours, she fed them, and they departed into the darkness; a few hours later, the gunfire started. Working in shifts, the executioners, whom she described as German SS officers and greenish-gray-uniformed Lithuanian auxiliaries, came back to eat periodically. This went on past midnight and into the next day. Local auxiliaries told her the horrific details of the execution site, including the throwing of babies into the air and the burying of those who were still alive. She recalled the beating of a Jewish woman on the street outside the gendarme office and other Jews who had worked in their office and were hunted down by the SS executioners and their auxiliaries. Maria Koschinska Sprenger, 20 Apr. 1966, BAL, 162/3446.

  [>] Gertrud Scholtz-Klink: Scholtz-Klink led the Nazi Women’s League and a host of other organizations. As the “Frau of the Volk,” she called for a new age of womanhood that was anti-feminist. To this end, she produced eleven children and married three times. She preached a life of purity, thrift, and discipline, but she lived a life of debauchery and infidelity. According to Claudia Koonz, who researched and interviewed her, Scholtz-Klink was ambitious but weak. See Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 6. Also see Scholtz-Klink’s self-serving account, Die Frau im Dritten Reich (Grabert, 1978).

  [>] in the killing fields: My choice of the term killing fields is deliberate. Though the Khmer Rouge terror came much later—three decades after World War II—this case of genocide drew popular attention to the historically more common non-industrialized methods of mass murder and to the role of Khmer women as revolutionaries and killers. See Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 3d ed. (Yale University Press, 2008). As an example of the view that the two were quite different, the German case being thought to involve just a few thousand camp guards as compared with the widespread participation of women in the Khmer Rouge, see Roger W. Smith, “Perpetrators,” in Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (Macmillan, 2004). did not speak openly: Ursula Mahlendorf, The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood (Penn State University Press, 2009).

  [>] There were ample rations: On excessive female plundering, see the report (Schenk Bericht) of the Commander of the Security Police and Security Service for District Galicia, Verhalten der Reichsdeutschen in den besetzten Gebieten, 14 May 1943. The full report is at ITS; several pages are missing from the copy in BAK, R58/1002. See also Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  [>] This sympathetic image: Margarete Dörr, “Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat . . .”: Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und in den Jahren danach, vol. 2, Kriegsalltag (Campus Verlag, 1998), p. 109. Women’s accounts of the rubble have contributed to this narrative of victimization; see Antonia Meiners, ed., Wir haben wieder aufgebaut: Frauen der Stunde null erzählen (Sandmann, 2011).

  [>] “endowed with innocence . . .”: Ann Taylor Allen, “The Holocaust and the Modernization of Gender: A Historiographical Essay,” Central European History 30 (1997): 349–64 (see p. 351). Only in passing are women analyzed in Gerhard Paul, ed., Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Wallstein Verlag, 2002).

  [>] agency of women in the crimes: In Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography (Berghahn, 2007), see Karen Hagemann, “Military, War, and the Mainstreams: Gendering Modern German Military History,” especially pp. 70–75, and the excellent review of the literature by Claudia Koonz, “A Tributary and a Mainstream: Gender, Public Memory, and Historiography of Nazi Germany,” pp. 147–68.

  [>] regime’s genocidal machinery: Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (HarperCollins, 1992), p. 53.

  [>] a female chief detective: She was the only section head in the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA). There were seventy-one female senior officers in the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), working in sixty-one offices in May 1943. See Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 177–78, 482 n. 35.

  [>] There are significant differences: See Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Praeger, 1998); Christopher Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Harald Welzer, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Fischer Verlag, 2002); and Dörr, “Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat . . .”

  1. The Lost Generation of German Women

  [>] The men and women who established: See Ernest M. Doblin and Claire Pohly, “The Social Composition of the Nazi Leadership,” American Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (1945): 42–49; Michael Mann, “Were the Perpetrators of Genocide ‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Real Nazis’? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographies,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14 (Winter 2000): 331–66; and Daniel Brown, The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System (Schiffer, 2002), especially John Roth’s foreword, pp. 6–7.

  [>] One historian: Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

  [>] baby boomers of World War I: Between 1914 and 1964, the greatest number of births occurred in the years 1920–1922. The birthrate plummeted during World War I to 14.3 per 1,000 people in 1918, then spiked in 1920 to 25.8, only to decline again with the depression in 1930 to 17.5. This demographic trend, though common in Europe, was extreme in Germany, and was one of the main causes of the anti-feminist backlash that tried to drive women back into the home and controlled contraception and abortions while elevating the social status of mothers. See Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 108, 272–82. The largest number of marriages in Germany between 1908 and 1964 occurred in 1919–1920. See Elizabeth D. Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (University of California Press, 1999), Appendix A.

  [>] The Weimar Republic saw an explosion: For example, the German National People’s Party, the Christian Socialist People’s Party, the German People’s Party, the Christian National Farmer’s and Rural Folk’s Party, and the Bavarian People’s Party. See Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, eds., Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 1992); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); and Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Howard Fertig, 1997).

  [>] Feminism lacked: Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Berg, 1989).

  [>] housewife wearing a spotless apron: See Nancy R. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 61–69, 97–101; and Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Monthly Review Press, 1984), p. xiii.

  [>] extreme turn to the right: Eva Schöck-Quinteros and Christiane Streubel, eds., “Ihrem Volk verantwortlich”: Frauen der politischen Rechten (1890–1933); Organisationen—Agitationen—Ideologien (Trafo Verlag, 2007).

  [>] “Women could not remain . . .”: Erna Günther, “Wir Frauen im Kampf um Deutschlands Erneuerung,” NS-Frauen-Wart
e 2, no. 17 (25 Feb. 1934): 507. German Propaganda Archive, http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/fw2-17.htm.

  [>] women cannot be blamed: Women were not a majority of those who voted for Hitler, even at the peak of the Party’s popularity in 1932. In the presidential election of March 1932, 51.6 percent of female voters voted for Hindenburg while 26.5 percent went for Hitler. In the 1931 September elections, 3 million women voted for NSDAP candidates, almost half of the total of 6.5 million votes cast for the NSDAP. Most women cast their ballots for the conservative nationalist parties. See Richard Evans, “German Women and the Triumph of Hitler,” Journal of Modern History 48 (March 1976): 156–57. Regional variations were significant, however, and religion mattered—for example, those in the Catholic Center Party (Amalie Lauer) and leftists in the SPD and the Communist Party (Clara Zetkin) opposed Hitler’s fascism. Among the more liberal conservative female leaders who warned women against the Nazi Party was the jurist Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt, in “Was hat die deutsche Frau vom Nationalsozialismus zu erwarten?” originally published in 1932 in Berlin, excerpted in Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus, vol. 1 (Schwann, 1982), pp. 80–83. See also Michael Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders (Harvard University Press, 1983); and Raffael Scheck, “Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of Female Politicians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 4 (2001): 547–60.

  [>] As soon as Hitler was in office: This history began in 1933 with the dissolution of the largest women’s organization, the Association of German Women (BdF). As traditional women’s groups and professions were taken over by Nazi fanatics, Jewish women were forced out. See Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, When Biology Became Destiny, pp. 21–22.

  [>] were among the persecuted: Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, When Biology Became Destiny, pp. 298, 300, 305. There were about 150,000 communists in Nazi concentration camps between 1933 and 1939, and 30,000 were executed. Female prisoners were later transferred to Lichtenburg and then Ravensbrück. Among those in the earliest camps at Gotteszell and then Lichtenburg was the communist Lina Haag.

  [>] “very quietly and carefully”: Lina Haag’s 1947 memoir, Eine Hand voll Staub— Widerstand einer Frau 1933 bis 1945 (Fischer Verlag), 1995, pp. 10, 53.

  [>] “When you leave . . .”: Barbara Distel, “In the Shadow of Heroes: Struggle and Survival of Centa Beimler-Herka and Lina Haag,” in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, eds., Dachau Review: History of Nazi Concentration Camps; Studies, Reports, Documents, vol. 1 (Berg, 1988), p. 201; see also author interview with Lina Haag and Dr. Boris Neusius, 9 Feb. 2012, Munich (interview is available in USHMMA).

  [>] The increase in female prisoners: Reports on camp personnel from January 1945, listing 3,508 female guards, cited by Karin Orth, “The Concentration Camp Personnel,” in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds., Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (Routledge, 2010), p. 45. The total number of women who served in the prison system (not camps) is not known. For portraits of female guards, see Luise Rinser, Gefängnistagebuch (1944–1945), excerpted in Kerrin Gräfin Schwerin, ed., Frauen im Krieg: Briefe, Dokumente, Aufzeichnungen (Nicolai Verlag, 1999), pp. 117–24. On Stutthof, where there were 30,000 prisoners, see Rita Malcher, “Das Konzentrationslager Stutthof,” in Theresa Wobbe, ed., Nach Osten: Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (Verlag Neue Kritik, 1992), pp. 161–74. See also Elissa Mailänder Koslov, Gewalt im Dienstalltag: Die SS-Aufseherinnen des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Majdanek, 1942–1944 (Hamburg Institute for Social Research, 2009); Brown, The Camp Women; and Jürgen Matthäus, ed., Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations (Oxford University Press, 2009).

  [>] Female guards at Camp Neuengamme: See Marc Buggeln, Arbeit und Gewalt: Das Aussenlagersystem des KZ Neuengamme (Wallstein Verlag, 2009). In January 1945 there were 322 female guards at Neuengamme.

  [>] when one’s neighbors: On the self-policing in German society, see Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1991).

  [>] “What man offers in heroism . . .”: Speech excerpted in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kunz, eds., Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (D. C. Heath, 1992), pp. 262–63.

  [>] “since it draws the woman . . .”: Hitler quoted in George L. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), p. 39.

  [>] “Hence all possibilities . . .”: Rosenberg quoted in Mosse, Nazi Culture, p. 40.

  [>] In the Reich’s battle for births: See Gisela Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders,” in Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 1999). See also the racial guidelines for conception, pregnancy, birthing and midwifery in a standard manual of the day (republished in the immediate postwar period) by Frau Dr. Johanna Haarer, Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind (J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1938). All female marriage candidates had to undergo invasive medical examinations and were evaluated for so-called hereditary diseases that included, prostitution, gambling, and vagrancy. See “Richtlinien für die ärztliche Untersuchung der Ehestandsbewerber vom 3.1.1939,” excerpted in Kuhn and Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus, vol. 1, p. 95; and “Die geschichtliche Entwicklung der deutschen Schwesternschaften,” in Lehrbuch für Säuglings- und Kinderschwestern (Stuttgart, 1944), p. 11.

  [>] historian Gisela Bock: Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany,” p. 87.

  [>] “incredibly authoritarian”: Dagmar Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, trans. William Templer (University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 148. See also Michael Kater, Hitler Youth (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 100–103.

  [>] “emancipate women . . .”: Alfred Rosenberg, quoted in Frevert, Women in German History, p. 207. See also Matthew S. Seligmann, John Davison, and John McDonald, Daily Life in Hitler’s Germany (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 75; Kirsten Heinsohn, Barbara Vogel, and Ulrike Weckel, eds., Zwischen Karriere und Verfolgung: Handlungsräume von Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Campus Verlag, 1997), p. 7; and Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany,” p. 93.

  [>] its own female aesthetic: Mosse, Nazi Culture, p. 21; and Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Berg, 2004), pp. 83–85, 92, 106–8.

  [>] act on the ambitious notion: On the appeal of “becoming someone,” Ulrike Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten: Krankenschwestern im Nationalsozialismus (Mabuse Verlag, 2006), pp. 7–8.

  [>] In secondary schools: Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Berg, 2011), pp. 57–58.

  [>] A Mardi Gras parade: Jürgen Matthäus, “Antisemitic Symbolism in Early Nazi Germany, 1933–1935,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 45 (2000): 183–203.

  [>] in the streets and at school: Jews were barred from German public schools in November 1938. Henny Adler, interview 10481; Susi Podgurski, interview 5368; both in SFA. Thanks to Danielle Knott for the interview sources.

  [>] “you can’t fight back”: Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 108.

  [>] historian Richard Evans: Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (Penguin, 2006), pp. 584–86; the estimate of the death toll is on p. 590.

  [>] “the night of broken glass”: Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard University Press, 2009); Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz, eds., Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 38–40.

  [>] “The Jews are the enemy . . .”: Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 587.

  [>] removed from management boards: Evans, The Third Reich in Pow
er, pp. 378–88.

  [>] not necessary for future mothers: On the racial state and women’s role, see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Evans, The Third Reich in Power, pp. 331, 523.

  [>] “In my state the mother . . .”: Quoted in Frevert, Women in German History, p. 207. See also Christina Thürmer-Rohr, “Frauen als Täterinnen und Mittäterinnen im NS-Deutschland,” in Viola Schubert-Lehnhardt and Sylvia Korch, eds., Frauen als Täterinnen und Mittäterinnen im Nationalsozialismus: Gestaltungsspielräume und Handlungsmöglichkeiten (Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2006), p. 22.

  [>] did not yield the results: 1939 was an exception when the marriage rate jumped, but between 1933 and 1945 the overall birthrate was not much higher than in the 1920s, and in the war years (1940–1945) it was significantly lower. See Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Longman, 2001), pp. 24, 31–35; and Frevert, Women in German History, pp. 218–19.

  [>] “everyone had to have a profession . . .”: Reese, quoting an interview subject born in Minden in 1921, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, p. 126.

  [>] it would be inaccurate: Besides working on a farm, one could still choose a particular assignment to fulfill one’s labor duty, and for women this usually meant in “clerical work, auxiliary nursing, social welfare, public transport, [and] munitions work” (Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany, p. 81). Obligatory labor service of single women was expanded under the Four Year Plan, but because these women preferred to work in offices and retail, Goering required them to spend at least one year as household help and in agriculture, where there were labor shortages. See Goering’s decree of 15 Feb. 1938 and Elisabeth Sedlmayr’s Frauenberufe der Gegenwart und ihre Verflechtung in den Volkskörper (Munich, 1939), excerpted in Kuhn and Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus, vol. 1, pp. 125–26.