Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  4. Accomplices

  [>] few published or publicly spoke: Joanne Sayner, Women without a Past? German Autobiographical Writings and Fascism (Rodopi, 2007), p. 2. Thanks to Marion Deshmukh for this source.

  [>] encourages women to tell war stories: See Rosemarie Killius, ed., Frauen für die Front: Gespräche mit Wehrmachtshelferinnen (Militzke Verlag, 2003); and Margarete Dörr, “Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat . . .”: Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und in den Jahren danach, vol. 2, Kriegsalltag (Campus Verlag, 1998).

  [>] hardships . . . on the home front: These accounts focus on the everyday household challenges of securing food, fuel, soap, and clothing, on cooking, on bombing raids, and on homelessness. See Kathrin Kompisch, Täterinnen: Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau, 2008), p. 85; Nicole Ann Dombrowski, “Soldiers, Saints, or Sacrificial Lambs? Women’s Relationship to Combat and the Fortification of the Home Front in the Twentieth Century,” in Nicole Ann Dombrowski, ed., Women and War in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2004), pp. 2–3; and Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (Basic, 2000), especially chap. 10, “Women Go to War.”

  [>] As Hitler’s empire expanded: Women filled positions left vacant by men in 1944–45. In Vienna the Gestapo office had 180 female administrators, and in Berlin there were 600 women out of 1,500 associates. See Kompisch, Täterinnen, p. 85.

  [>] access to higher education: Many secondary schools were converted into military quarters and hospitals, but with young men on the front, women returned to the universities in greater numbers. Female enrollment skyrocketed, reaching more than fifty percent of the student body at the University of Frankfurt in 1943. A wartime hit comedy film, Unser Fräulein Doktor (1940), featured a wily, intelligent, university-educated woman who supplanted her lover, a medical doctor, in a twist of roles that emboldened women, not mocked them. See Christoph Dorner et al., Die Braune Machtergreifung: Universität Frankfurt, 1930–1945 (Nexus/Druckladen, 1989), p. 96; and Dörr, “Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat . . . ,” p. 125.

  [>] Women secretaries, file clerks: The number of Reich Germans employed in the commissariat offices varied, but in the office in Lida, for example, there were eighty-six. In Baranowitsche’s district office in September 1941 there were six German men on staff; by January 20, 1943, there were nineteen men and seven women (and from the local population ninety-five men and sixty-six women); on June 24, 1944, there were twenty-six men and ten women, plus four men in the German court with two female assistants, and three women (including two nurses) in the National Socialist Welfare Association. The Gebietskommissar for this district, Werner, brought his wife and four children to live with him in November 1942. See NARA, RG 242, T454, roll 102, Report by Gebietskommissar Hennig, Lida, 15 Aug. 1944; and Situation and Activity Report of Gebietskommissar Werner, Baranowitsche, 11 Aug. 1944.

  [>] “yellowhammers”: Goldammern are described in Erika Summ’s memoir, Schäfers Tochter: Die Geschichte der Frontschwester (Zeitgut Verlag, 2006), p. 130.

  [>] office work in the East: The commissar who would succeed Hermann Hanweg in Lida complained in the summer of 1944 that many women went east not to serve the Reich but to serve themselves. He contrasted the women there with those at home who had to clean and do their own laundry. Those in the East behaved like prima donnas with domestic servants and private dressing rooms. (He was referring here to the officials’ female secretaries and wives.) Gebietskommissar Kennig, report of 15 Aug. 1944, NARA, RG 242, T454, roll 102, frame 000162.

  [>] a sinecure in the empire: Hanweg wanted to retain laborers for his building projects, to fulfill his imperial fantasies and personal demands. He was not as brutish as his deputy Windisch, but he also did not object to or impede the mass-murder operations. Hanweg interacted closely with “his” Jewish laborers with some decency and appreciation for their work. For his relative leniency, Hanweg had to answer to complaints against him lodged by Windisch and the SS and police. NARA, RG 242, roll 21, frames 000580 and 000587, report of 29 Dec. 1942, Wilhelm Kube to Personnel Advisor to Rosenberg, and response to Kube, 15 Jan. 1943.

  [>] Hanweg’s duty to make the region: In their testimony to the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich in 1947, most survivors named Hanweg’s deputy, Windisch, as the worst perpetrator in the Lida administration. Hanweg was identified as having been present at selections as well, but it was Windisch who took every opportunity to beat, shoot, and humiliate Jews. Record Group M.21, War Criminals’ Section, Legal Department at the Central Committee of Liberated Jews, File 184, 28 pp., YVA. I am grateful to Waitman Beorn for sharing archival references to Lida and Slonim testimonies.

  [>] “Vice-Mama”: Statement of Eberhard Hanweg, 15 Oct. 1964, BAL, 162/3433. Hanweg testified in 1964 that he arrived in Lida with Meier in the spring of 1942, and shortly thereafter the massacre occurred. On the Nazi occupation of Lida, see Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungskriegpolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburger Edition, 1999); Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weissrussland, 1941–1944 (Droste Verlag, 1998); and statement of Joachim L. (former 727th Infantry Regiment, in Lida), 7 May 1965, BAL, B162/3440.

  [>] Today the commissar’s ring: Hanweg interview with author, 20 Sept. 2010, Langgoens, Germany; and see Sefer Lida, Lida Memorial Book, ed. Alexander Manor, Itzchak Ganusovitch, and Aba Lando (Tel Aviv, 1970), p. 294. A similar case is documented in Buczacz, Ukraine. The Landkommissar brought his wife and three children. One son received a carved toy horse from a Jewish laborer, to the disapproval of the SS commander Otto Waechter, who asked him where he got the nice toy. B 162/1673, testimony of Henriette Bau, former wife of Richard Lissberg, 23 Apr. 1969. Thanks to Omer Bartov for sharing this source.

  [>] critical reports and investigations: See the Schenk Bericht on the behavior of Reich Germans in the occupied territories (Galicia) of May 1943, located in ITS. This particular report was an attempt by the SS police to expose and weaken rivals in the civil administration, such as mayors, district officials, and local developers. Such a power struggle may have led to exaggerated accounts of misconduct, but at the very least the report documents trends of corruption related to the Holocaust and the collusion of German women in the East. On the availability of foodstuffs in the East being shipped back to Reich, see letters intercepted by the Abwehr about shipments in March and April 1943, and the Wehrmacht’s critique of the black market and plundering, in ZSA, P1151-1-1, P1151-1-21. See also Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (Picador, 2008); and Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford University Press, 2012), especially p. 269 (on Greiser’s castle at Mariensee) and p. 276 (on his wine collection, valued at $300,000).

  [>] Operation (Aktion) Reinhardt: See Peter Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 1–99; also by Peter Black, “Odilo Globocnik—Himmler’s Vorposten im Osten,” in Ronald Smelser et al., eds., Die Braune Elite (Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 1993); and Dieter Pohl, “Die Stellung des Distrikts Lublin in der ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage,’” in Bogdan Musial, ed., “Aktion Reinhard”: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941–1944 (Fibre Verlag, 2004).

  [>] secretaries “cheerfully” prepared lists: Runhof statement to Wiesbaden court, 15 Sept. 1961, presented in Berndt Rieger, Creator of Nazi Death Camps: The Life of Odilo Globocnik (Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), pp. 72, 82. Hillmann was “relieved” of her duties in Lublin, owing to a health issue and rumors of having Jewish ancestry. See Joseph Poprzeczny, Odilo Globocnik, Hitler’s Man in the East (McFarland, 2004).

  [>] top managers, such as Globocnik: By the end of the summer of 1943, however, Globocnik fell out of favor with the Reichsführer because of his excessive behavior. See Bogdan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwalt
ung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement (Harrossowitz Verlag, 1999), pp. 201–8. See also David Silberklang, “Only the Gates of Tears Were Not Locked: The Holocaust in the Lublin District of Poland” (forthcoming); and Peter R. Black, “Rehearsal for ‘Reinhard’? Odilo Globocnik and the Lublin Selbstschutz,” Central European History 25, no. 2 (1992): 204–26.

  [>] One day when Hanweg’s son: The ghetto workshops were liquidated on September 18, 1943. Remaining Jewish laborers were deported to the gassing facility of Sobibor and the Majdanek camp. Hanweg’s son, who was gone from Lida before September 1943, must have recollected an earlier massacre. See statement of Eberhard Hanweg, 15 Oct. 1964, BAL, 162/3433, and in interview with author, 31 July 2010.

  [>] first and largest massacre: During the first two weeks of May 1942, especially May 5–12, several massacres occurred in the Lida region (Radun, Woronowo, Szczuczyn) in which more than twenty thousand Jews were shot. See survivor testimony (Churban Wilno), German report of the General Commissar Weissruthenian (month illegible, but not earlier than 29 July 1942) on “Partisan Warfare and Jewish Actions,” excerpts of the Soviet investigation, and grave exhumations of September 1947 in ITS, Doc No. 82176805 #1 (1.2.7.6/0007/1383/0233, Archivnummer 3090). In 1962 testimony, the survivor Sioma Pupko refers to Hanweg and Meier as “Hanenberg along with his girlfriend Merkel, a sadistic person.” Quoted in Sefer Lida, Lida Memorial Book, translated at http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/lida/lid307.html#Page311. The massacre on May 8 was carried out by former members of Einsatzkommando 9 (based in the SD office in Baranowitsche) and native auxiliaries. Also see The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2009), vol. 1, Lida, pp. 396–97. The local auxiliaries might have been Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian, or Latvian; the testimony on nationality is inconsistent. See Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006), pp. 885–86. Three hundred Jews survived the war in Lida. Many who escaped to the forests joined the Bielski partisans, a resistance force recently featured in the film Defiance, which is based on the work of Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford, 1994).

  [>] “better informed . . .”: Statement of Johanna Luise Zietlow, 9 Oct. 1964, BAL, 162/3433.

  [>] A certified bookkeeper: Liselotte Meier Lerm, statement of 19 Sept. 1963, BAL, 162/3425, and statement of 5 Sept. 1966, BAL, 162/3450. Lerm explained in the statement of 19 Sept. 1963 that the last time she saw Altmann was in the fall of 1943, when the ghetto was liquidated. Hanweg’s son remembered Tenenbaum, who is also mentioned in Lerm’s testimony.

  [>] “Commissariat officials . . .”: Sefer Lida, Lida Memorial Book, p. 294. The female exploitation of Jewish laborers for personal items was investigated by the Sipo SD Lettland, in a case concerning a local leather factory where several women were connected with the Gebietskommissariat Schaulen. KdS Lettland, Ermittlungsverfarhen, betr: Lederwerk in Schaulen, 10 Jan. 1943, NARA, RG 242, T454, roll 15.

  [>] constructing a swimming pool: Liselotte Meier Lerm, statements of 19 Sept. 1963, 6 Oct. 1964, and 6 Sept. 1966, BAL, 162/3425. Thanks to Waitman Beorn for bringing Lerm to my attention.

  [>] “eastern rush”: Ostrausch, “intoxication with the East,” as a spatial-colonial high rather than a sexual one, is treated in Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (Yale University Press, 2003), p. 125.

  [>] sex and violence: Non-German women who were raped were often killed by German men who wished to conceal the crime of racial mixing. Testimony of Erna Leonhard, 14 Dec. 1960, BAL, 162/1682. Testimony of Frau Ingeborg Gruber (b. 1922), Mannheim, 11 Oct. 1960, BAK, 9 Js 716/59. Grihory Denisenko, ZSA, interview by author, 11 Aug. 1993, Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Also see Abschlussbericht, Becker Case, BAL, 204 AR-Z 129/67, 1023; and Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the intertwining of male brain circuits that control sexual and violent behavior, see Scientific American, “Sex and Violence Linked in the Brain,” February 2011. The co-occurrence of raping and killing of Jewish women by German men has been documented, but how widespread this phenomenon was is unclear because the Nazi authorities prosecuted Germans for racial mixing, and Jewish victims and witnesses were mostly killed. To protect privacy and honor, Jewish female survivors were reluctant to speak about this type of assault. A Jewish survivor who lived in Vienna, Julie Sebek, was questioned in several cases about crimes in Minsk. She had been sent in May 1942 to Minsk and Trostenets. She mentioned incidents of Jewish women who were raped and then killed (20 Mar. 1962, BAK, Sta, 9 Js 716/59). See Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Brandeis University Press, 2010); and John Roth and Carole Rittner, eds., Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide (Paragon, 2012).

  [>] He gave Meier special access: Liselotte Meier Lerm, statement of 6 Sept. 1966, BAL, 162/3450. The personal secretary of Arthur Greiser, Elsa Claassen, was the only one besides Greiser who had special access to the safe where top-secret Reich orders and correspondence were kept. See Epstein, Model Nazi, p. 142.

  [>] commissar and his staff had the authority: “Die Zivilverwaltung in den besetzten Ostgebieten, Teil II: Reichskommissariat Ukraine” (Brown File), Osobyi Moscow 7021-148-183.

  [>] “had not finished knitting . . .”: Frau Emilie Horst, another secretary at the local sawmill, statement of 10 May 1961, BAL, 162/5088.

  [>] “On one Sunday . . .”: Quoted in the chapter “Life in the Lida Ghetto,” p. 289, by D. S. Amarant, translated by Don Goldman, in Sefer Lida, Lida Memorial Book, http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/lida/lida.html. The incident is also described by Elise Barzach (b. 1913), Interview 1995, Sydney, Australia (interviewer Anna Friedlander), SFA. Likewise, the district captain in Tarnopol and Rawa Ruska, Gerhard Hager, was described as a corrupt philanderer in a critical SS report (in large part a smear campaign against rivals in the civilian government), who took his ladies on boar hunts and showered them with gifts that were stolen Jewish belongings. See Schenk Bericht on corruption in 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 the photo album and testimonies on Lida massacres, LAS, Bestand J76, Nr. 569.

  [>] “Trees saved us”: Elise Barzach, Interview 1995, Sydney, Australia (interviewer Anna Friedlander), Title 4, SFA. Barzach also described the mistress of one of Hanweg’s deputies, who was present when the deputy, named Werner, killed Jews. Thanks to staff of the USHMM for providing a copy of this interview.

  [>] Lida’s Jews would reappear: Liselotte Meier Lerm, statement of 6 Sept. 1966, BAL, 162/3450. The Germans in town (Meier, Hanweg, Windisch, Werner) were with other German visitors when they came upon the shoveling Jews. See interrogation of Meier, 19 Sept. 1963, BAL, 162/3425.

  [>] Historians of the Holocaust: Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Interview with former prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, Benjamin Ferencz and his wife, Gertrude Ferencz, conducted with author, Nicole Dombrowski, and Linda Bishai. New Rochelle, N.Y., 15 Oct. 2005.

  [>] at least thirteen: Gudrun Schwarz, “Verdrängte Täterinnen: Frauen im Apparat der SS, 1939–1945,” in Theresa Wobbe, ed., Nach Osten: Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (Verlag Neue Kritik, 1992), p. 207. For years after the war, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller’s secretary Barbara Hellmuth was questioned by West German and American authorities hunting for Mueller. Hellmuth appears in the recently declassified CIA name files: http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-mueller.html. Mueller’s mistress Anna Schmid was also questioned. See Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Tim Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 150. The wife of Wily Suchanek, SS adjutant of Himmler, who herself served as Himmler’s secre
tary, was pursued after the war as a witness. See Simon Wiesenthal correspondence regarding investigation of SS Officer Horst Bender, 2 Jan. 1975, SWA.

  [>] thousands of pages of such reports: On the reports, see Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992).

  [>] Himmler realized: Himmler speech at Poznań, 4 Oct. 1943, full text with appeal for SS female auxiliaries, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/himmler-heinrich/posen/oct-04-43/. The SS school for women was intended for those who experienced “an awakening of their sense of honor.” By the end of the war, about three thousand women, one-quarter of the applicants, were accepted into auxiliary and command positions. See SS Obersturmbannführer, Commander of the SS Helferinnenschule, Dr. Mutschler, on applicant Dorothea Seebeck (b. 1925), Prüfung, Dienstleist- ungszeugnis, and Verhandlung, 19 Feb. 1945, NARA, RG 242, BDC, Misc. recs., DRK personnel files, A 3345-SF B021, 130, 156. For more on the training and assignments of the graduates, see Jutta Mühlenberg, Das SS Helferinnenkorps: Ausbildung, Einsatz und Entnazifizie-rung der weiblichen Angehörigen der Waffen-SS 1942–1949 (Hamburger Edition, 2011), p. 264.

  [>] “women’s camp must be . . .”: Langefeld complained about the encroachments of SS men Aumeier and Mulka. Himmler sided with her. See Peter Witte et al., eds., Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (Christians Verlag, 1999), entry of 18 July 1942, p. 483; and the biography of Langefeld by Irmtraud Heike, “Johannes Langefeld: Die Biographie einer KZ-Oberaufseherin,” in Werkstatt Geschichte 12 (1995): 7–19.

  “In the hallway . . .”: Quoted in Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (Yale University Press, 2010), p. 149.

  [>] “hold down the fort” and “Look, here is a drop . . .”: Helene Dowlad, Euskirchen, 21 Apr. 1966, BAL, B162/2110, fol. 1, copy provided by Marie Moutier, Yahad in Unum. Also see testimony of Maria Koschinska Sprenger, 20 Apr. 1966, BAL, 162/3446. On the Holocaust in Tarnopol, from the perspective of a Jewish woman who was murdered there in 1943, see “Briefe einer unbekannten Jüdin an ihre Familie (geschrieben kurz vor ihrer Hinrichtung, 1943),” Tarnopol, 7 Apr. and 26 Apr. 1943, ed. Kerrin Gräfin von Schwerin, Frauen im Krieg: Briefe, Dokumente, Aufzeichnungen (Nicolai Verlag, 1999), pp. 127–30. There was a similar piece of testimony from a German secretary in Minsk confronted by a shooter after an action with a finger in a splint, explaining a mass shooting in Maly Trostenets in 1943. The SS first lieutenant also invited the secretary to the execution site, since he thought that she might like to pick through the clothing. Testimony of Frau Ingeborg Gruber (b. 1922), Mannheim, 11 Oct. 1960, BAK, Js 716/59.