by Wendy Lower
[>] Drohobych: Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 50–60.
[>] beautiful, fanciful paintings: In recent years the murals were at the center of an international scandal and diplomatic crisis when the Ukrainian government objected to the murals’ removal to Israel, where they are displayed at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum.
[>] had a balcony on their villa: Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite, pp. 201–9.
[>] testimony of a Jewish witness: Chaim Patrich, 3 July 1947 and 6 Sept. 1947, VCA, Polizeidirektion Vienna, People’s Court investigation, Vg 3b Vr 7658/47.
[>] reclined on upholstered chairs: Austrians referred to this chair as a “Canadian,” a modish design in the 1930s. Gertrude Landau, statement of 27 Feb. 1948, VCA, Polizeidirektion Vienna, People’s Court investigation, Vg 3b Vr 7658/47.
[>] working in the garden below: Gertrude Landau, statement of 29 May 1947, VCA, Polizeidirektion Vienna, People’s Court investigation, Vg 3b Vr 7658/47.
[>] started to shoot pigeons: Gertrude Landau, 2 June and 17 June 1947 additions to statement of 29 May 1947, VCA, Polizeidirektion Vienna, People’s Court investigation, Vg 3b Vr 7658/47.
[>] largest was in November 1942: “Jew General” Indictment of Landau, 20 Apr. 1961, 14 Js 3808/58, BAL 162/3380. It was not long after this massacre that Landau’s colleague shot Bruno Schulz on the streets of Drohobych.
[>] “Don’t be such an idiot . . .”: Quoted in Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite, p. 204.
[>] trampled a Jewish child: See the Judgment of the Stuttgart Court from 16 Mar. 1962, published in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 18, pp. 364–65.
[>] “I will help you!”: Statement of Josefine Block, 18 May 1948, VCA, Vg 8514/46. Indictment, 3 March 1949, 15 St 1617/49. In 1946 she had a five-year-old and a three-year-old. Thus in 1942–43, at the time of her killing sprees, she had a toddler and an infant, or was pregnant with the second.
[>] Desperate Jewish laborers: One victim was able to flee. The three who were killed were identified as Vera Zuckermann, Dora Sternbach, and Paula Winkler (witness statements of Katz, Fischer, and Weidemann). On the pleasure Block and her husband both derived from abusing Jews in random encounters, see courtroom testimony of Regina Fritz, 12 Dec. 1946, and statement of Weiss, 19 Feb. 1947, Vg 8514/46, Investigation and Trial of Josefine Block (b. 1910), 19 Nov. 1946, VCA, Polizeidirektion Wien an Staatsanwaltschaft Wien; Stadtarchiv Wien.
[>] witnesses would later state: Statements of Fischer, 3 Oct. 1946, and Katz, VCA, Polizeidirektion Vienna, 21 Sept. 1946, and Katz, 12 Dec. 1946, Vg 8514/46.
[>] could not make any decisions: Statements of Fischer, 16 Dec. 1946, and Dengg, 17 Jan. 1947, VCA, Vg 8514/46.
[>] approached fellow Germans: Heinrich Barth testimony of 2 Mar. 1977, BAL, 76-K 41676-Koe. Wetzle testimony on Westerheide “invitation” to shoot Jews: Karl Wetzle, Statement, Oberhausen, 21 June 1963, BAL, LKA-NW, B162/4522 fol. 1, II, 204 AR-Z 40/1961.
[>] As “packers” . . . as “hemp collectors”: Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (Macmillan, 2008).
[>] Crime scenes included: In Riga, an ethnic German female translator attended one of these “funeral banquets” and recalled people raising their schnapps glasses, toasting to the death of the Jews. A Latvian police chief summoned everyone—“Ladies and gentlemen, now it is time”—and all were led about 150 meters from the banquet hall to a fresh grave that had been dug, about fifteen meters long and two meters wide. Ten Jews stood by the grave, stripped to their underwear; another ten were in the pit moaning. The Latvian ordered his unit to shoot; he also placed a pistol in the hands of one woman and told her to try, aiming for the Jews. Regular German soldiers who were also there did not shoot, and complained that this scene was a mess. They returned to the banquet, which lasted until dawn. Violetta Liber, BAL, B162/8978, interrogation of 16 Feb. 1972, Riga. Thanks to Martin Dean for sharing this source.
6. Why Did They Kill?
[>] One young schoolteacher: Eugenie S. on Chernihiv school, in Rosemarie Killius, ed., Frauen für die Front: Gespräche mit Wehrmachtshelferinnen (Militzke Verlag, 2003), pp. 59–60.
[>] The entire staff: Erika Summ, Schäfers Tochter: Die Geschichte der Frontschwester (Zeitgut Verlag, 2006), p. 144.
[>] “transported away”: Summ, Schäfers Tochter, p. 153.
[>] dead children on the hooks: Summ, Schäfers Tochter, pp. 165–66. Erika Ohr married one of her patients, a German soldier who had lost his legs in the war. After the war, Summ (as she was now called) worked as a nurse in Sindelfingen and Marbach and then had children. Five or six times she met with other nurses from the war at reunions in southern Germany. Summ relied on her faith to cope with what she had witnessed and done during the war. She tended to look forward; until her ninetieth birthday, one of her mottos was “Es muss weitergehen” (Life must go on). She focused on small pleasures and trained herself to suppress bigger fantasies and ambitions. Author telephone interview with Summ’s daughter, 4 Aug. 2011.
[>] “For the last time . . .”: Proclamation of Adolf Hitler, 15 Apr. 1945, published in German newspapers. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, 1936–1945 (W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 793.
[>] women who were raped: Estimates of rapes vary in part because victims were raped repeatedly and because many were killed or committed suicide afterward (ten thousand died in Berlin alone). French troops committed mass rapes in southwestern Germany. There were also cases among American soldiers, and to a lesser degree within the British Army. See Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (Penguin, 2010); Michael Kater, Hitler Youth (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 241; and Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Harvard University Press, 1995). On the mass rapes and discourses of German victimization, see Atina Grossmann, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Soviet Occupation Soldiers,” in Nicole Ann Dombrowski, ed., Women and War in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2004), pp. 162–83; Die deutschen Trümmerfrauen (documentary film), Hans Dieter Grabe (1968); Elizabeth D. Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 354–95; and [Anon.,] A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City (Metropolitan Books, 2005).
[>] life without Hitler: The schoolteacher Frau Ottnad in Reichersbeuern, for instance, committed suicide on May 9, 1945, when the Allies arrived. Author interview with Ottnad’s former student and his wife, Friedrich and Freya K., 11 Apr. 2011, deposited in USHMMA. See also Evans, The Third Reich at War; and Margaret Bourke-White, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s Thousand Years (Literary Licensing, 2012).
[>] would be punished: On early trials and vigilante justice, see Ilya Bourtman, “‘Blood for Blood, Death for Death’: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22 (Fall 2008): 246–65; Gary Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press, 2000); and Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2001).
[>] escaped Soviet custody: Christiane Berger, “Die Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink,” in Marita Krauss, ed., Sie waren dabei: Mitläuferinnen, Nutzniesserinnen, Täterinnen im Nationalsozialismus (Wallstein Verlag, 2008); and Claudia Koonz’s interview with Klink in Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
[>] twenty thousand were arrested: 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. 212.
[>] “I might as well hang myself . . .”: Ilse Schmidt, Die Mitläuferin: Erinnerungen einer Wehrmachtsangehörigen (Aufbau Verlag, 2002), pp. 38, 61, 76–
77.
[>] Erika Ohr was also swept up: Summ, Schäfers Tochter, p. 176.
[>] cruel medical experiments: Dr. Oberheuser had worked her way up through the Nazi Party. She volunteered to serve as a camp doctor at Ravensbrück and received a German War Merit Medal for assisting with gruesome medical experiments (lethal injections, bone transplants, inserting glass and wood splinters into wounds) that killed Polish laborers, among other victims. She told the Nuremberg court that she was always interested in surgical procedures and that it was hardly possible for a woman in Germany to be a surgeon. In the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück she had the opportunity to be a surgeon and to perform experiments on healthy “living objects.” See Paul Weidling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 2000). Original documents from the Doctors’ Trial, including Oberheuser’s testimony (Document NO-487, NO-862), have been digitized and are online in Harvard University’s Law Library, http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu. NO-470. NARA, RG 238.
[>] Inge Viermetz: On the U.S. case against members of the SS organization that carried out kidnapping campaigns (among other crimes of “Germanization”), and Viermetz, see Kathrin Kompisch, Täterinnen: Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau, 2008), pp. 33–36; and Andrea Böltken: Führerinnen im Führerstaat: Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Trude Mohr, Jutta Rüdiger und Inge Viermetz (Centaurus Verlag, 1995), pp. 105–29.
[>] Emmy Hoechtl: From 1925 to 1933, Emmy Hoechtl was secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior (with Robert W. Kempner); from 1933 to 1936, secretary at Polizeipräsidium Berlin; from 1936 to 1942, secretary of Arthur Nebe at Reichskriminalpolizeiamt; from October 1945 to November 30, 1948, secretary of Kempner at Nuremberg; from 1948 to 1949, secretary of the representative of the Landesregierung, Nordrhein-Westfalen, with the Zweizonenregierung Frankfurt; and from 1950 to 1959, located in Bonn as secretary of the representative of the government of Berlin (West). When she was interrogated in 1961 as part of the investigations of Albert Widman and Dr. Werner concerning the gas vans in the East, Hoechtl claimed that she could not remember anything about the crimes or any criminal activity of Nebe or other people she knew in the Kripo. During the war she was not stationed in the East. But her knowledge of the documentation on the Final Solution and offices of the Reich may have been one of the reasons that the prosecutor Kempner turned up so much evidence, including the Wannsee Protocol, when she was his secretary at Nuremberg. See BAL, B162/1604, fol. 1, 556–568. I am grateful to Christian Gerlach for bringing Hoechtl to my attention.
[>] “without illusions . . .”: Ruth Kempner and Robert M. W. Kempner, Women in Nazi Germany (1944), p. 46.
[>] “It could not be established who he was . . .”: Summ, Schäfers Tochter, p. 152.
[>] “as a civil servant . . .”: Quoted from Susan Benedict, “Caring While Killing,” in Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, eds., Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis and the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2003), p. 105.
[>] “I would never have committed . . .”: Testimony quoted in Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Fischer Verlag, 2007), p. 67. Dr. Wernicke at Meseritz-Obrawalde also used her authority to order nurses to give lethal injections. See Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 233, 248.
[>] Besides sharing tools of violence: Men’s and women’s methods overlapped in most ways, but women seem to have had some preferences that men did not have. In the literature on the concentration camps, one often reads of the distinctive manner of female guards who regularly relied on attack dogs, and who screamed, slapped, and kicked. See Elissa Mailänder Koslov, Gewalt im Dienstalltag: Die SS-Aufseherinnen des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Mayjdanek, 1942–1944 (Hamburg Institute for Social Research, 2009); and author interview with Helen Tichauer, commenting on Irma Grese at Birkenau and female guards at Malchow, 23 June 2010, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich; corroborated in Donald McKale, Nazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), p. 42.
[>] denial and repression: Typical responses include “Mir ist nichts daruber bekannt” (I know nothing about that), “Ich kann nicht sagen” (I cannot say), “Ich weiss nicht mehr” (I don’t know anymore), and “Ich habe nichts davon gehört” (I heard nothing about it). Elisabeth Hoeven (b. Bork 1922), Kassel, 10 Oct. 1978, BAL, 634-K41676-Koe.
[>] Germans and Austrians investigated: The latest estimate on German and Austrian perpetrators who had a direct hand in the killing process—those in the SS and police, and those in the camp system—is about 200,000 to 250,000 people. Across Europe, as many as 330,000 Germans and Austrians were investigated and accused, and of this about 100,000 were actually judged and received some sentence by a court. Between 1945 and 1989, in East Germany, 12,890 people stood trial for Nazi-related war crimes and crimes against humanity, about twice as many as in West Germany. Ninety percent occurred prior to 1955, under Soviet pressure. Conviction rates were high, and the death sentence was imposed until the mid-1980s. See Norbert Frei, ed., Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik. Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechern in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wallstein, 2006); and Jürgen Matthäus and Patricia Heberer, eds., Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
[>] “I never understood . . .”: Pauline Kneissler quoted in Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991); and in Ulrike Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten: Krankenschwestern im Nationalsozialismus (Mabuse Verlag, 2006), p. 160. Kneissler killed as long as she could. In her last placement, at Kaufbeuren-Irsee, a four-year-old boy was killed on May 29, 1945, thirty-three days after U.S. troops had marched into Kaufbeuren. See Ernst T. Mader, Das erzwungene Sterben von Patienten der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren-Irsee zwischen 1940 und 1945 nach Dokumenten und Berichten von Augenzeugen (Blöcktach, 1992). The historian Peter Witte has pieced together the documentation of these last days at Kaufbeuren, based on a U.S. intelligence report of 2 July 1945, Nuremberg Doc. PS-1696 (unpublished). See excerpts in Henry Friedlander’s The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 218–19; “Massenmord in der Heilanstalt” in the Münchner Zeitung on 7 July 1945; and Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Fischer Verlag, 1983), pp. 452–53.
[>] “may see something wrong . . .”: Roy Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (W. H. Freeman, 1997), p. 47.
[>] Erna Petri did not deny her killing: According to Insa Eschenbach, the judgment of women on trial in the GDR for Nazi crimes was influenced by three factors: consideration of their behavior as an anomalous lapse, their youth or naiveté, and their status as workers in the emerging socialist state. Erna’s self-presentation played into all of these considerations—but apparently the court was not sympathetic: she still received a life sentence. See Insa Eschenbach, “Gespaltene Frauenbilder: Geschechterdramaturgien im juristischen Diskurs ostdeutscher Gerichte,” in Ulricke Weckel and Edgar Wolfrum, eds., “Bestien” und “Befehlsempfänger”: Frauen und Männer in NS-Prozessen nach 1945 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), p. 99.
[>] “In those times . . .”: Interrogation of Erna Petri, 18 Sept. 1961. Horst and Erna Petri Trial, BStU 000050–57, USHMMA, RG 14.068, fiche 566.
[>] “I am unable to grasp . . .”: Interrogation of Erna Petri, 18 Sept. 1961.
[>] “the treatment we Germans . . .”: Norman Goda, Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 147.
[>] female killers stood out: Roger Brown and James Kulik, “Flashbulb Memories,” Cognition 5 (1977): 73–99.
[>] not a feminine characteristic: Susannah Heschel, “Do
es Atrocity Have a Gender? Feminist Interpretations of Women in the SS,” in Jeffrey Diefendorf, ed., Lessons and Legacies, vol. 6, New Currents in Holocaust Research (Northwestern University Press, 2004), pp. 300–321.
[>] creates a false shield: Of course, as the social psychologist James Waller points out, “to offer a psychological explanation for the atrocities committed by perpetrators is not to forgive, justify, or condone their behaviors. Instead, the explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines.” James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xiv.
[>] criminologist Cesare Lombroso: Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, trans. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson (Duke University Press, 2004).
[>] likening them to underdeveloped primates: Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (Random House, 1991), pp. xi–xii. Thanks to Robert Ehrenreich for bringing this source to my attention.
[>] “naturally deceitful”: Cited in Steven Barkan and Lynne Snowden, Collective Violence (Allyn & Bacon, 2000), p. 85.
[>] studies of animal behavior: Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Evolutionary Ethics, Aggression, and Violence: Lessons from Primate Research,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 32 (Spring 2004): 18–23. Adam Jones provides a good summary of similar literature, such as Michael Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of Man, in Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2011), pp. 477–82.
[>] “an insult to the animal kingdom . . .”: Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2000), p. 21.
