by Wendy Lower
[>] Perpetration of genocide requires: See Roger W. Smith’s entry, “Perpetrators,” in Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (Macmillan, 2004); Baumeister, Evil, p. 137; Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (Routledge, 2000); and Steven K. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Victims (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 123.
[>] preponderance of male violence: James Blair, Derek Mitchell, and Karina Blair, The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain (Blackwell, 2005), p. 20. Community samples in the present-day United States show that cruel conduct (bullying, torturing pets) and delinquent behavior (shoplifting, truancy) are exhibited in 6–16 percent of men and 2–9 percent of women. More extreme forms of psychopathic tendencies appear in 1–3 percent of men and 1 percent of women. According to psychologists, extreme forms of criminal behavior can be measured along a spectrum of emotional and interpersonal factors. Typically, such a diagnosis relies on a point system of factors, or a checklist such as Robert Hare’s list of certain traits, behaviors, and emotional responses (lack of empathy, self-centeredness, lack of remorse, aggression, and impulsivity). These lists of traits are more descriptive than explanatory. The childhoods of the killers could be important indicators, since psychopathy and antisocial behavior are manifested at an early age and become pronounced in the teen years.
[>] A recent study of female criminals: There are gender differences as well; see Dana Britton, The Gender of Crime (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). Waller, Becoming Evil, also stresses the importance of socialization, and a similar conclusion was reached in an important study by Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Adam Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), pp. 127–28. The Wiggershaus study of guards and wardens—cited in Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Longman, 2001), p. 113—stressed their deprived backgrounds and dysfunctional family. From a biological standpoint, recent psychological research has linked hormones (such as serotonin) and brain damage caused by birth complications to psychological abnormalities and violent behavior. See Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, The Psychopath, pp. 32, 42; Peter Loewenberg, “Psychohistorical Perspectives on Modern German History,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 229–79; Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Dirk Schumann, ed., Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child (Berghahn, 2010), pp. 111–13.
[>] Other studies, including Theodor Adorno’s: Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (W. W. Norton, 1950); Aurel Ende, “Battering and Neglect: Children in Germany, 1860–1978,” Journal of Psychohistory 7 (1979): 249–79; Raffael Scheck, “Childhood in German Autobiographical Writings, 1740–1820,” Journal of Psychohistory 15 (1987); and Sigrid Chamberlain, “The Nurture and Care of the Future Master Race,” Journal of Psychohistory 31 (2004): 374–76.
[>] Rorschach inkblot test: See Molly Harrower, “Rorschach Records of the Nazi War Criminals: An Experimental Study after Thirty Years,” Journal of Personality Assessment 40, no. 4 (1976): 341–51; and George Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (Holmes & Meier, 1994).
[>] “sadist, a pervert or a lunatic”: Quoted in the introduction to Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 35. On Ohlendorf, also see Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[>] “neither sick nor unusual . . .”: Douglas Kelley report, quoted in Welzer, Täter, p. 9.
[>] Such psychological exper i ments: Most of the postwar psychological research on Nazi perpetrators, done by Milgram, Adorno, Ritzler, and others, concluded that Nazi leaders and functionaries were normal. According to clinical criteria applied to perpetrator testimony, about 10 percent of those studied would be diagnosed as pathological. In fact, most were highly intelligent, creative, and energetic. Dr. Ritzler found in his analysis of the Rorschach inkblot tests that five out of the sixteen people examined in Nuremberg drew chameleon-like images. That image, he argued, was the most revealing. Cited in Welzer, Täter, pp. 9, 11. On the chameleon effect, see also Eric Steinhart, “The Chameleon of Trawniki: Jack Reimer, Soviet Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23 (Spring 2009): 239–62.
[>] not been published: Eleanor Baur, otherwise known as Bloody Sister Pia, is one of the few known cases in which a woman was given a psychiatric evaluation. A hard-core Nazi, she was seen in Dachau observing medical experiments. On more than one Christmas Eve, she abused prisoners while singing carols and handing out packages. Baur was arrested in 1945. A German doctor from a nerve clinic in Munich examined her during her incarceration and determined that she was a “primitive, incapable character . . . dominated by a strong ego and sexual drives.” A Munich court sentenced her in 1949 to ten years of forced labor, the maximum sentence allowable in that denazification court. She was released in 1950 for health reasons, and died in 1981 at the age of ninety-five. See Ulrike Leutheusser, ed., Hitler und die Frauen (DVA, 2001), pp. 178–86. See also Hans Holzhaider, “‘Schwester Pia’: Nutzniesserin zwischen Opfern und Tätern,” in Dachauer Hefte 10 (1994).
[>] “The individuals were not insane . . .”: Author interview with Hermann Weissing, 10 Mar. 2010, Münster, Germany.
[>] There is no contradiction: Baum, The Psychology of Genocide, pp. 122–25.
[>] “masculine” and “ice cold”: Author interview with Hermann Weissing, 10 Mar. 2010.
[>] women in the elite ranks: Dora Maria Kahlich, a Viennese anthropologist, visited the Tarnów ghetto to conduct racial research on Jews. See Evan Bukey, Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 51.
[>] dynamic of male-female relationships: The importance of marital relationships should be stressed not only as a causative factor in persecution, but also as a decisive part of the rescue activity. A spouse in the Third Reich could be an extreme liability or an asset. Besides the well-known story of German wives in Berlin married to Jewish men (Rosenstrasse protest), consider the following case: In Riga, the resident advisor in a special dormitory for army secretaries, a German woman, befriended a Jewish woman who had arrived in Latvia from their hometown of Nuremberg. The German woman snuck food from the residence hall kitchen to the Jewish laborers who worked in the military motor pool. The SS found out and arrested the German woman and indicted her husband, a senior lieutenant also stationed in the East. When he learned of his wife’s crimes and that he would be held responsible for her actions, he committed suicide. His wife survived the war. See Yad Vashem Righteous File, no. 49, file 2828. Also see Killius, Frauen für die Front, p. 183.
[>] perform for each other: Franz Bauer, a German gendarme in Miedzyrzec-Podlaski, kept score with his wife, according to an eyewitness, a former Jewish POW who was in the ghetto there. Sworn testimony of Daniel Dworzynski, Linz, 28 Feb. 1962. Correspondence between Wiesenthal and Staatsanwalt Zeug, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, 8 AR-Z 236/60, 5 Feb. 1962. An investigation was opened in Dortmund, file no. 45 Js 28/61. Correspondence from Wiesenthal to the Investigative Office for Nazi War Crimes, Tel Aviv, 28 Mar. 1963, SWA.
[>] Moral codes of conduct: Gisela Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers and Bystanders,” in Lenore Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, eds., Women in the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 1999), p. 96.
7. What Happened to Them?
[>] thirty-five percent of the SS staff: See Kathrin Kompisch, Täterinnen: Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau, 2008), pp. 77, 84. In 1944 there were some 31,000 staff members in the Gestapo and 13,000 in the Kripo.
[>] not threats to postwar German society: 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. 209. See also Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 40–44.
[>] the “rubble women”: Elizabeth D. Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Survival in Defeat and Occupation” and “Marriage Rubble,” in What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (University of California Press, 1999).
[>] German women as martyrs: On the gendered metaphors of modern German history, and Nazism, see Elizabeth D. Heineman, “Gender, Sexuality, and Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Central European History 38 (2005): 41–74.
[>] Such a display of emotion: The interrogator of the Lida secretary Liselotte Meier Lerm explained that she broke out in tears, was distraught, and confused while she got caught up in her own lies, denied her love affair with her boss, and tried to conceal her knowledge. Her actual culpability was not determined. 6 Oct. 1964, BAL, 162/3433.
[>] After the war, Annette Schücking: Schücking was one of the first female judges in a criminal court in Duisburg. Between 1954 and 1957 she was a judge in the civil court in Düsseldorf, and from there she moved to the courts in Detmold. She married the journalist Helmut Homeyer in 1948, and they had two children. Schücking-Homeyer was considered a potentially valuable witness. In May 1974, Dr. Rückerl, the head of the West German Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, wrote a memo to a prosecutor stating that Schücking-Homeyer should be contacted as a witness if their investigation of the Gebietskommissar and German policemen in Zwiahel/Novgorod Volynsk went to trial. No trial occurred. The memo from Dr. Rückerl regarding Schücking-Homeyer as a witness, attached to her reports, is in the Investigation of Gebietskommissar Schmidt, BAL, II, 204a ARZ 132/67, p. 574.
[>] “It was impossible . . .”: Schücking-Homeyer interview with author and Christof Mauch, 30 Mar. 2010, Lünen, Germany.
[>] in the minority: Women made up between five and eighteen percent of the murderers and accomplices to murder who were indicted in Austria, West Germany, and East Germany. Twenty-two percent of defendants in euthanasia cases were women, and nine percent in cases against camp guards. See Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider and Winfried R. Garscha, eds., Keine “Abrechnung”: NS-Verbrechen, Justiz und Gesellschaft in Europa nach 1945 (Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1998), pp. 200–205. See also Alexandra Przyrembel, “Ilse Koch,” in Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, eds., Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), pp. 126–27, 130–31.
[>] their role as administrators: When Hannah Arendt fashioned her thesis of the banality of evil based on her study of Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi bureaucracy, she neglected the role of female administrators. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose work was heavily influenced by Arendt’s, also crafted a theory that failed to account for the role of women. About six years after the Eichmann trial, one female desk murderer was put on trial: Gertud Slottke, a thirty-nine-year-old specialist in Department “J” (Jewish Matters) in the Nazi secret police office in the Netherlands. Historians scrutinizing German documents from the summer and fall of 1941 to reconstruct the origins of the Final Solution have found clues in regional initiatives such as a document prepared by Slottke on 31 Aug. 1941, “Combating Jewry in its totality,” which proposed “the final solution of the Jewish question by way of the removal of all Jews.” Slottke had her own support staff of typists and clerks, and she actively participated in meetings with her boss, the commander of the Security Police and Security Service, Wilhelm Harster. She drafted lists of Jews to be deported to Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Sobibor, and observed at least one roundup of “hysterical” Jewish women, as she described them in her report of 27 May 1943. Jews in the Westerbork transit camp named her the Angel of Death, because she circulated around the camp making her selections. Anne Frank’s family was on her list of deportees. At the trial against Slottke and her male bosses, Anne’s father, Otto, questioned the defendants and showed them the photograph of Anne on the cover of her published diary. Slottke received a five-year jail sentence for her role as an accomplice in the murder of nearly 55,000 deported Jews. The 1967 trial of this female desk murderer and the convictions were unusual; the international attention, media coverage, and involvement of Otto Frank as well as the prominent Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and former Nuremberg attorney Robert Kempner may have strengthened the prosecution’s case. For Gertrude Slottke’s testimony and other trial material, see BAL, 107 AR 518/59, Band II. See also Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (Continuum, 2000), pp. 165–66, 171, 269; and Elisabeth Kohlhaas, “Weibliche Angestellte der Gestapo, 1933–1945,” in Marita Krauss, ed., Sie waren dabei: Mitläuferinnen, Nutzniesserinnen, Täterinnen im Nationalsozialismus (Wallstein Verlag, 2008), pp. 154–61.
[>] outside of institutional settings: On the complicity of women managers of Jewish apartment houses and property in Berlin, see Brigitte Scheiger, “‘Ich bitte um baldige Arisierung der Wohnung’: Zur Funktion von Frauen im buerokratischen System der Verfolgung,” in Theresa Wobbe, ed., Nach Osten: Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (Verlag Neue Kritik, 1992), pp. 175–96; Krauss, Sie waren dabei, p. 11; and Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Longman, 2001), pp. 112–13. Female denouncers were pursued, though women were not disproportionately represented among those who denounced and those who were prosecuted for denouncing. See Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1991); and Ulricke Weckel and Edgar Wolfrum, eds., “Bestien” und “Befehlsempfänger”: Frauen und Männer in NS-Prozessen nach 1945 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003).
[>] “act of fate . . .”: Quoted in Katharina Kellenbach, “God’s Love and Women’s Love: Prison Chaplains Counsel the Wives of Nazi Perpetrators,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Fall 2004): 11–13, 23. I thank Susan Bachrach for this source.
[>] When I telephoned: Author telephone interview with Edith N., 22 Apr. 2010. Edith stressed that she had met her husband after the war and that as an elderly invalid he needed her continued care. She cried about the early death of her troubled son, who investigated his father’s past and was devastated by what he discovered. Her husband was in an SS Death’s Head division and served as a mass shooter with sonderkommando 10a in Taganrog in 1942. Prior to that he was a guard in the Warsaw prison.
[>] Pacts of loyalty: See Jürgen Matthäus, “‘No Ordinary Criminal’ Georg Heuser, Other Mass Murderers and West German Justice,” in Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus, eds., Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
[>] secretary for the district commissar in Slonim: Gerda Rogowsky, statement of 14 Mar. 1960, BAL, 162/5102.
[>] Of course, not everyone abided: Vorermittlungsverfahren der Zentralen Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen wegen NS-Verbrechen im Bereich des ehemaligen Generlabezirks Shitomir/Ukraine, II, 204a AR-Z 131/67, Abschlussbericht, Das Gebietskommissariat Tschudnow. Beweismittel, Witness Statements, Erna Barthelt, Elisabeth Tharun, Elfriede Büschken, Friedrich Paul, Otto Bräse, Elfriede Bräse, Staatsanwaltschaft, Handakten, I 13 Js 60/51, Landesgericht I 13 ERKs 35/51. BAB, BStU 000199–202. Herr Richter, Volkspolizei Oberwachtmeister, VPKA-Wittenberg, “Bericht,” 3 Feb. 1950, BStU 00035, Archiv Staatsanwalt des Bezirkes Halle, Fach Nr. 2052. MfS BV Halle, Ast 5544, BStU 00133–138, Urteilurschrift, Strafsache gegen den Arbeiter Bruno Sämisch aus Mühlanger Landgericht Dessau, and “Gründe,” pp. 1–5. BAB, BStU 00133–138, Archiv Staatsanwalt des Bezirkes Halle, Fach Nr. 2052.
[>] covered for their bosses: When questioned after the war, Mimi Trsek, Globocnik’s secretary, remained steadfastly loyal to her boss and maintained her ignorance about the Final Solution. She claimed that she kn
ew nothing of the gassing centers. Yes, she had heard terms such as “resettlement” and “evacuations,” but she did not realize that these were code words for death. Mimi stuck with this defense when she was interviewed by a German filmmaker in 2001. See Berndt Rieger, Creator of Nazi Death Camps: The Life of Odilo Globocnik (Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), p. 201.
[>] motive was anti-Semitic hate: Cited in Kerstin Freudiger, Die juristische Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen (Mohr Siebeck, 2002), p. 214.
[>] rubber-stamping a document: “Erledigt!” telephone conversations with Ruth P., 7 June and 2 Aug. 2011. Thanks to Andrej Angrick for this source. The West German investigation of the RSHA was the most extensive, involving the identification of about 730 members of the RSHA and the indictment of about 50 men. Landgericht Berlin, 13 Oct. 1969, KS 1/69 (ZStL: VI 415 AR 1310/63, Sammelakte Nr. 341).
[>] “dragged into this shit”: Vermerk, 9 Oct. 1960, prosecutor’s notes, BAL, 9 Js 716/59.
[>] incriminating details: As special prosecutors moved outside the closed circle of Heuser’s staff and friends, they found other German women who had worked in wartime Minsk who provided more objective testimony. One secretary who was in Minsk from September 1941 to December 1943 described the killing operations in credible detail. She remembered Heuser very well and could place him in the center of the operations. Whenever Jewish transports arrived at Maly Trostenets, she said, Heuser stood on a barrel and made a speech. Greetings, he declared, in the name of the Great German Reich. He told the Jews they were being resettled, and during these tough times of war they must give up their valuables for the effort. All their items would be registered on a list, he told them, implying that they would eventually be compensated. They would be transferred to farms for agriculture work; he apologized for the poor accommodations and transportation. Then this secretary related what she heard from other women in Heuser’s office and SS male colleagues about the events at the mass murder sites and specific German methods of killing. She saw Jews being shot in the courtyard of her building and named the persons who shot the Jews. Eva Maria Schmidt testimony, 9 Nov. 1961. Landgericht Köln. Koblenz Sta, 9 Js/716/59. Such testimony, combined with wartime documentation, was sufficient to convict Heuser. He was sentenced to fifteen years for the murder of more than 11,103 persons, but released after ten, since the court determined that he “was not a criminal in the usual sense.” Files of the Staatsanwalt Koblenz, Heuser case, Sonderkommission P. 9 Js 716/59. Interrogation notes on Sabine Dick, April–Oct. 1960.
