Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  [>] Gender bias: Kuretsidis-Haider and Garscha, Keine “Abrechnung,” pp. 204–6. See Heineman on West German widows and family law, What Difference Does a Husband Make?

  [>] loathsome reminders: Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton University Press, 2005), especially chap. 3, “Desperately Seeking Normality”; and Krauss, Sie waren dabei, p. 13.

  [>] Hanweg’s deputy was still in Mainz: Windisch, who was Austrian, had fled to West Germany and had hidden out in neo-Nazi circles in the Saarland. He died in jail after serving fifteen years.

  [>] He personally arrested: Author interviews with Herbert Hinzmann, former Oberstaatsanwalt, Mainz, 2 Aug. 2010, and with Hinzmann and Boris Neusius, Mainz, 14 Feb. 2012.

  [>] “I cannot remember,” “I cannot recall . . .”: Liselotte Meier Lerm, statement of 19 Sept. 1963, BAL, 162/3425; statements of 5 and 6 Sept. 1966, BAL, 162/3449 and 3450.

  [>] the West German pursuit: A West German delegation, including the prosecutor, Hermann Weissing, and the defense attorneys for the accused, traveled to Lutsk, where Soviet Ukrainian and Polish witnesses presented their accounts. Author interview with Weissing, Münster, 9 Mar. 2010.

  [>] “She can be usefully employed”: Biographical material in the indictment of Altvater and verdict, BAL, B162/4524, pp. 20, 22.

  [>] Nazi Youth in Minden: Dagmar Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, trans. William Templer (University of Michigan Press, 2006), quoting the recollections of one of Altvater’s contemporaries in Minden, p. 154.

  [>] During the public trial proceedings: A key witness in the trial against Johanna Altvater Zelle and Wilhelm Westerheide was a former German colleague, a driver with the Wehrmacht (Technical Battalion 6, First Company) stationed near Westerheide’s office. This driver often met Westerheide on the streets of Volodymyr-Volynsky. They would walk and chat. In 1943, when they encountered Jewish laborers, the Jews would stop and kneel down to Westerheide. The driver asked Westerheide, Why do the Jews do that? Because I ordered them to do so, Westerheide replied, and then boasted that he used to have about 30,000 Jews in his district, crammed into the ghettos, but already 18,000 had been “knocked off,” with the remainder yet to be killed. Westerheide added that he was looking for shooters and asked the driver if he would be interested in killing Jews, but he declined. Others in his military unit were approached by Westerheide and served as shooters in a massacre at the old cemetery in 1943. Among the shooters Westerheide recruited, the driver recalled, was a band of musicians. Statement of Karl Wetzle, 21 June 1963, Oberhausen, BAL, 162/4522, fol. 1. These musicians were probably the ones who played at the banquet table and then put down their instruments to do some shooting, described by Polish witnesses. Testimony of Josef Opatowski, 7. Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw, ZIH 301/2014.

  [>] “his city,” “his Jews,” and “Herr Westerheide . . .”: Quoted in Die Tat, 6 Oct. 1978. “Das Todes-Getto war ‘unsagbar freundlich,’” newspaper coverage of the trial. Band IV, bl 773–1004. Westerheide, II, 204 AR-Z 40/61, B162/4523, fol 1. Strafsenat of the Bundesgerichtshof.

  [>] “insufficient evidence” and “Despite strong suspicion . . .”: Urteil, Bundesgerichtshof, in der Strafsache gegen Westerheide und Zelle, wegen Moerder, 4 StR 303/80. BAL, Band IV, II, 204 AR-Z 40/61.

  [>] The chief prosecutor in this office: During Weissing’s tenure at the Central Office (1965–2000), he and his colleagues investigated more than 25,000 suspects and indicted 159. Among the other controversial cases that the office unsuccessfully prosecuted or rejected were the Erich Priebke and Heinrich Boere cases. Boere, a former Waffen-SS man (with Division Viking in Ukraine), was tried in Aachen for his crimes in the Netherlands and received a life sentence on March 23, 2010.

  [>] reflections on the proceedings: Author interview with Weissing, 9 Mar. 2010.

  [>] Another protest took place: “Germans Protest Acquittal of Two in War Criminal Case,” New York Times, 21 Dec. 1982.

  [>] “rule of Nobody”: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Viking, 1963). Defense attorneys could not turn up evidence that those who did not follow orders to rob, deport, and kill Jews were punished by superiors. Putative duress as well as following orders did not hold up in court as a defense. The lack of an actual Führer Order also weakened the argument.

  [>] “it was not right . . .”: Gertrude Segel Landau statement, 29 May 1947, VCA, Polizeidirektion Wien, People’s Court investigation, Vg 3b Vr 7658/47. Felix Landau denied having responded in the way Gertrude claimed, and also insisted that his wife was lying when she told him not to shoot at people. Felix admitted that he confiscated a Jewish apartment in Vienna in 1938. In the course of this seizure of Jewish property he also bullied a family member (the Altmans, factory owners in Vienna) to give him gold jewelry. Felix Landau statement, 7 Aug. 1947. Camp Marcus, Abschrift in Wien Stadtarchiv, Vg 8514/46.

  [>] escaped from an Austrian jail: Apparently the Austrian jails were rather open—Franz Stangl also walked out of prison in 1947. See Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (Vintage, 1983), p. 353. To hide from investigators in Austria and Germany, Landau took on another identity, that of Rudolf Jaschke, claiming that he was a Sudeten ethnic German refugee; in fact, Landau was born in Vienna in 1910. (Preliminary investigation of Landau, and records of the Staatsanwaltschaft Stuttgart, 11 208 AR-Z 60a/1959, BAL/3380.) In 1958 Landau sought to obtain a marriage license in Stuttgart. When he applied for his marriage certificate, he revealed his real name to the authorities and presented his Austrian birth certificate. It was the investigation over his false identity that led to his arrest, followed by a 1961 indictment for his Nazi-era crimes and a March 1962 murder conviction by a Stuttgart court. He received a double life sentence, a rare punishment by a West German court in the 1960s. But it turned out to be largely symbolic: he was pardoned in 1973. He died a decade later. See Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, 1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 392, 417.

  [>] looking for evidence of guilt: Gertrude Segel Landau statements of 29 May, 2 June, and 17 June 1947, and 17 Feb. and 27 Feb. 1948. VCA, Wien Stadtarchiv, Vg 8514/46.

  [>] witnesses who accused her: Regina Katz, who had worked as Block’s personal tailor in Drohobych, was one of the witnesses against Block. Ms. Katz had two reasons for going to the authorities. When the Jewish ghetto was liquidated in 1943, Katz’s life and that of her daughter were at risk. Block retained Katz as a laborer, but not the one-year-old daughter. Katz wanted to find her child, and she wanted to make sure Josefine Block would be punished. Statement of Regina Katz, 3 Oct. 1946, VCA, Amtsvemerk, Haft, 19 Oct. 1946, Polizeidirektion. Niederschrift vom 19 Okt. 1946, Hausdurchsuchung, Wien Stadtarchiv, Vg 8514/46.

  [>] “friend of the Jews”: Statement of Josefine Block, 14 Nov. 1946, VCA, Vg 8514/46. Josefine Block statement, 12 Feb. 1948, Investigation of Gertrude Landau, VCA, Vg 3b Vr 7658/47. The former Birkenau guard Irma Grese claimed she was a victim of the privileged Jews who really controlled the camp; see testimony in Donald McKale, Nazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), p. 41.

  [>] in that Vienna courtroom in 1949: The investigative process had dragged on for quite a while, with Frau Block remaining in jail until early 1949. Austrian authorities made little effort to locate key eyewitnesses, “foreign” Jews who “spoke poor German” or had left Austria to live in a less hostile environment. The Austrian prisons were full of suspects, and there were too few layman attorneys and judges to handle the cases. After some time, everyone wanted to move on, with perhaps the exception of a prosecutor, Altmann, who on March 3, 1949, issued a one-page indictment against Block, charging her with the torture and abuse of one girl. The other charges were dropped, and the only witness to the crime against the girl was gone. Another prosecutor stepped in and rushed through the half-day proceedings. Block was unani
mously acquitted on September 15, 1949, on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Beratungsprotokoll bei dem Landesgericht Wien, 259/3 stop.

  [>] Exhibiting little understanding: A similar bias appeared in the Hermine Braunsteiner case, also held in the Viennese People’s Court in Austria. Braunsteiner, a camp guard, got only three years in 1951 because “a Viennese woman could never be so brutal.” In 1981 she got a life sentence in a Düsseldorf court. See Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, “Täterinnen vor Gericht: Die Kategorie Geschlecht bei der Ahndung von nationalsozialistischen Tötungsdelikten in Deutschland und Österreich,” in Krauss, Sie waren dabei.

  [>] “Do you remember . . .”: Vera Wohlauf interrogation, 19 Nov. 1964, BAL, B162/5916, 1655–1658.

  [>] eight thousand Jews: Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1993).

  [>] Gustav was killed in action: For more on Gustav Willhaus (1910–1945), see Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, pp. 333, 423.

  [>] “went against all preconceived notions . . .”: Lemberg Trial, Indictment, BAL, 162/4688, p. 274.

  [>] “whose conscience cannot . . .”: Quoted from the German newspaper coverage of the trial, “Das Urteil im Lemberg Prozess,” 30 Apr. 1961, which was included in the Stuttgart prosecutor’s press clippings file, BAL, 162/4688, 208 AR-Z 294/59.

  [>] perpetrators tried in East Germany: Published work on female perpetrators who stood trial in the GDR focuses on the camp guards, especially the SS-Aufseherinnen Ravensbrück. Thirty-five were tried and received relatively light sentences in East German and Soviet courts between 1947 and 1954. See the interesting analysis by Insa Eschenbach, “Gespaltene Frauenbilder: Geschechterdramaturgien im juristischen Diskurs ostdeutscher Gerichte,” in Weckel and Wolfrum, “Bestien” und “Befehlsempfänger,” pp. 95–116.

  [>] By the time Erna Petri was arrested: My analysis of the Petri trial is adapted from material I published in an earlier article, “Male and Female Holocaust Perpetrators and the East German Approach to Justice, 1949–1963,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 56–84. I thank Oxford University Press and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for permission to use passages (in altered form) from that article.

  [>] the local agricultural commune: Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG), an East German term for a Soviet-style collective farm. About this time West German prosecutors investigated and launched trials against perpetrators in the same region of Ukraine. Erfurt officials did not benefit from this coincidence; they focused on collaborating with Polish and Russian authorities. On the West German trials in Galicia, see Omer Bartov, “Guilt and Accountability in the Postwar Courtroom: The Holocaust in Czortkow and Buczacz, East Galicia, as Seen in West German Legal Discourse,” paper presented at “Repairing the Past: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery, Genocide, and Caste” (Yale University, October 27–29, 2005).

  [>] confessions extracted under duress: The files do not reveal the duress, though the times of day noted on the interrogation reports suggest that the sessions were long, exhausting, and conducted at odd hours without interruption. The signatures of the defendants on the transcripts are shaky and irregular.

  [>] “most severe war crimes . . .”: Erfurt, General Stasi Records, Allg. S 100, BSt U 000111–113, Allg S 73, BStU 000019–21, BAB, Archiv-Nr. 403/63, BSTu aussentselle Erfurt, twenty-two volumes/folders, plus ten audiotapes and two photo albums.

  [>] “Thank you . . .”: Audio file of the trial of Horst and Erna Petri, Eft. AU 403/63, Archives of BStU, BAB.

  [>] “18 to 20 years ago . . .”: Petri case, no. 10733, DDR-Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Lfd Nr. 10733, 271–272.

  [>] “Which crimes . . .”: Erna Petri interrogation, 15 Sept. 1961. Case Against Horst and Erna Petri, BAB, Archives of BStU Berlin, file number Eft. AU 403/63 GA 1, USHMMA, RG 14.068, fiche 565.

  [>] “Why have you denied . . .”: Erna Petri interrogation, 18 Sept. 1961.

  [>] even an embarrassment: In Kathrin Meyer’s analysis of the denazification proceedings against German women, she found that gender expectations raised the moral standards for women who were not supposed to behave brutally. Such expectations colored the judgment of American, West German, and East German jurists and officials alike. See Meyer’s Entnazifizierung von Frauen: Die Internierungslager der US Zone, 1945–1952 (Metropol, 2004).

  [>] “those people . . .” and “I admit that my wife shot”: Petri letters. BAB, Handakten Staatsanwalt Erfurt, BStU 000379.

  [>] Jewish women as troublemakers: BAB, Abschrift, 7 Aug. 1961, Untersuchungsvorgang, Erna Petri, Stasi, Erfurt, 3493/61, Band V, Archiv-Nr. 403/63.

  [>] In the next few months: According to a law of September 1990, a person could be rehabilitated if a West German court, or German successor court, found that the Nazi crimes one was convicted of were not substantiated with evidence, if one incurred serious violations of human rights in the investigative process and trial, and if the trial was carried out in an unlawful manner. One in six prisoners (or his or her descendants) applied for rehabilitation, amounting to 106 applications; of these, 43 were declined or rejected outright, but the rest were altered or revised in some manner. Of the thirteen convictions overturned, many originated in the Waldheim trials. Two prisoners were released. See Gunther Wieland, “Die Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen in Ostdeutschland, 1945–1990,” in DDR-Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung ostdeutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen (K. G. Saur Verlag, 2002).

  [>] She came home in 1992: It is possible that Petri was released on December 12, 1991, in accordance with the ruling of the Stollberg court. The decision and a quote from Petri, who gushed about her visit with Gudrun Himmler Burwitz, “the most wonderful woman,” is in Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke, Stille Hilfe für braune Kameraden: Das geheime Netzwerk der Alt- und Neonazis (Aufbau Verlag, 2006), pp. 104–5. Author interview with Petri family, 24 July 2006.

  [>] If Petri had resided in West Germany: Historians disagree as to the higher conviction rate of women who were tried. In the highly publicized trials, such as the Majdanek trial, the female guard Hildegard Lächert received a twelve-year sentence, whereas her male counterpart received a sentence of eight years. A general analysis of all West German cases, however, led another historian to conclude that most women tried were acquitted or received sentences of less than three years. See Michael Greve, “Täter oder Gehilfen?” in Weckel and Wolfrum, “Bestien” und “Befehlsempfänger,” p. 202. Also see Claudia Koonz, “A Tributary and a Mainstream: Gender, Public Memory, and the Historiography of Nazi Germany,” in Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography (Berghahn, 2007), p. 161.

  [>] The images of Nazi propagandists: This was first argued by the former Nazi Hermann Rauschnigg, then echoed by the historian Joachim Fest.

  [>] “men organize life . . .”: Quoted in Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Berg, 1989), p. 215.

  [>] created false narratives: Roy Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (W. H. Freeman, 1997), p. 46.

  [>] historian Katrin Himmler: Katrin Himmler, the grandniece of Heinrich Himmler, has pursued her own personal and scholarly reconciliation with the Nazi past, publishing a study of the Himmler family as well as marrying an Israeli. See her essay, “‘Herrenmenschenpaare’: Zwischen nationalsozialistischem Elitebewusstsein und rassenideologischer (Selbst-) Verpflichtung,” in Krauss, Sie waren dabei, p. 73.

  [>] amount of material booty: Götz Aly, Hitlers Volkstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und Nationalsozialismus (Fischer Verlag, 2005). Some of the people interviewed for this book proudly showed me items that had been brought back from their wartime years in the East and which are now displayed in their homes.

  [>] sensationalistic press coverage: Among the more prominent defendants were Ilse Koch (the sadistic seductress accused of making lampshades from the tat
tooed skin of prisoners), Hermine Braunsteiner (the mare of Majdanek), and Irma Grese (the beautiful beast from Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen). See Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Monthly Review Press, 1984), pp. 297–333; and Sarah Cushman, “Women of Birkenau” (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 2010). For East German cases against women in particular, see Insa Eschenbach, “‘Negative Elemente’: Ermittlungsberichte des MfS über ehemalige SS-Aufseherinnen,” in Annette Leo and Peter Reif-Spireck, eds., Helden, Täter und Verräter: Studien zum DDR-Antifaschismus (Metropol, 1999), pp. 197–210.

  [>] “sensationalized Nazism . . .”: Koonz, “A Tributary and a Mainstream,” p. 161.

  Epilogue

  [>] postwar population exchanges: On the interaction of Hitler and Stalin in eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine and Poland, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books), 2010.

  [>] An informant in the 1960s: The eyewitness was a former Jewish POW who was in the ghetto in Miedzyrzec-Podlaski. Franz Bauer was known as the henchman with the dog, who often declared, “I cannot eat breakfast until I have shot a Jew, and cannot sleep until I have shot a Jew. With this pistol I have shot 2000 Jews.” 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.