Hitler's Furies Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Main Characters Witnesses, Accomplices, Killers

  Map

  Introduction

  The Lost Generation of German Women

  The East Needs You

  Witnesses

  Accomplices

  Perpetrators

  Why Did They Kill?

  What Happened to Them?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 by Wendy Lower

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Lower, Wendy.

  Hitler’s furies : German women in the Nazi killing fields / Wendy Lower.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-547-86338-2 (hardback)

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Female. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Women—Germany. 3. Women war criminals—Germany. 4. National socialism and women. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) I. Title.

  D810.W7L69 2013

  940.53'18082—dc23

  2013026081

  map © Peter Palm, Berlin, Germany

  eISBN 978-0-547-80741-6

  v2.1013

  For my grandmothers, Nancy Morgan and Virginia Williamson

  my mother, Mary Suzanne Liljequist

  and my sisters, Virginia Lower and Lori Lower

  Illustrations

  Page

  [>] The Nazi East / © Peter Palm, Berlin

  [>] Members of the League of German Girls shooting rifles, 1936 / bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY

  [>] A Nazi Party rally in Berlin, 1935, with a banner declaring, “Women and girls, the Jews are your ruin” / Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives

  [>] Red Cross nurses gathered in Berlin / Kurt Friedrich, Courtesy of the Archives of the German Red Cross

  [>] Erika Ohr, 1941 / Renate Sarkar and Erika Summ

  [>] Annette Schücking in her nurse’s uniform, summer 1941 / Courtesy of Annette Schücking-Homeyer and Julie Paulus

  [>] Ilse Struwe, army staff secretary, at her desk, 1942 / © Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin 1999

  [>] Liselotte Meier, c. 1941 / Courtesy of the Landesarchiv, Speyer Collection

  [>] Gertrude Segel, c. 1941 / Courtesy of U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

  [>] Photos of Vera Stähli in her SS marriage application, 1942 / Courtesy of U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

  [>] Photos of Liesel Riedel in her SS marriage application, 1935 / Courtesy of U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

  [>] Erna Petri in Thuringia, late 1930s / Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  [>] Recruitment brochure for resettlement advisors in Poland: “German Woman! German Girl! The East Needs You!” / Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  [>] Nurses at a soldiers’ relief station / Courtesy of the Archives of the German Red Cross

  [>] German civilians and officials viewing hanged men, Minsk, 1942 or 1943 / Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  [>] Ilse Struwe picnicking with colleagues in Ukraine, 1942 or 1943 / © Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin 1999

  [>] Soldiers’ home in Novgorod Volynsk / Courtesy of Annette Schücking-Homeyer and Julie Paulus

  [>] Jews forced to march through Lida before being killed, March 1942 / Courtesy of the Landesarchiv, Speyer Collection

  [>] A “Frau Apfelbaum” with a shotgun in the Lida woods / Courtesy of the Landesarchiv, Speyer Collection

  [>] Einsatzgruppe A’s coffin-decorated tally of Jews killed in 1941 / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Thomas Wartenberg

  [>] Vera and Julius Wohlauf enjoying refreshments, summer 1942, Poland / Courtesy of the Staatsarchiv, Hamburg

  [>] Erna Petri at her Grzenda estate / Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  [>] German female prisoners detained in Kassel, Germany / Courtesy of Yad Vashem

  [>] Jewish man out of hiding / Courtesy of the Landesarchiv, Speyer Collection

  [>] Johanna Altvater Zelle in an album used by Israeli investigators / Courtesy of Yad Vashem

  [>] Arrest photographs of Erna Petri / Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  Main Characters Witnesses, Accomplices, Killers

  INGELENE IVENS, schoolteacher from Kiel, sent to Poznań, Poland

  ERIKA OHR, nurse from the village of Stachenhausen in Swabia, daughter of a sheepherder, sent to a hospital in Zhytomyr, Ukraine

  ANNETTE SCHÜCKING, law student from Münster, great-granddaughter of the esteemed writer Leon Schücking, daughter of a Social Democratic Party politician and journalist, sent as a nurse to a soldiers’ home in Novgorod Volynsk, Ukraine, and Krasnodar, Russia

  PAULINE KNEISSLER, nurse from Duisburg in the Rhineland, born in Odessa, Ukraine, emigrated to Germany at the end of World War I, sent to Poland and Belarus

  ILSE STRUWE, secretary from the suburbs of Berlin, went with the German Armed Forces to France, Serbia, and Ukraine

  LISELOTTE MEIER, secretary from the town of Reichenbach, Saxony, near German-Czech border, sent to Minsk and Lida, Belarus

  JOHANNA ALTVATER, secretary from Minden, Westphalia, daughter of a foundry foreman, went to Volodymyr-Volynsky, Ukraine

  SABINE HERBST DICK, secretary from Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, middle-class graduate of a Gymnasium, went to Latvia and Belarus

  GERTRUDE SEGEL LANDAU, SS commander’s daughter, secretary from Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, volunteered to serve in Radom, Poland, and Drohobych, Ukraine, wife of Einsatzkommando squad leader and Gestapo chief Felix Landau

  JOSEFINE KREPP BLOCK, typist who worked in Gestapo headquarters in Vienna and frequently visited her husband, SS major Hans Block, the Gestapo station chief in Drohobych, Ukraine

  VERA STÄHLI WOHLAUF, socialite from Hamburg, wife of Captain Julius Wohlauf, SS and Order Police company commander, Battalion 101, joined her husband in Poland

  LIESEL RIEDEL WILLHAUS, typist, daughter of a senior foreman in the ironworks of the industrial Saar region, Catholic-educated, wife of Gustav Willhaus, SS commander of the Janowska concentration camp, joined her husband in Ukraine

  ERNA KÜRBS PETRI, farmer’s daughter and farmer’s wife, grammar school education, managed an SS agricultural estate in Ukraine with her husband, SS Second Lieutenant Horst Petri

  Introduction

  IN THE SUMMER of 1992 I bought a plane ticket to Paris, purchased an old Renault, and drove with a friend to Kiev over hundreds of miles of bad Soviet roads. We had to stop often. The tires blew on the jagged pavement, there was no gas available, and curious peasants and truckers wanted to look under the hood to see a Western automobile engine. On the single highway stretching from Lviv to Kiev, we visited the town of Zhytomyr, a center of Jewish life in the former Pale of Settlement, which during the Second World War had become the headquarters of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust. Down the road to the south, in Vinnytsia, was Adolf Hitler’s Werwolf compound. The entire region was once a Nazi playground in all its horror.

  Seeking to build an empire to last a thousand years, Hitler arrived in this fertile area of Ukraine—the coveted breadbasket of Europe—with legions of developers, administrators, security officials, “racial scientists,” and engineers who were tasked with colonizing and exploitin
g the region. The Germans blitzkrieged eastward in 1941, ravaged the conquered territory, and evacuated westward in defeat in 1943 and 1944. As the Red Army reoccupied the area, Soviet officials seized countless pages of official German reports, files of photographs and newspapers, and boxes of film reels. They deposited this war booty and classified the “trophy” documents in state and regional archives that would remain behind the Iron Curtain for decades. It was this material that I had come to Ukraine to read.

  In the archives in Zhytomyr I came across pages with boot footprints and charred edges. The documents had survived two assaults: a Nazi scorched-earth evacuation that included the burning of incriminating evidence, and the destruction of the city during the fighting of November and December 1943. The files contained broken chains of correspondence, tattered scraps of paper with fading ink, decrees with pompous, illegible signatures left by petty Nazi officials, and police interrogation reports with the shaky scrawls of terrified Ukrainian peasants. I had seen many Nazi documents before, while comfortably ensconced in the microfilm reading room of the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. But now, seated in the buildings that had been occupied by the Germans, I discovered something besides the rawness of the material I was sifting through. To my surprise, I also found the names of young German women who were active in the region as Hitler’s empire-builders. They appeared on innocuous, bureaucratic lists of kindergarten teachers. With these leads in hand, I returned to the archives in the United States and Germany and started to look more systematically for documentation about German women who were sent east, and specifically about those who witnessed and perpetrated the Holocaust. The files began to grow, and stories started to take shape.

  Researching postwar investigative records, I realized that hundreds of women had been called to testify as witnesses and that many were very forthcoming, since prosecutors were more interested in the heinous crimes of their male colleagues and husbands than in those of women. Many of the women remained callous and cavalier in their recounting of what they had seen and experienced. One former kindergarten teacher in Ukraine mentioned “that Jewish thing during the war.” She and her female colleagues had been briefed as they crossed the border from Germany into the eastern occupied zones in 1942. She remembered that a Nazi official in a “gold-brownish uniform” had reassured them that they should not be afraid when they heard gunfire—it was “just that a few Jews were being shot.”

  If the shooting of Jews was considered no cause for alarm during the war, then how did women respond when they actually arrived at their posts? Did they turn away, or did they want to see or do more? I read studies by pioneering historians such as Gudrun Schwarz and Elizabeth Harvey that confirmed my suspicions about the participation of German women in the Nazi system but left open questions of wider and deeper culpability. Schwarz had uncovered violent SS wives. She mentioned one in Hrubieszow, Poland, who took the pistol from her husband’s hand and shot Jews during a massacre in the local cemetery. But Schwarz provided no name for this killer. Harvey had established that women teachers were active in Poland and that, on occasion, they visited ghettos and stole Jewish property. The scope of women’s participation in the massacres in the eastern territories remained unclear, however. It seemed that no one had scoured the wartime and postwar records and memoirs with these questions in mind: Did ordinary German women participate in the Nazi mass shooting of Jews? Did German women in places such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland participate in the Holocaust in ways that they did not admit to after the war?

  In the postwar investigations in Germany, Israel, and Austria, Jewish survivors identified German women as persecutors, not only as gleeful onlookers but also as violent tormentors. But by and large these women could not be named by the survivors, or after the war the women married and took on different names and could not be found. Though there were source limits to my inquiry, over time it became clear that the list of teachers and other female Nazi Party activists that I had found in 1992 in Ukraine was the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of thousands of German women went to the Nazi East—that is, to Poland and the western territories of what was for many years the USSR, including today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—and were indeed integral parts of Hitler’s machinery of destruction.

  One of these women was Erna Petri. I discovered her name in the summer of 2005 in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum had successfully negotiated the acquisition of microfilmed copies from the files of the former East German secret police (Stasi). Among the records were the interrogations and courtroom proceedings in a case against Erna and her husband, Horst Petri, who were both convicted of shooting Jews on their private estate in Nazi-occupied Poland. In credible detail Erna Petri described the half-naked Jewish boys who whimpered as she drew her pistol. When pressed by the interrogator as to how she, a mother, could murder these children, Petri referred to the anti-Semitism of the regime and her own desire to prove herself to the men. Her misdeeds were not those of a social renegade. To me, she looked like the embodiment of the Nazi regime.

  Recorded cases of female killers were to a degree representative of a much bigger phenomenon that had been suppressed, overlooked, and under-researched. Given the ideological indoctrination of the young cohort of men and women who came of age in the Third Reich, their mass mobilization in the eastern campaign, and the culture of genocidal violence embedded in Nazi conquest and colonization, I deduced—as a historian, not a prosecutor—that there were plenty of women who killed Jews and other “enemies” of the Reich, more than had been documented during the war or prosecuted afterward. Though the documented cases of direct killing are not numerous, they must be taken very seriously and not dismissed as anomalies. Hitler’s Furies were not marginal sociopaths. They believed that their violent deeds were justified acts of revenge meted out to enemies of the Reich; such deeds were, in their minds, expressions of loyalty. To Erna Petri, even helpless Jewish boys fleeing from a boxcar bound for the gas chamber were not innocent; they were the ones who almost got away.

  It was not by chance that eastern Europe was where Nazis and their collaborators carried out mass murder. Historically, the terrain was home to the largest populations of Jews, many of whom had become, in Nazi thinking, dangerously “bolshevized.” Western European Jews were deported to remote areas of Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia to be shot and gassed in broad daylight.

  The history of the Holocaust is wrapped up in the Nazi imperial conquest of eastern Europe, which mobilized all Germans. In Nazi-speak, being part of the Volksgemeinschaft, or People’s Community, meant participating in all the campaigns of the Reich, including the Holocaust. The most powerful agencies, starting with the SS and police, were the main executors; these agencies were controlled by men but also staffed by women. In the government hierarchies, female professionals and spouses attached themselves to men of power and in turn wielded considerable power themselves, including over the lives of the regime’s most vulnerable subjects. Women who were assigned to military support positions to free up men for the front had the authority to issue orders to subordinates. These women filled positions in the Nazi hierarchy from the very bottom to the very top.

  Among Hitler’s retinue stationed in the East were his secretaries—women like Christa Schroeder, who took dictation for the Führer in his bunker near Vinnytsia. After touring the Ukrainian countryside, where she caroused with the regional German chiefs and visited the ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) colonies, she pondered the future of the new German Lebensraum (“living space”) in a wartime letter:

  Our people immigrating here do not have an easy task, but there are many possibilities to achieve great things. The longer one spends in this immense region and recognizes the enormous opportunity for development, the more the question presents itself as to who will be carrying through these great projects in the future. One comes to the conclusion that the foreign people [Fremdvolk] are not suitable for various reasons,
and ultimately because in the course of the generations an admixture of blood between the controlling strata, the German element and the foreign people would occur. That would be a cardinal breach of our understanding of the need to preserve our Nordic racial inheritance and our future would then take a similar course to that of, for example, the Roman Empire.

  Schroeder was in an extremely unusual place among a select few, of course; yet her words attest to the fact that secretaries in the field recognized their imperial role and that their understanding of the Nazi mission was articulated in the sort of racialist, colonialist terminology that is usually attributed to the male conquerors and governors.

  As self-proclaimed superior rulers, German women in the Nazi East wielded unprecedented power over those designated “subhuman”; they were given a license to abuse and even kill those who were perceived, as one secretary near Minsk said after the war, as the scum of society. These women had proximity to power in the massive state-run machinery of destruction. They also had proximity to the crime scenes; there was no great distance between the settings of small towns, where women went about their daily routines, and the horrors of ghettos, camps, and mass executions. There was no divide between the home front and the battlefront. Women could decide on the spot to join the orgy of violence.

  Hitler’s Furies were zealous administrators, robbers, tormentors, and murderers in the bloodlands. They melded into hundreds of thousands—at least half a million—women who went east. The sheer numbers alone establish the significance of German women in the Nazi system of genocidal warfare and imperial rule. The German Red Cross trained six hundred forty thousand women during the Nazi era, and some four hundred thousand were placed in wartime service; the majority of these were sent to the rear areas or near the battle zones in the eastern territories. They worked in field hospitals of the army and Waffen-SS, on train platforms serving refreshments to soldiers and refugees, in hundreds of soldiers’ homes socializing with German troops in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltics. The German army trained over five hundred thousand young women in support positions—as radio operators, file-card keepers, flight recorders, and wiretappers—and two hundred thousand of these served in the East. Secretaries organized, tracked, and distributed the massive supplies necessary to keep the war machine running. Myriad organizations sponsored by the Nazi Party (such as the National Socialist Welfare Association) and Himmler’s Race and Resettlement Office deployed German women and girls as social workers, racial examiners, resettlement advisors, educators, and teaching aides. In one region of annexed Poland that was a laboratory for “Germanization,” Nazi leaders deployed thousands of teachers. Hundreds more—including the young teachers mentioned in the files I found in Zhytomyr—were sent to other colonial enclaves of the Reich. As agents of Nazi empire-building, these women were assigned the constructive work of the German “civilizing” process. Yet the destructive and constructive practices of Nazi conquest and occupation were inseparable.