by Wendy Lower
The German juggernaut consisted of a combined assault of military forces, the SS and police, civilian government agencies, and development contractors. The most powerful man in the Reich after Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS and Police, controlled both the security apparatus and social engineering. According to his grand scheme, called the General Plan East (Generalplan Ost), thirty to fifty million Slavic “subhumans” would be killed off and deported over twenty years to make room for German settlers, while the “lucky” helots who remained would serve their new German masters. The Race and Resettlement Office and other agencies of Germanization fanned out across the eastern occupied territories in search of racially acceptable ethnic Germans and suitable colonial enclaves. Himmler instructed his men to carry out state-sanctioned campaigns of kidnapping. One version was in sinister fashion called the “Hay Harvest Action.” If an SS man spotted a nice-looking blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy or girl in a Ukrainian, Polish, or Belarusian village, he could grab the child. SS racial examiners would determine if the child had enough German blood, and if so, the child was put up for adoption. German women who were infertile or had miscarried, and who were desperate to prove their racial merit by becoming mothers, were likely candidates for receiving and adopting stolen children. Children who were not racially valuable were sent to children’s homes and forced labor camps or, in some cases, used as guinea pigs in Nazi medical experiments.
Evaluating and redistributing children was thus another arena for German women’s participation in the Reich’s state-sponsored genocide. In their roles as resettlement administrators and racial examiners, women escorted racially cherry-picked children from the East to the Reich and arranged for their placement in foster homes and state-run nurseries. Germanization meant the forced assimilation of these children, their “civilization” by German female welfare workers and mothers. In typically passive terms, official German reports referred to the children as “orphaned” when in fact German SS and military forces in the course of antipartisan and mass reprisal operations had shot the fathers and sent the mothers to concentration camps. The 105 children from Lidice—the Czech village that the Nazis destroyed in retaliation for the assassination of Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich—are probably the most famous victims, but there were many more: estimates of stolen children range from fifty thousand to two hundred thousand. After the war the Polish government and surviving relatives requested that the children be returned. Most of the children were not identified, however, and many German mothers refused to give up those who were. Thus many of the children grew to adulthood in German households, and few learned where they came from. This aspect of the Nazi genocide would not have been possible without the involvement of German female administrators and German mothers.
Himmler had the dual charge of securing and expanding the German race by destroying its enemies and promoting the breeding of Aryans. The Nazi movement sought to take European history in a new direction, into an era of German hegemony that in its core anti-Semitic Weltanschauung would be free from the racial-political influence of the Jews. The scapegoating of “the Jew” in a time of severe crisis was, of course, nothing the Germans invented, though the centrality of this “other” in Nazi ideology was distinctive.
In Nazi thinking, the eastern “living space” took contradictory forms: it was not only Germany’s future Garden of Eden, a place of opportunity, but also a hostile terrain. Imperial dreams were set on the lands between Germany and Russia, inhabited by—in the picture painted by the Nazis—inferior, threatening races and political opponents. Such a paranoid hatred incited radical population policies and heightened security measures—all of which became the rationale for mass shootings of noncombatants, Soviet POWs, and especially Jewish men, women, and children. Starting in late July 1941, when it seemed that German predictions of the Soviet Union’s rapid demise were coming true, Himmler demanded the extermination of Jews residing in villages deemed partisan nests, prioritizing the clearing of the marshlands in Belarus. The mass murder began under the cover of the war and, as the historian Christopher Browning aptly put it, in the “euphoria of victory.”
What routes did German men and women take to the East, and how many Germans were involved? On the heels of the German army, the German government and Nazi organizations deployed at least thirty-five thousand colonizing agents in the occupied territories of the former Soviet Union. Nazi-occupied Poland also attracted its share of carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs, dilettantes, careerists, social climbers, and former convicts; in total, some fourteen thousand German men and women worked in this administration, known as the General Government. The historian Michael Kater has estimated that nineteen thousand young German women were sent to annexed territories of Poland to assist with the resettlement operations. More women staffed the German post offices and railways. These figures do not include Himmler’s SS and police personnel, the German Red Cross, those at armed forces headquarters and field offices, and government contractors. Transfers, leaves, deaths in warfare, and visits or relocation of family members for periods of time further complicate the task of arriving at good estimates. But the estimate given earlier for women in the East—half a million—is based on the total number of documented nurses, secretaries, teachers, wives, Nazi Party activists, and resettlement advisors, and covers the territories of eastern and southeastern Europe, including the areas of Poland that were annexed by Germany in 1939.
In this chapter we will meet women in the largest of these categories—teachers, nurses, secretaries, and wives—as they accepted or seized the opportunity to go east.
TEACHERS
One did not become a convert to the Nazi cause overnight; it required indoctrination and reinforcement pursued relentlessly in the Reich’s schools. For Hitler, a proper education should “burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it.” The school, according to a 1934 reform, should educate the youth in the service of nationhood and in the National Socialist spirit, and teachers had to be trained to become conduits of that spirit. Two-thirds of all German teachers attended training camps where they were subjected to physical and ideological exercises.
History lessons in German schools focused on German military prowess, past empires, and heroic pioneers. Hitler was placed within a pantheon of heroes, including Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck. Language instruction explained speech patterns not as regional dialects but as racial variants. In math class, students calculated government welfare costs for the disabled in state asylums, implanting in young minds an economic justification for the mass-murder program of the patients who were called “useless eaters.” In one textbook, students were taught how to “observe the Jew: his way of walking, his bearing, gestures, and movements when talking.” As one teacher told her students, the Jews were ugly not only on the outside, but on the inside too. An interwoven theme in all subjects was the superiority of the German race. A Jewish student in a public school later recalled her teacher appearing in the classroom one day wearing a swastika, pointing to her, and telling her, “Go to the back of the class. You’re not one of us anymore.” Those who challenged these tenets, teachers and students alike, were removed from the system. Physical beating of children who did not conform or were disobedient was common in the 1930s.
To implement the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, teachers were expected to report children with disabilities. If a child could not properly button his coat, did poorly on exams, or lacked coordination in sports or on the playground, he was reported for “screening.” In the Bavarian village of Reichersbeuern, such a lethal selection occurred in the intimate setting of a one-room schoolhouse. In 2011 I interviewed one of the former students, Friedrich K., now a man in his seventies eager to recount what he had experienced as a boy during the war. We sat outside on his terrace enjoying the customary late-afternoon coffee and cake. When we were finished, I ask
ed Friedrich K. and his wife, who had joined us, about the leading Nazis in his village. He recalled that there was the local teacher, Frau Ottnad, but she was dead. She had committed suicide. He gestured toward the nearby chapel where she was buried, and mentioned something about her gravesite, the kind of local details that inhabitants of small villages notice. I asked what she had done. He paused and looked at his wife, who nodded approvingly. Well, he explained, there was a nice little girl in our village I liked to play with. We climbed trees. She sat next to me in class. But sometimes she had seizures. It was epilepsy. And Frau Ottnad could not tolerate this. Then the girl stopped coming to school; she had disappeared from the village. We children were curious and asked our teacher, Frau Ottnad, about the girl’s whereabouts. Frau Ottnad explained that the child caused too much disruption in class and that she had to be sent away. The child never returned.
In the teaching profession, as in nursing and midwifery, what was traditionally valued as the female virtue of nurturing remained, but now it was selectively applied on the basis of “racial” criteria—judgments of who was human or “subhuman,” German or non-German, worthy of full participation in the community or subject to expulsion. Teachers took students on field trips to psychiatric hospitals—called insane asylums at the time—so that the students could appreciate their own “racial health” in the face of patients on display who were deformed and screaming. Children were coached not to feel pity for these “inferiors.” As the historian Claudia Koonz has observed, these outings went against bourgeois mores of not staring at the less fortunate and at social outcasts. Nazi socialization actually encouraged the gaze at the inferior as affirmation of one’s own superiority. One learned how to witness suffering arrogantly. It was a pedagogical technique not limited to Germany; the gaze at the inferior extended to the “subhumans” in the imperial lands of the East.
A quixotic dreamer, Ingelene Ivens was to become one of Hitler’s female combatants fighting for proper German education in occupied Poland. Ivens completed her teachers’ training in Hamburg and, as she prepared for the exams to become a certified teacher, thought about where she would like to teach. Only those with the best marks would be taken into the foreign service, so Ivens studied hard. As a child, she had visited the Netherlands with her father; she had fond memories of the city that served as the seat of the Dutch government, The Hague, and of one of its buildings in particular, the German School. Ivens awaited official word of her assignment from the Cultural Ministry for Science and Art in Berlin during the spring of 1942 as Hitler’s armies dominated Europe. Where might she be posted? There were many possibilities. The Hague would be ideal, but what about elsewhere in the Netherlands, northern France, Bohemia, Poland, Latvia, or Ukraine?
When a thin blue envelope with official stamps on it arrived, Ivens suddenly felt her heart beating faster. She slit open the envelope and read, “You are hereby assigned to the administration of the public grammar school in Reichelsfelde, District Posen.” Ivens was shocked. Her father left the room and began to telephone friends. Did anyone know where this place was? He returned as informed as he could be. Reichelsfelde was a village in the annexed territories of Poland. There was no post office in the village, no train station, no electricity, and no plumbing.
Ivens was disappointed, but there was nothing she could do. Orders were orders, and there was little time to become sentimental about Den Haag. She began to pack and plan for her journey. She was summoned to the district capital city of Poznań (Posen), where she was to make her way by foot or bike about fifteen miles to her schoolhouse in Reichelsfelde.
Ivens was one of several hundred teachers from Germany who were sent to the Warthegau region of Poland to run one-room schoolhouses in remote areas, and among thousands of teachers and teachers’ aides sent to other parts of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Bohemia-Moravia (Nazi-annexed Czech territory). Though Nazi authorities were not keen on placing single women in these rural outposts, they saw no alternative. With the ongoing war, fewer men were available for civilian desk jobs and professions. Nazi leaders were determined to pursue their “civilizing mission” in the East, no matter what the risks to single women. Schools were central institutions for converting ethnic Germans to the Nazi cause, and for creating a racial hierarchy that pushed non-German children out of the schools while developing a new elite of female educators. By March 1940, about six months after the start of the war, the Reich Education Ministry in Berlin had already instructed its regional offices across Germany to send trained teachers immediately to the eastern territories to fulfill this mission. In one region of Poland alone, some twenty-five hundred German women worked in the German-only schools, organizing the establishment of more than five hundred kindergartens. Like Ivens, these teachers had little choice in their assignments; attempts to be released from postings in places like Reichelsfelde were routinely denied. To deter defections, the Nazi Party’s Association for German Female Youths and the Women’s Organization promoted assignments in the East as a patriotic duty and adventure.
The teachers and childcare workers who ran schools and kindergartens in the Nazi East contributed to the development and implementation of the regime’s genocidal campaigns in a few key ways: by excluding non-German children from the school system; by privileging and ideologically indoctrinating ethnic Germans in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics; by plundering Jewish and Polish property and belongings for the schools and schoolchildren; and by abandoning their students, many of them orphans, when the Nazis evacuated the East. Schools were often managed by German women sent from the Reich and local ethnic Germans who assisted them. One young Latvian ethnic German woman who worked as an assistant kindergarten teacher in Poland and Ukraine recalled her work as a “Sisyphean task.” Local SS policemen kept dumping more “racially valuable” children into the school—children whose parents they had shot. Traumatized and uprooted, the children here and elsewhere in the burgeoning Nazi school system in the East were expected to learn German, sing German songs, and memorize Hitler’s maxims about proper behavior and the superiority of the German race.
NURSES
Of all the professions, it was nursing that brought the largest number of German women directly into the war and the Nazi genocide, as nurses occupied a variety of traditional and new roles in the developing racial state. They counseled ordinary women about “racial hygiene” and hereditary diseases. In Germany, they participated in selections of the mentally and physically disabled in asylums and escorted these victims to their deaths in gas chambers or administered lethal injections. In the eastern territories, they cared for German soldiers and witnessed the deprivation and murder of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews. They worked in the infirmaries of concentration camps. They consoled German SS policemen and soldiers who recoiled from the experience of shooting victims at close range. They visited ghettos on official health inspections, and they visited ghettos privately as well, out of curiosity or a desire to obtain some object or service. They stood on railway platforms while Jewish deportees locked in railway cars begged for help. They were primary witnesses of the Holocaust in Europe, and some committed mass murder as the euthanasia program expanded from Germany into Poland. Who were the Nazi regime’s nurses, and under what circumstances did they go east?
As the profession of nursing developed into a noble calling in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was limited to middle- and upper-class women. In the militaristic culture of Germany, it was expected that the “angel of the house” should spread her wings in wartime to bring order, hygiene, and maternal care to ailing German soldiers in field hospitals. Indeed, soldiers dubbed these nurses in their long white dresses and winged caps, flying from bedside to bedside, the “angels of the front.” By the mid-1930s, with the overall muting of class differences in German society thanks to the new racial hierarchy and the call for national unity, social standing no longer mattered, and Hitler’s plans for global war made the mass mobilization of nurses a nece
ssity. “Model” nurses arrived in villages to give home-care courses and to meet with and recruit young girls, especially those who were in the Hitler Youth. Recruiters enticed young women with patriotic slogans and propagandistic images of smiling nurses in exotic settings and dressed in clean white uniforms—images that presented war as an experience of healing and caring rather than one of bloodshed and violence. Many teenagers were receptive to the call to serve the Reich; they wanted to escape the village and had already been exposed to a heavy dose of hygiene and racial biology in childcare courses. Some fifteen thousand women turned out in the recruiting drives of late 1939 and early 1940, just after the Nazi conquest of Poland.
During the Nazi era, nursing took on an acutely nationalistic and ideological character. Tailored dresses and modest caps replaced the gowns of World War I. The most important piece of the new uniform was the pin, a military-style stamp of honor and organizational affiliation. Under the leadership of the SS officer and medical doctor Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the German Red Cross held informal but important ties to Heinrich Himmler, whose wife was a proud nurse. The Nazi Party regulated the certification of Red Cross nurses while it developed its own cadres of “brown nurses.” Jewish nurses were permitted to work only in Jewish hospitals, caring only for Jewish patients. To become fully certified—a status allowing for work in any hospital—a nurse had to show proof of her Aryan ancestry and political reliability.