by Wendy Lower
It was in Nazi press circles, where she worked beginning in 1934, that Liesel became strongly affiliated with the movement and met Gustav Willhaus, a mechanic and the son of a maître d’. Gustav had joined the Nazi Stormtroopers in 1924 and the SS in 1932. He was a street brawler, and by the time he met Liesel he had the scars to prove it. Although Willhaus could barely spell and was assessed by his peers as illiterate, he was appointed sales manager of the Nazi newspaper Westmark, located in Saarbrücken, about twelve miles from Liesel’s newspaper office. During their courtship, Liesel joined the Nazi women’s organization and did her share of expected charitable work in the Nazi Party’s welfare and relief organizations.
What these young lovers saw in each other is hard to imagine from the official documentation on the couple. In their terse letters to SS headquarters in Berlin, they made demands while not delivering what was requested of them. More than anything, the two come across as small-town swindlers out to exploit the system. Hitler wanted the movement to unify all racially valuable Germans, including working-class Volk like Liesel and Gustav. The Party prided itself on being anti-intellectual and anti-establishment, an attitude that suited these two perfectly. The fact that they came from the politically volatile region of Saarland may have helped them advance in the SS and the Party, or at least to persuade Berlin examiners to overlook their shortcomings and dubious characters.
A territorial entity created by the Treaty of Versailles, the Saarland was historically a contested borderland between France and Germany, with a rich repository of iron ore useful for rearmament. At Versailles the Allies had intended to contain the German war machine, end the perpetual Franco-Prussian conflict, and stabilize the region ethnically. The fact that the French occupied the Saarland to carry out the League of Nations mandate, though, fueled the German campaign to undo the victors’ peace. Hitler and Goebbels ramped up Nazi propaganda and political agitation in the Saarland to prepare for the region’s annexation. In January of 1935, the year when the League of Nations mandate was due to run out, a plebiscite was held. Ninety-one percent of the population voted to join the Third Reich. Liesel Riedel and Gustav Willhaus worked at the center of this Nazi agitprop campaign, which escalated into a civil war. Riedel did her part in the press office, while Willhaus was among the uniformed thugs who beat up communists and socialists. In his victory speech in Saarbrücken, Hitler declared, “In the end, blood is stronger than any documents of mere paper. What ink has written will one day be blotted out by blood.” Versailles, the Locarno Treaty, anti-aggression pacts—these were all just scraps of paper to Hitler. The Volk, war, and imperial expansion were all that mattered.
On October 30, 1935, amid the national hysteria over Hitler’s first big political triumph in Europe, Liesel and Gustav got married. But this brazen pair wed without the official approval of the SS, which could have been grounds for Gustav’s dismissal. Gustav could not obtain the proper documentation to complete his genealogical chart. Part of his family was from East Prussia, another part from France, which complicated the process. But the couple’s application was delayed by another issue: Gustav was Protestant and Liesel was Catholic. Liesel’s family pressed for a wedding ceremony in a Catholic church and wanted the two to raise their children as Catholics. At first Gustav agreed to this, but SS examiners in Berlin strongly advised him to reconsider. Gustav had a duty to raise his children as Nazis, they insisted. The Nazi position was that the Catholic Church was more than an institution of faith. It was a “political organization that was intent on undermining the Nazi cause and German nationhood.” Gustav was “losing his grip over the ideological direction of his family” if he allowed the children to be Catholic. Gustav and Liesel complied. They had found a common future as members of an emerging elite; family expectations and religious faith could be cast aside. Now their allegiance was to the Party and the SS.
As dutiful members of the Community of the Volk, Gustav and Liesel Willhaus tried for a few years to have a child. Finally, in May 1939, their daughter arrived, a few months before the outbreak of war in September. Gustav completed his combat training in Himmler’s army, the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the SS. After filling a desk job in the economics and administrative main office of the SS in Berlin, he was called into action—not on the military front, but in the Nazis’ “war against the Jews” in the occupied territories.
In March 1942 Gustav was assigned to manage Jewish prisoners working in the armaments industry in western Ukraine, in Lviv (called Lemberg in German). He must have impressed his superiors with his ruthlessness, because he was later promoted to commandant of Janowska, the biggest labor and transit camp in Ukraine. At the perimeter of Janowska he received special housing, a villa large enough for his family. Liesel Willhaus and the couple’s daughter, now three years old, joined him there in the summer of 1942.
Erna Kürbs grew up a farmer’s daughter in Germany’s agricultural heartland of Thuringia. Her family had lived in the village of Herressen for centuries. The community was small, just a few hundred hard-working people who were proud of their sixteenth-century mill, seventeenth-century church, and nineteenth-century promenade. Herressen lay on the side of a hill above a river valley, surrounded by fields of wheat, beets, and barley. Seemingly isolated, it was only ten miles from Weimar, the birthplace of Germany’s failed experiment in democracy.
If Germany developed a split personality during the 1920s of Erna’s youth, then Weimar was its nerve center, radiating electrifying pulses of modernity and shocking backlashes. Already in 1925 the right-wing völkisch parties had begun to take over the Thuringian state parliament, and a Nazi Party district chief was calling for the racial screening of all representatives. Much has been written about Hitler’s failed “beer hall” coup in 1923 and his showmanship in the subsequent trial, which served as his first national stage. But few know that after his conviction for treason the courts banned him from public speaking throughout Germany, with the exception of Erna’s Thuringia. The reason for this exception was not that Weimar politicians were determined to uphold free speech in their budding democracy; rather, it was that Nazi Party activists had so effectively infiltrated that state that Thuringia could provide a haven for Hitler and a platform for his annual Party rally, moved in 1926 from Munich to Weimar. For Hitler, Thuringia provided a model of how the system of democracy could be destroyed legally from within, by swamping the parliament with Nazi delegates and cultivating the movement in the countryside with aggressive electioneering. In fact, when the Nazi Party reached its peak of popularity in free elections, capturing 37.4 percent of the national vote in the Reichstag election of July 31, 1932, Nazi Party delegates in Erna’s region garnered even more of the vote, 42.5 percent. The Party’s biggest supporters, here and elsewhere, were people like Erna—lower-middle-class Protestants and farmers.
In the German countryside, young women of Erna’s generation were expected to keep the family farm running, laboring sun-up to sundown. The new cinema and mass advertising that tantalized young women with images of dazzling cities and rags-to-riches love stories made such drudgery all the more frustrating. And yet few women—who made up more than 54 percent of the agricultural workforce in 1939—were able to escape the farm. Like Erna, these young single women (and widows), though not formally recognized or paid, were essential to family businesses. The assumption was that this female workforce did not need much of an education to keep the traditional household economy intact. In Herressen, Erna went to a public school for seven years, followed by one year as a household servant in a neighboring town. This was the extent of her experience beyond the village—until, in 1936, the “sweet sixteen” Erna attended a local dance. There she met the man who would become her husband—Horst Petri, a rising star in the Nazi movement.
This encounter would change her life, as she wished, but in unimaginable ways. The tall, handsome Horst was a local loudmouthed Nazi Party agitator and SS man who enchanted Erna with his big plans. He spoke of restoring the
honor of his heroic father, who died for the Fatherland in the Argonne Forest in World War I, and of the renewal of a Greater German Reich. He had strong political views and romantic feelings for Erna, which she found irresistible.
Prior to establishing the Nazi Party cell in his small town in Thuringia in 1932, Horst Petri had become interested in agricultural science and economy. He was fascinated by the figure of the soldier-farmer, the romanticized, militarized notion of the Aryan peasant whose duty was to stem the tide of urbanization. Petri read the bestseller Volk ohne Raum and started to believe that Germany’s future was threatened by the lack of imperial lands—not territory overseas in Africa, but land to the east in continental Europe. His early commitment to the Nazi movement and his particular interest in its agricultural mission captured the attention of the Reich “farmer leader” and first chief of Himmler’s Race and Resettlement Office, Dr. Richard Walther Darré, the “blood and soil” expert, author of Peasantry as Life-Source of the German Race (1929), New Nobility from Blood and Soil (1930), and Pig as Criterion for Nordic Peoples and Semites (1933). Darré heavily recruited farmers to the Nazi Party, and he took Horst Petri under his wing. With Darré as his mentor, Horst completed a university degree in agriculture at Jena and SS training at Buchenwald and Dachau. His career path in the SS and as Darré’s ideal of the soldier-farmer seemed limitless.
After a yearlong courtship Erna became pregnant. The two immediately submitted their marriage application to the SS Race and Resettlement Office. At eighteen, Erna was a young prospective bride (most women at the time married between the ages of twenty-five and thirty). The couple received Himmler’s blessing but not that of Erna’s own father, who disliked Horst. But it was too late. The two wed in July 1938. Erna was no longer the farmer’s daughter; she was the wife of an SS officer and an official member of the SS family tribe, to which she would make her contribution as a racially prized mother. Horst junior was born in November 1938.
Erna Petri in Thuringia, late 1930s
Sometime in the late 1930s, Erna Petri was photographed in Thuringia sitting on what looks like a DKW (Dampf-Kraft-Wagen) motorcycle. The photograph was enlarged and glued into her personal album, among Nazi-era memorabilia that Erna treasured for many years after the war. It is a striking photo—the last snapshot in which Petri radiates youthful innocence. Wearing an apron, with her hands on the steering bar and feet on the pedals, she appears ready to take off on a whirlwind ride.
Look closely at that photo and you can see the budding Nazi perversion of womanhood. True to her generation, she enjoyed the modernity of motion. The National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps had a large following among lower-middle-class members like the Petris, who could not afford a Volkswagen but enjoyed the thrill of auto racing and the motorcycle. In Erna Petri’s Germany, the earlier “unrestrained individualism” of the New Woman of the Weimar era —who would have straddled the motorcycle in shorts, sporting a bob and lighting a cigarette—was bridled by new forms of conformity and racial hierarchies. Interwar German desires for national unity, a Community of the Volk, were transformed in the Nazi era into the crudest, most exclusionary and criminal form of racial club, and Petri had become a proud and adventurous member.
Petri’s patterned apron was no symbol of domestic placidity. On the contrary, in Hitler’s Germany it was a female expression of German superiority, in the form of order and cleanliness. Even before the Nazi takeover, the Colonial Women’s League in Germany had promoted the notion that efficient housekeeping was an expression of “cultural and biological Germanness.” In the Nazi empire this was taken to an extreme. German women were expected to carry out a civilizing mission that entailed bringing “superior” methods of housekeeping and domestic order to the primitive lands of the East. Even the term “cleansing” took on a violent meaning. It became a euphemism for pogroms, and for removing “inferior” races through deportation and, ultimately, mass murder.
In the summer of 1942, under the auspices of Himmler’s Race and Resettlement Office, Horst and Erna Petri were given the task of cultivating and defending a Polish plantation in eastern Galicia. Horst’s ideological fantasies were materializing, and his dutiful, aproned wife was by his side to join him in the crusade.
Women like Erna Petri embodied the two extremes of German femininity—the liberated woman on the one hand, the traditional housewife on the other. They experienced childhood in the Weimar Republic but adulthood in Hitler’s Germany. Having grown up in a bewildering world of rapid urbanization, seesawing economic crises, and tumultuous mass politics, this lost generation of women had to find its bearings in Hitler’s Third Reich.
The Nazi movement did not turn the majority of German women into blind followers or subjugate them into baby-making machines for the Reich. Rather, its racial-utopian goals and nationalist agenda sparked a revolutionary consciousness among ordinary Germans and excited a new patriotic activism. Women learned how to navigate a system that had clear limits but also granted them new benefits, opportunities, and a raised status, especially as they went east, where they joined the governing elite. In other words, they were an odd—and often confused—amalgam of the two eras.
Hitler told them that the war was a fight for Germany’s existence, the ultimate showdown between the Aryan and the Slav, between German fascism and Judeo-Bolshevism. Even after years of schooling and indoctrination, after seeing the violent forces of radical politics on the streets of Germany, hearing about the terror regime in action at camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, being exposed to official and popular forms of anti-Semitism, these German women were still not prepared for what they saw and experienced when they crossed the borders of the Reich and entered Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltics. And no one could have imagined what some would do there.
3
Witnesses
Arrival in the East
THE RED CROSS NURSE Erika Ohr soon forgot about her lonely departure by train from Germany. It was mid-November 1942. Hitler’s forces were spread unevenly along the eastern front, a major Soviet counteroffensive was about to explode, and another Russian winter approached. The train crossed the border into Poland, and suddenly “everything looked totally different: the countryside, the houses, the train stations, the script on the signs.” Ohr saw bombarded villages for the first time. Around her the soldiers whose destination was Stalingrad stopped carrying on as they had been; there was no more joking or singing. Ohr realized that, despite Nazi radio and newsreels touting German superiority, the war was dragging on longer than expected. Back home, Stuttgart would soon experience its heaviest aerial bombardment to date. The Nazi push for world hegemony was being decided on the eastern front, and that was where all eyes were turned, including Erika Ohr’s.
To Ohr, the journey east seemed as endless as the horizon. The train passed slowly through Belarus on its way toward Ukraine. Out the window there was not much to see but the blur of gray plains interrupted by occasional patches of bare birch trees. The incessant turning and screeching of the train wheels added to the monotony. There appeared to be no life whatsoever in this foreign land, no people, hardly a bird. Inside the train car, soldiers were lying among their packs. Some had nodded off; others reread old newspapers.
When Ohr finally arrived in the provincial capital of Zhytomyr, about ninety miles west of Kiev, it was late in the day. She was pondering what to do next when she heard female voices speaking German. Ohr noticed and decided to approach two women, military aides in uniform. They arranged for a driver and carriage to bring her to the surgical hospital across town, her new workplace. Located in a former school, the hospital accommodated about one hundred patients. It was nothing like the soldiers’ hospital near Stuttgart where she had trained. This Ukrainian outpost stank of blood, pus, and urine. Frostbitten soldiers wailed in pain. Bullets, shrapnel, and limbs had to be removed. There was no time for welcome or orientation.
Another idealistic nurse underwent an even more difficult entry. After completin
g a quick course in nursing in Weimar, she arrived in the summer of 1942 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and went straight to work on her first day there. The wounded kept streaming in, and she had to assist with one operation after another. Some two hundred suffering soldiers called out for her help. She darted from one bed to the next administering injections, suppressing the senses of the combatants while hers exploded under the stress. Before the day ended she had abandoned her post and fled to her room. She crawled into her bed, curled up in a ball, wrapped her arms around her head, and bit down on her index finger like a child. How could she have dreamed of the war as an adventure?
For Ohr as for so many others, crossing into the East was a Nazi rite of passage, a separation from the familiar, which brought with it a sense of isolation amid the unknown. In official bulletins and recruitment propaganda, the newly occupied parts of Poland and Ukraine were described as a proving ground, an environment where one’s toughness and commitment to the movement were tested. Entering this realm marked the start of a deep transformation of these women’s lives. Initial impressions became indelible memories. One nurse arriving in August 1942 in Vyazma, Russia, recorded her first encounter with “the enemy.” The train station where she disembarked was located next to a large POW camp. Masses of emaciated Soviet prisoners peered at her “like animals hanging on the barbed-wire fence.” Descriptions of the landscape as barren and the inhabitants as animal-like or even invisible were typical of German colonialist rhetoric in letters of the time and would persist in memoirs penned decades later.