by Wendy Lower
Front cover of a recruitment brochure for resettlement advisors in Poland: “German Woman! German Girl! The East Needs You!”
While many found going east disorienting and difficult, for others it was an exhilarating passage to adulthood, one that gave them freedom for self-realization. Driving through the “partisan-infested” forests of Minsk, the young entertainer Brigitte Erdmann took in the scenery with her “eyes wide open,” relishing the danger. She was now a true woman in her own eyes, having lost her virginity in Belarus, and noted that she was honored with the title of Frau, not Fräulein. Erdmann asserted her femininity and sexuality in this new terrain while other women expressed their masculinity. After volunteering for the Patriotic Women’s Association, training as a nurse, and taking an oath to the Führer as a member of the German Red Cross, one woman decided to leave her unhappy marriage and a small daughter at home, and headed to Belarus and Ukraine. In letters she sent home from the front, she expressed her loyalty to the Nazi campaign as a “manly” honor. She wrote enthusiastically about the chance she now had to stand guard with a weapon in her hand, just like the men. Her official role as a nurse was clearly women’s work, but when she had the opportunity to be a soldier, she willingly took up that role as well. We do not know if she fired the weapon, or upon whom. But like many other women in uniform, she relished the pride of being a victorious occupier, and she described the East as her place of liberation.
Nurses, teachers, and secretaries entered several zones of Nazi genocidal warfare near the front and behind the lines. Most women did not directly witness the mass shootings of Jews, but they encountered some aspect of it. Only in hindsight did they recognize (or admit) the massive scope of what was happening around them, along with their own contribution to the regime’s criminal policies. At the time, the Holocaust was unfolding in different forms and at different stages across Europe; it was neither a foregone conclusion nor the comprehensive event that we perceive it as today. Working from within the machinery of the Holocaust, female functionaries often saw the parts but did not grasp their sum. Stories about the mass shootings in September and October 1941 in Babi Yar, Ukraine, circulated among soldiers and other personnel moving to and from the front and were reported in official German newspapers and Soviet bulletins. German propaganda units filmed pogroms in Lviv (Lemberg), and this newsreel footage was shown in German theaters. Beginning in January 1942, the Allies sent out multiple warnings to the Germans and their collaborators that those engaging in such atrocities would be punished after the war. But credible information about the gassing operations such as those at Belzec, which started in March 1942, was almost nonexistent. At any rate, back in the Reich most did not care about what was happening to the Jews who were deported east. They were more concerned about the fates of loved ones fighting against “Judeo-Bolshevism.”
If female functionaries, professionals, or family members of the ruling elite in the eastern territories witnessed or heard about an atrocity against Jews, it was easy to downplay it as part of the general horror of war, or shrug it off as someone else’s plight. Anti-Semitism had desensitized Germans to the plight of Jews, and especially to foreign ones. Initially shocked by the violence of the war and genocide, most adjusted to it and learned to cope with it. As long as Hitler’s armies were victorious, many thrived. The most unpleasant images could be compartmentalized in one’s mind, overshadowed by one’s daily routine, repressed by other immediate needs. One had to endure, no matter what. Wasn’t that expected of a virtuous woman, a loyal German patriot, a racially superior Aryan?
In the East, nurses like Erika Ohr in their Red Cross garb were the most visible and numerous German women—in military and SS hospitals and in soldiers’ homes. One ubiquitous propaganda image of the time shows cheerful nurses at a railway station providing relief to soldiers and SS policemen in transit. There was no nurses’ welcome, however, for POWs and Jews who passed through these stations in transports, such as an inadequately heated train carrying 1,007 Jews from Düsseldorf to the Riga ghetto in December 1941. The train had broken down more than once because it was so overloaded with human cargo, and had stopped at several stations. While stopped, Jewish deportees tried in every way possible to obtain water and to get out of the train. Having realized during the journey that whatever awaited them was not good, they tried to attract the attention of travelers standing on the platform and threw them postcards and letters in the hope of alerting loved ones and others to their fate. At one station stop in Latvia, as in many others across Nazi-occupied Europe, German Red Cross nurses appeared on the platform. The temperatures were below freezing, and it was after one in the morning. The nurses presented the German police guards with a warm beef and barley soup. While the Germans enjoyed their soup, Lithuanian railway personnel turned off the lights in the “Judenwagen.”
Nurses at a soldiers’ relief station
The Red Cross nurse Annette Schücking would become a rare exception to the pattern of indifference and cruelty, documenting not only the horrors she heard about and saw but also her own moral indignation. On the eve of her departure for Ukraine in the early autumn of 1941, a journalist friend warned her that Russia was no place for her, that they were “killing all the Jews there.” At the time, unable to imagine that such a horrifying statement could possibly be true, she remained curious about the prospect of German expansion and was in favor of the “civilizing” mission in the East. Soon, however, her friend’s words were to echo in her ears.
On her journey by train to her new position, two uniformed Germans entered Schücking’s compartment at the station in Brest Litovsk. In the Nazi-occupied East, train compartments were Aryan-only spaces; the “natives” traveled in cargo and third-class wagons. In the compartments candid conversations often took place among German strangers in transit. The uniformed men started to speak with Schücking and her female colleague, another nurse. “All of a sudden, one of them told us how he had been ordered to shoot a Jewish woman in Brest,” Schücking later recalled. The soldier said that the Jewish woman had begged for mercy, pleading that she had to take care of her disabled sister. He summoned the sister, and then he shot them both. Schücking and her companion were “horrified, but didn’t say anything.” This was their introduction to the East.
It was not long before nurses, secretaries, and teachers began to grasp that the war was, as Hitler wished, a campaign of annihilation. For individual women, this moment of realization occurred during the journey eastward, through overheard conversations in a train compartment, at border crossings, or when they arrived. Nearing the genocide was jarring for most women, since they were not formally trained in violence, either in committing it or responding to it. For the men it was different. Young men in Germany were raised in the shadow of the Great War’s graphic, often homoerotic imagery of brutal trench warfare. Hitler Youth exercises often focused on overcoming fear, shaming cowards, enduring pain, and forging bonds of comradeship like those of a gang. Marching exercises, shooting drills, public flogging of nonconformists, and regular military training prepared the young men to kill. German women, aside from the specially trained camp guards, did not receive this degree of military indoctrination, nor did they form gangs to commit atrocities.
Because very few of the women who arrived in the East had received any preparation for witnessing or assisting in the execution of mass murder, their varied reactions to the Holocaust reveal less about their prewar training than about their character and ideological commitment to the regime. Their responses ranged from rescue at one extreme to direct killing at the other. But the number of ordinary women who contributed in various ways to the mass murder is countless times larger than the relative few who tried to impede it.
Mostly out of curiosity but also greed, many German women came face-to-face with the Holocaust in one of the thousands of ghettos in the East. These “Jewish-only” districts were officially forbidden territory; those who entered did so against Nazi regulations. Despite official
threats and bans (or perhaps because of them), ghettos became sites of German tourism. And there was a distinctly female feature of this emerging pastime: shopping trips and romantic outings.
One Red Cross nurse in Warsaw had nothing planned for her day off. Her friend greeted her with a surprise: “Today we are going in the ghetto.” Everyone goes there to shop, her friend gushed. The Jews place all their personal items on the street, on planks and on tables—soap, toothbrushes, cosmetics, shoelaces, whatever you need. Some even offer the items from their own extended hands. The nurse was hesitant to defy German rules by entering the ghetto, but her friend reassured her that German doctors were going there also, to meet with Jewish doctors who would advise them about treating typhus. The two women went on their shopping adventure, and afterward the nurse recorded that she’d seen poverty and filth much worse than in the Polish population. The “ghetto smell” of “those people” stayed with her for a long time.
The Nazi policy of ghettoizing Jews began in Poland in October 1939, a month after the start of the war. Over time, the ghetto took on many forms and uses. In the villages the ghettos could consist of a few streets behind the main road, demarcated by some barbed wire. Viewing the Jews as a racial threat and an enemy, the Germans incarcerated them as a segregationist and security measure. Any facility could serve this purpose. German military commanders and SS and police officers would arrive in a small town such as Narodichi, Ukraine, announce that a ghetto would be formed, and demand that the Jewish population report for registration. In Narodichi, Jews were brought to a local club; elsewhere they were brought to a school, factory barracks, or synagogue, or even locked in abandoned railway cars, while plans for the mass shooting or deportation to a camp were made. It could be days, weeks, or months before these plans were carried out, depending on available SS and police forces, the whims of local officials, and the orders of higher-ups such as Heinrich Himmler and his regional deputies. In the interim, local German officials, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others “traded” with the trapped Jews, who were forced to give up their personal possessions—everything from houses to coats and boots—for a loaf of bread or some firewood. Skilled Jewish laborers were selected from the ghetto population and assigned to heavy labor, such as road construction, and to war-related industries in mining, textile, carpentry, and metalworking. Though these Jewish-only incarceration sites were often referred to as ghettos, they were in fact way stations to sites of mass murder, as well as “death crates,” in Goebbels’s term, since famine, typhus, and suicide took the lives of hundreds of thousands who were boxed into them.
The German showgirl Brigitte Erdmann also had her “ghetto” experience in Minsk. Among the male admirers who attended her performances was a senior commander in the Organization Todt, a militarized construction agency that was a primary exploiter of Jewish labor. The German commander promised the showgirl that on their next date they would go to the ghetto. In Minsk, the ghetto was fenced in with barbed wire six feet high and guarded by two watchtowers. With some seventy-five thousand registered Jewish inhabitants at the outset, the ghetto was less than a square mile in size, spanning thirty-four streets lined with one- and two-story wooden structures and bounded by the Svisloch River and the old Jewish cemetery. An additional thirty thousand German and Austrian Jews were housed separately in a special section of the ghetto. Waves of mass shootings and executions in poison gas vans reduced the ghetto population by two-thirds. In the autumn of 1942 there were some nine thousand Jews left, mostly laborers but still some non-working women, children, elderly, and the infirm. Close to eight thousand of them would also be killed in 1943 as the Minsk ghetto was transformed into a labor camp.
Showing off his authority, appealing to the showgirl’s desire for danger, the commander assumed that it would be impressive to “slum it” in this forbidden part of town. And Erdmann fell for it, writing home to her mother how she looked forward to the date. A similar courtship that occurred on the grounds of the Cracow ghetto was captured in a series of photographs showing a smiling young secretary and an SS man in a picturesque carriage touring the ghetto.
A young teacher in Poland on a Hitler Youth training program wrote home about what she witnessed in the Plöhnen ghetto in July 1942. Though the two hundred young women on the tour had been taught about Poland as a place of “filth, laziness, primitiveness, fleas, lice and scabies,” she was not prepared for what she saw. Just imagine this, she wrote to her parents—you go along the street and come across houses with the windows and doors boarded up, but inside is the noise of people constantly moving and murmuring. A large fence surrounds the houses, but the fence does not reach the ground. You look down and see feet shuffling below, some bare, some with slippers, some in sandals, others in shoes. It smells like a mass of unclean people. If you stand on your toes and peek over the fence, you see bald heads. Then suddenly you realize that it is a ghetto, and that all those people penned up in there must be Jews. One Jewish cobbler at his work “who smiled sadly” made her anxious and confused. She was relieved when she and the other girls left town. That disturbing ghetto scene was behind them. She could put the “disappearing” Jews out of her mind.
Peering into the ghetto was more than a gesture of curiosity. It was an act of voyeurism that affirmed German superiority and the “new order” in the East. To a German observer, the world of the eastern Jew was that of an exotic, distasteful native. In the confines of the ghetto, the threatening “other” had been defeated and was being eradicated. In German thinking, Jews were a species verging on extinction, and their inevitable demise evoked a cruel fascination and pride. A female journalist reported on the Lodz ghetto as an “unreal city” of Jews in “greasy kaftans,” while a student wrote home that the “streets and squares swarm with Jews roaming around, many of them criminal types. What are we to do with this vermin?” Leaving the ghetto was likened to a return to civilization, a regaining of one’s control and place among the powerful. The daughter of the Nazi district chief of Warthegau, Poland, wrote to her fiancé about her adventures in the Lodz ghetto:
It’s really fantastic. A whole city district totally sealed off by a barbed-wire fence . . . You mostly see just riff-raff loafing about. On their clothes, they have a yellow Star of David both behind and in front (Daddy’s invention, he speaks only about the starry sky of Lodz) . . . You know, one really can’t have any sympathy for these people. I think that they feel very differently from us and therefore don’t feel this humiliation and everything.
For the young women who were assigned to the East or who volunteered to go—to fulfill their ambitions and the regime’s expectations, to experience something new, and to further the Nazi cause—witnessing the realities of the Holocaust had usually several effects: it hardened their determination; it confused or eroded their sense of morality (as is clear in the assertion that the Jews in the ghetto “don’t feel this humiliation”); and it triggered the search for outlets to escape what was unpleasant or repulsive, for opiates such as sexual pleasure and alcohol. Vodka flowed in nightly parties with, as one secretary recalled, the “nice lads in the office.” Moral transgressions seemed to go unnoticed, or at least unpunished. Scenes of unfettered greed and violence were common. Those who tried to stay away from what was happening around them found few places untouched by the war’s devastation, and little solace.
Interaction with Jews and mass murder entered into these women’s everyday lives in unexpected but recurring ways. Ingelene Ivens, the young teacher posted near Poznań, Poland, was shocked when she looked out from her one-room schoolhouse at the playground one day. Two emaciated Jewish laborers who had fled from a nearby camp were standing there, frightened and seeking some refuge at her school. Perhaps they assumed that children would be sympathetic. Instead the children shouted at them, and one boy threw rocks. Ivens intervened and scolded the rock-thrower while the Jewish men fled. A German Red Cross nurse recalled a day in Lviv when she and other nurses were walking around town and
decided to go to the old Jewish cemetery. Suddenly the nurse realized that she was treading on a fresh mass grave only loosely covered. Her foot had sunk into the earth—“it stuck on me, that was unpleasant.” When a group of secretaries picnicked in the woods near Riga, they smelled the stench of the fresh mass graves. They decided to choose another spot. In the town of Buczacz, Ukraine, an agricultural overseer’s wife noticed that the water tasted strange and realized that Jewish corpses had polluted the ground water.
Mass murder transforms the people who witness it and the physical environment where it occurs. What were rolling hills and sylvan glades in Ukraine became rough craters, death mounds, and scorched patches. Hillsides held graves dug several meters deep (embankments absorbed bullets); riverbanks, too, served as shooting sites (blood flowed into waterways); and ravines like Babi Yar were filled with corpses and lime chloride, then dynamited shut. Personal effects and human remains could be seen on the sandy patches and barren spots between towns. The sites of mass murder were not in out-of-the-way places; rather, they often encroached on the shortcuts and paths that connected towns. Peasants, laborers, and schoolchildren traversed them on foot and with carts. They were places of curiosity and of pillaging. The sites of genocide were also the very spots where German men and women went for recreation—the meadows for picnics, the forests for hunting, the swimming holes for cooling off and sunbathing.