Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  As the Allied occupation authorities in Vienna began to scale back on the internment, investigation, and prosecution of suspected war criminals, the Austrian judiciary felt little pressure to punish their “own,” including defendants such as Gertrude Segel Landau. In 1948, under examination, Gertrude found herself in a favorable climate. She and Felix had divorced in 1946, and now he was at large; he had escaped from an Austrian jail in 1947. Gertrude played up her postwar compliance with the authorities as a demonstration of her wartime innocence. She was no criminal; she was a good Austrian citizen. She pointed out that it was she who had dutifully appeared when summoned, she who had answered questions. If you are looking for evidence of guilt, she told prosecutors, look for my fugitive ex-husband, not me. It was an effective strategy on Gertrude’s part; she was not prosecuted.

  Austrian investigations revealed a Viennese web of perpetrators and accomplices in the SS and police offices in Galicia, the former Habsburg territory of Ukraine. This network included secretaries and wives of the SS chiefs. On October 19, 1946, Austrian police arrested Gertrude’s neighbor, Josefine Block, in her apartment on the Apollogasse. These two female perpetrators in Drohobych lived on the same street in Vienna again. Josefine Block was charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and murder. While searching her apartment, the police found wartime photographs. They also found old Nazi newspapers, an anti-Semitic diatribe by Joseph Goebbels (Das Buch Isidor, 1928), a bayonet, and a sword.

  When questioned, Block admitted to being present at the crime scenes. She said her husband gave her a free hand in making decisions and managing the market garden where she employed Jews, and that she established her own workshop with Jewish workers. Josefine insisted that she never hurt, beat, or killed anyone. The Jewish witnesses who accused her were on a revenge mission, she claimed.

  Fear of revenge was one of the wartime rationales for killing all Jews, including children, and it was typical for perpetrators to cite that fear when they were questioned or prosecuted. Himmler had warned his men that Jewish children and the Jewesses who begot them would rise up and avenge the death of Jewish men. To Josefine Block, the war was lost, and now she was being subjected to a victor’s justice led by Jews. She argued that the Jews were going after her because her husband, the Gestapo man who was really in charge, had fallen in battle in 1944.

  The desperate Block tried every angle. As a war widow, she tried to blame the crimes on her dead husband. She attempted to present herself as a rescuer, taking credit for saving the life of the survivor who denounced her. Like Vera Wohlauf, she brought up her pregnant condition as a mitigating factor. How could she parade around with a whip and beat a Jewish girl when she was in a late stage of pregnancy herself? None of the witnesses, neither former German colleagues nor Jewish victims, mentioned that she was pregnant. They did recall her taking her infant in a baby carriage down the main street and ramming Jewish laborers with the carriage.

  In a final twist of morality and maternity, Block—the self-proclaimed “friend of the Jews” —argued that her Jewish accuser, her former seamstress, was the real murderer: the seamstress had abandoned her own one-year-old child in the ghetto so that she could save herself, Block said. Astonishingly, this shameless “blame the victim” defense was taken seriously in that Vienna courtroom in 1949, and Block was acquitted. Exhibiting little understanding for the survivor witnesses, lacking critical distance from the anti-Semitism of the defendants, and favorably biased toward their fellow Austrian citizens, the male judiciary remained skeptical of the testimony of Jews, especially of statements that described atrocious female behavior.

  More than a decade later, in the 1960s, Vera Wohlauf was summoned for questioning about her husband’s wartime activities. Before the interrogation began, she was informed that as the wife of the accused, Julius Wohlauf, she was not legally obligated to testify and had the right to refuse to answer questions without providing an explanation. She understood the law but asserted that she wanted to testify regardless.

  She met with investigators on the morning of November 19, 1964. When asked about her time in Poland, Wohlauf explained that she arrived in Radzyñ at the end of July 1942. She was driven there with the wife of another member of the Order Police, Lieutenant Boysen. Skipping over the period of the ghetto massacres in August 1942, Vera asserted that she returned to Hamburg in September. Though she claimed that during her stay in Poland she remained exclusively in Radzyñ, the questioner was able to place her at Miedzyrzec, the site of the massacres. Vera admitted that a German family with whom she was acquainted was managing an agricultural estate at the edge of Miedzyrzec. Now and then she and her husband visited this family, the Doberauers, and stayed overnight. Vera did not want to reveal that she and Julius had gone to Miedzyrzec for another reason.

  Question: Do you remember during your stay in Poland with your husband that you were driven to an Einsatz [operation]?

  Vera Wohlauf: This question cannot be answered in one sentence, at any rate one cannot reply with a simple yes or no to this question.

  Question: Frau Wohlauf, then I will now present to you more concretely which case I have in mind and ask you please to respond to me afterward in the most exact manner possible. Various witnesses, former subordinates of your husband, reported that on a day in autumn 1942 you accompanied your husband to M[iedzyrzec] to a Jewish expulsion. According to the witness statements, you and your husband were picked up by truck from your lodging in Radzyn. You supposedly wore a military coat. In M[iedzyrzec] you allegedly watched over the Aktion and when the Aktion was over that evening you were driven back to Radzyn.

  Vera Wohlauf: In the first moment, it seems to me the claim that I wore a military coat is impossible. At any rate, I have no memory of that. I would rather not present my statements here too definitively because I can imagine that one will draw any conclusions that do not correspond with the true facts of the case. On the other hand, I would like to avoid giving you the impression that I am not being truthful, if for example through several witness statements the opposite can be established. At any rate, I cannot remember whether I wore a military coat. It is worth considering that for any reasons it could have happened differently. I was pregnant at the time and my clothes did not fit me properly. For example it is possible that my husband put his coat over me for whatever reasons.

  On the day before the execution in question we traveled to the Doberauer home [located near the crimes in Miedzyrzec]. I just wanted to visit the Family Doberauer, it was not known to me that the following day an Aktion would take place and I assume that it was not known to my husband. I cannot give good reasons for this assumption; in any case the behavior of my husband did not indicate to me that he knew of the events that occurred the following day. I cannot remember whether we spent the night after the questionable Aktion at the Doberauers’ or whether we returned to Radzyn. It is more likely that we returned to Radzyn.

  After we spent the night at the Doberauers’ my husband left early the following morning. I did not know what he would do. Around midday, Frau Doberauer and I went to town to do some shopping. Regarding that, please note that I personally went along because Frau Doberauer asked me to. We were totally surprised when we saw in town a crowd of persons. A lot of persons stood around, presumably Polish. As we got closer, we saw that people in brown uniforms and members of the SD got people out of their homes and organized them into columns on the street. Frau Doberauer and I did not know what was happening. I did not even know that the concerned people were Jews. From the discussions right there at the site, I pretty soon concluded that these were Jews. I was very shaken by these events, although I in no way was aware of the actual fate of the Jews. I presumed, and I was convinced that this was an evacuation of Jews who were to move to new apartments and lodgings elsewhere. I do not know what happened thereafter. In any case, my husband was suddenly there. I heard a shot and saw an old woman collapse. The shot was fired from a man in a brown uniform. Then my husband said:<
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  “Have they gone mad, I will disarm them immediately.” Then I went away with Frau Doberauer. I do not remember whether my husband accompanied us or not.

  Allegation: Frau Wohlauf, I must state again that witnesses reported that you drove with [the men] in the morning to the Aktion and returned that evening, and that the members of the [Order Police] Company were outraged that you were inspecting the Aktion.

  Vera Wohlauf: I am sticking with my depiction. The contrary statements of witnesses are not correct. I never knew about all of these things. For the first time I learned of them after my husband was arrested and the attorney reported about these serious allegations levied against my husband. It is entirely illogical that my husband brought me from Radzyn to this Aktion, while I had absolutely no idea about these things and besides that I was pregnant.

  It is clear from Wohlauf’s testimony that her pregnant condition was useful to her after the war as evidence of her non-involvement in the massacre. Note that even years later both Wohlauf and the examiner preferred to use the euphemism Aktion and the word “expulsion” (Aussiedlung) rather than more explicit terms. Wohlauf tried to minimize the mass killing to one “execution in question” and downplayed her husband’s role in it. We know from the historian Christopher Browning’s extensive research on Julius that he was a seasoned killer and liked to flaunt his role as the unit commander; one of the policemen in the unit mocked him as “the little Rommel.” Targeting eleven thousand Jews, the Miedzyrzec deportation was the largest operation that this unit of Order Police Battalion 101 carried out. Wohlauf expected that hundreds of Jews would be killed on the spot, and indeed 960 Jews were later buried by the survivors. This particular Aktion was unique, not only in its scale, but also in its open slaughter on the streets and in the marketplace. Julius and Vera knew what they were getting into.

  Like most German defendants and witnesses who were questioned after the war about the massacres, Vera Wohlauf’s evasive statements contain contradictions and clues. She admitted that she saw the clearing of the ghetto and the shooting of an elderly Jewish woman. She identified the shooter as a man in a brown uniform, the color worn by leading Nazis and local collaborators, attempting to vindicate her husband, who wore a green uniform, the color worn by regular policemen. When asked directly if she had joined her husband at an Aktion, she replied that she could not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead she focused on the coat, perhaps not realizing that it was a potentially incriminating detail—that the coat linked her to the police uniform and her proximity to the executioners. In the end she admitted to wearing the coat, and explained that her husband gave it to her because she was pregnant, because she might have needed to cover herself. Would ill-fitting clothes warrant the wearing of a heavy military overcoat on a hot August day? Perhaps Vera and Julius were engaging in some form of role-playing, and the coat was his way of including her in his unit, as “one of the guys.”

  In any case, Vera Wohlauf was not herself investigated. There was no clear evidence that she killed or assisted in the killing. Julius Wohlauf, who had resumed his career in the Hamburg police after the war, was arrested in 1964 and later sentenced to eight years in prison for aiding and abetting in the murder of more than eight thousand Jews in Poland. Yet Vera claimed that she had “absolutely no idea about these things” during the war or until her husband was arrested.

  The crimes of Elisabeth “Liesel” Willhaus did not go unnoticed after the war: she was one of sixteen people indicted for the mass murder of more than four hundred thousand Jews in the Lviv (Lemberg) region. She and “Fräulein Hanna” were among the very few Nazi female perpetrators to be indicted in West Germany for murder.

  In July 1943 Liesel’s husband, Gustav, was sent into combat with a Waffen-SS unit. Liesel remained in Lemberg as long as she could: her industrial hometown in the Saar was being heavily bombed. But the Red Army advanced into Galicia and recaptured Lemberg in July 1944, and Liesel returned home. Gustav was killed in action near Frankfurt in late March 1945. As a war widow with a small child, with no pension from her husband, Willhaus stayed with her family for a while. By 1948 she had married again, this time to a lawyer. She and her new husband started an Automat business. When war-crimes investigators found her in 1964, they also discovered that Liesel and her new husband had a record of petty crimes and violations in connection with their business.

  In spite of her wartime and postwar history, investigators were unable to prosecute Elisabeth Riedel Willhaus. Since her place in the Nazi killing machinery was not formalized in an official position, there was no wartime documentation to corroborate witness testimony. She was at the crime scene and carried out mass murder publicly, but she was not held legally responsible.

  German prosecutors noted that a remarkable number of people testified against Willhaus. Not all of them were Jewish survivors, whose memories and testimonies were considered less reliable by many German courts; indeed, some of those testifying against her were her husband’s former SS colleagues. All those who testified, as well as the prosecutors who elicited the stories, were shocked by the behavior of the commandant’s wife, which “went against all preconceived notions of ‘female character.’” Yet, for reasons that remain unclear, she was released.

  At the end of the West German “Lemberg Trial,” the presiding judge asserted that it was not the task of the court to master Germany’s past; it was the task of the entire nation, “whose conscience cannot be released and all its stains wiped clean here in the court.” Several members of that nation, defendants with blood on their hands, were allowed to go home with their conscience cleared by their peers.

  The fate of perpetrators tried in East Germany was radically different. Erna Petri was among the few German women—perhaps the only one—to be convicted for shooting Jews. She was one of 12,890 people to stand trial for Nazi-related war crimes and crimes against humanity in East Germany between 1945 and 1989. About ninety percent of these cases were prosecuted by 1955, mostly before 1951. Her trial was among a dwindling few still taking place in the 1960s.

  By the time Erna Petri was arrested, in August 1961, she was no stranger to the East German police system. The previous summer, her husband, Horst, had been arrested for alleged anti-state activities. The Stasi had been reading the Petris’ mail, in particular their correspondence with their son in West Germany. They suspected that Horst, a member of the local agricultural commune, was sabotaging the latest collectivization drive; he had made critical comments about the government in a letter to his son. They also believed that Horst had denounced an East German agent to the West Germans. But when the police searched the Petri house, they did not find much evidence of anti-state activities, only some “agitational literature,” including a political pamphlet from West Germany. Their more significant finds were a guestbook and photographs from Grzenda showing Horst Petri as an SS Untersturmführer lording over the SS agricultural estate with his wife. The guestbook contained the names of senior SS and police and Wehrmacht officers, as well as the signature of the wife of the region’s most notorious Nazi mass murderer, the chief of the SS and police for District Galicia, Friedrich Katzmann.

  Arrest photographs of Erna Petri

  It is not clear if the uncovering of Horst’s Nazi past was a coincidence. In any event, based on seventeen witness testimonies, mostly of former Polish and Ukrainian laborers on the estate, the state prosecutor in Erfurt determined that Horst and Erna Petri tortured, abused, and killed forced laborers as well as Jews who sought refuge in the forests, fields, and multiple barns and stables of the SS manor at Grzenda.

  The confessions extracted under duress from Horst and Erna Petriare rich in detail and on the whole consistent with one another. German prosecutors determined that Horst’s postwar activity, which was the cause of his initial arrest, was relatively insignificant, certainly not as reprehensible as the clear record of his and his wife’s “most severe war crimes and crimes against humanity.” They were interrogated for three h
ours together on August 31, 1962; each of them was asked to confirm or deny the crimes of the other. Husband and wife also stood trial together on September 10–15, 1962. In the audio record of the trial, Erna is so forthcoming about the details of her criminal actions that the prosecutor cuts her off with the comment “Thank you, we have heard enough.” Horst was less forthcoming. In the end, however, the court decided that Horst’s crimes were worse than Erna’s.

  In his final judgment, the judge wrote that their heinous deeds “occurred 18 to 20 years ago, but it is in the interest of the establishment of a democratic people’s justice and essential that these crimes be uncovered without regard for the passage of time.” Furthermore, he asserted, since the imperialist powers continued to plan crimes against peace and humanity, all peace-loving peoples had to be vigilant in preventing the recurrence of such crimes. In the interest of justice, he insisted, such crimes must be punished. The judge argued that in this particular case the terror system of Hitler’s fascism came into clear expression, as his dictatorship controlled not only Germany but also the occupied territories. In practice “this terror was built on unscrupulous elements, to which these accused belong.” In typical East German Cold War rhetoric, the court asserted that Horst Petri was not only a fascist then and now but also a demonstrated enemy of the socialist construction of “our workers’ and farmers’ state.”