Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  2. The East Needs You

  [>] “Just as our ancestors . . .”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Houghton Mifflin, 2001; orig. pub. 1943), pp. 653–54. According to Albert Speer’s account, Hitler also stated that the loss of a few hundred thousand Germans on the battlefield did not play a role, since these losses could easily be made up in two or three years. Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (Macmillan, 1976).

  [>] “The German colonist . . .”: Monologues of 8–10 Sept. 1941, Adolf Hitler, Table Talk, 1941–1944 (Enigma Books, 2008), p. 24.

  [>] “essence of blood purity”: Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Berg, 2011), p. 56.

  [>] a best-selling novel: Woodruff Smith, “The Colonial Novel as Political Propaganda: Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum,” German Studies Review 6, no. 2 (May 1983): 215–35.

  [>] “Into the east wind . . .”: Verses in Wir Mädel singen, 1938 edition of the BdM songbook, cited in Michael Kater, Hitler Youth (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 102–3.

  a major exhibit in Berlin: Das Sowjet-Paradies: Ausstellung der Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP; Ein Bericht in Wort und Bild (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942; excerpted at www.calvin.edu). On May 18, 1942, a group of leftist resisters, including Herbert Baum and four other Jews, bombed the exhibit. Goebbels and the SS and police retaliated with the arrest of 500 Jews and their families; 250 of the men were shot immediately, the others sent to camps. The event figures in the diaries of Goebbels and Victor Klemperer. See Regina Scheer, Im Schatten der Sterne: Eine jüdische Widerstandsgruppe (Aufbau Verlag, 2004).

  [>] “the expanses in the East”: Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (Yale University Press, 2003), p. 92. See also Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (Random House, 2005), p. 120; and the memoir by Hildegard Fritsch, Land, mein Land: Bauerntum und Landdienst, BDM-Osteinsatz, Siedlungsgeschichte im Osten (Schütz, 1986).

  [>] In the Nazi imagination: Wendy Lower, “Living Space,” in Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 310–25; Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 1; Hitler, Table Talk; Götz Aly, Hitlers Volkstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und Nationalsozialismus (Fischer Verlag, 2005), pp. 230–44; Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (1992): 667–94; and Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Der Drang nach Osten: Zur Entwicklung der Landespflege im Nationalsozialismus und während des 2. Weltkrieges in den eingegliederten Ostgebieten (Minerva, 1987), p. 132.

  [>] in wagon trains: For photos of migrating Volhynian Volksdeutsche in covered wagons, see Maximilian du Prel, ed., Das deutsche Generalgouvernement Polen: Ein Überblick über Gebiet, Gestaltung und Geschichte (Buchverlag Ost Krakau, 1940).

  [>] “those deep layers . . .”: Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton University Press, 1947; reprinted 2004), p. 6. See also Eric Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Harvard University Press, 1996).

  [>] campaigns of kidnapping: Himmler’s Hegewald speech, 16 Sept. 1942, NARA, Record Group 242, T175, R 90. The International Tracing Service is still reuniting families: http://www.its-arolsen.org/en/archives/collection/organisation/child-tracing-service/index.html. During the war children were exploited as laborers and subjected to medical experiments. Karoline Diehl and her husband, the SS doctor Sigmund Rascher (a Himmler confidant known for his cruel medical experiments at Dachau), kidnapped their children; arrested in late 1944, Diehl and Rascher were killed in concentration camps in April 1945 for their deceit and financial wrongdoings. See Stanislav Zamečnik, Das war Dachau (Comité International de Dachau, 2002).

  [>] roles as resettlement administrators: Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut (Wallstein Verlag, 2003), p. 520.

  [>] “euphoria of victory”: Christopher R. Browning, with Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Yad Vashem, 2004), p. 427.

  [>] how many Germans: The figures for German personnel in the East are scattered in the documentation, and the reports that do exist are from specific agencies at different points in time. The figures presented here are mainly from the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, the Reich Commissariat Ostland, and the General Government. Women were among the staff of more than 15,000 German personnel in SS offices in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine and Ostland in 1942, the 14,000 agricultural inspectors, and the 6,600 Germans in the Central Trade Corporation East (ZHO); in Ukraine there were more than 440 rural outposts that made up the commissariat, and each had at least one secretary. See the statistics in Timothy Patrick Mulligan, The Politics of Illusion and Empire: German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1942–1943 (Praeger, 1988), pp. 22–23, 26, 28–29, 64 (n. 18), and 72. Mulligan’s source is NARA, Record Group 242, “Übersicht über die Verwaltungseinteilung des Reichskommissariats Ukraine nach dem Stand vom 1. Januar 1943,” T454, reel 92, frame 000933. The figures for occupied Poland are from Bogdan Musial’s Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement (Harrossowitz Verlag, 1999), pp. 82–90. Within the figures cited by Musial were local ethnic Germans (Volksdeutschen). Additional personnel records that show female typists and administrators in the Ostland are in Record Group 242, A3345-DS-A156, Ostministerium, frame 316, selections for Riga, “Einsatz in den besetzten Ostgebieten, 28 Nov. 1941, Zentral- und Personalabteilung RKO-RmfdbO, NARA, Record Group 242, T454, roll 15.

  [>] nineteen thousand young German women: Kater, Hitler Youth, p. 89.

  [>] “burn the racial sense . . .”: Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (Penguin, 2006), p. 273; see also pp. 265, 268.

  [>] “observe the Jew . . .”: George L. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), p. 80, excerpted from Jakob Graf, Familienkunde und Rassenbiologie für Schüler (Munich, 1935).

  [>] “Go to the back . . .”: Susi Podgurski, interview 5368, segment 32; Henry Adler, interview 10481; both in SFA. See Pine, Education in Nazi Germany, pp. 15–16. Thanks to Danielle Knott for her research help.

  [>] The child never returned: Author interview with one of Ottnad’s students, friend of the epileptic child, Friedrich and Freya K., 11 Apr. 2011. Letter from witnesses to author, Reichersbeuern, 6 May 2011. Local history corroborated in the personnel and party records of Ottnad, who was an active Party member, a district leader of the NS Women’s League after July 1933, in the Nazi Teachers’ League and local manager of youth programs beginning in 1934. See NARA, Record Group 242, BDC records, NSDAP Parteikorrespondenz: A3340-PK-I450, frames 1336–1340; NS Lehrerbund: A3340-MF-B095 frames 96–98, NSDAP, MFOK: A3340-MFOK-Q036, frame 1496. Author interview with Ottnad’s student has been deposited in USHMMA. For teachers’ reliance on the Party for basic materials, see Kalender 1938-NS Lehrerbund, private collection of former teacher, Weil im Schönbuch, Germany.

  [>] Claudia Koonz has observed: Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 154.

  [>] “You are hereby assigned . . .”: Ingelene Rodewald, . . . und auf dem Schulhof stand ein Apfelbaum: Meine Zeit in Polen, 1942–1944 (Cimbrian, 2007), pp. 8–11.

  [>] one of several hundred: Harvey, Women and the Nazi East, pp. 97, 98–101.

  [>] “Sisyphean task”: Rosemarie Killius, ed., Frauen für die Front: Gespräche mit Wehrmachtshelferinnen (Militzke Verlag, 2003). See correspondence from Eugenie S., pp. 59–60.

  [>] Of all the professions: See Jean H. Quataert, “Mobilizing Philanthropy in the Service of War: The Female Rituals of Care in the New Germany, 1871–1914,” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, eds., Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experi
ences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Within the 1930s network of organizations were the Evangelical-Lutheran and Catholic associations of nurse-nuns (for example, the Diakonissen des Kaiserswerther Verbandes, the Caritasschwestern des dritten Ordens) and the National Association for Nurses (Reichsbund für Schwestern); the Blue Sisterhood merged with the Nazi Schwesterschaft.

  [>] “angels of the front”: See Birgit Panke-Kochinke and Monika Schaidhammer-Placke, Frontschwestern und Friedensengel: Kriegskrankenpflege im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg; Ein Quellen- und Fotoband (Mabuse Verlag, 2002), p. 18; and Ulrike Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten: Krankenschwestern im Nationalsozialismus (Mabuse Verlag, 2006).

  [>] During the Nazi era: For the interconnections between the DRK, NSV, and NSDAP, see record of the German Red Cross at NARA, Record Group 242, Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, Göttingen Stab, BDC, A 3345-DS-N001, frame 298. Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten.

  [>] The Nazi Party regulated: Vorschlagsliste DRK to NSDAP, Ortsgruppenleiter Aschaffenburg, 7 Dec. 1938. NARA, Record Group 242, Misc. Collection, Personnel Records, Göttingen, A 3345-DS-N001. Decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, 28 Sept. 1938, on the segregation of Jewish nurses’ training and patient care. Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat (C. F. Mueller Verlag, 1996), p. 243.

  [>] “hatred is noble”: Lotte Guse, Kriegserlebnisse einer Krankenschwester: Vom Kreuz beschützt, Der Spiegel, August 11, 2008, http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/authoral bumbackground/2413/vom_kreuz_beschuetzt.html. The quote is taken from the recollections of a former wartime nurse, Lotte Guse.

  [>] “evil people in Russia”: Frauen an der Front: Krankenschwestern im Zweiten. Weltkrieg, documentary film, Henrike Sandner and Dirk Otto (MDR, 2010). Thanks to Renate Sarkar for sharing this film with me.

  [>] Ohr found them inspiring: Erika Summ, Schäfers Tochter: Die Geschichte der Frontschwester (Zeitgut Verlag, 2006), p. 76.

  [>] “I wanted more”: Erika Summ, “Ich will mehr,” quoted in Jürgen Kleindienst, ed., Als wir Frauen stark sein mussten: Erinnerungen 1939–1945 (Zeitgut Verlag, 2007), p. 60; and in Summ, Schäfers Tochter, p. 89, the same phrase is used as a heading, with an exclamation mark.

  [>] nurses and female health aides: See Panke-Kochinke and Schaidhammer-Placke, Frontschwestern und Friedensengel; and Birgitt Morgenbrod and Stephanie Merkenich, Das Deutsche Rote Kreuz unter der NS-Diktatur, 1933–1945 (Ferdinand Schöningh), 2008.

  [>] two years of intensive training: Summ, Schäfers Tochter, pp. 95–115.

  [>] A patriot and an idealist: Author interview with Annette Schücking-Homeyer, 30 March 2010, Lünen, Germany.

  [>] barred women from the judiciary: Diemut Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 638.

  [>] her wartime labor duty: On the obligatory labor of German women during the war, see Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Berg, 1989), p. 227.

  [>] Of all the female professions: Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany, 1900–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 159; and Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

  [>] “The Führer developed . . .”: NARA, RG 238, NMT, NO-470; Pauline Kneissler, Nazi Party #3892898. She was born in Kurdjunowka, Ukraine. Nazi Party Card, BDC, NARA II, A3340-MFOK-L005, frame 0972.

  [>] “not all particularly serious cases”: All quotations in this paragraph and the next two are from Kneissler and testimonies cited in Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten, p. 176.

  [>] rise of the modern workplace: The metropolitan scene was bewildering for young women from the countryside. They experienced new forms of stress as well as liberation. See Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (University of California Press, 1997), pp. 2–4; and Frevert, Women in German History, pp. 156–57, 218.

  [>] “Thank God . . .”: Ilse Schmidt, Die Mitläuferin: Erinnerungen einer Wehrmachtsangehörigen (Aufbau Verlag, 2002), p. 16.

  [>] some five hundred thousand: The largest employer of German female clerical aides during the war was the German military. The most numerous female military aides, the Blitzmädchen or “lightning girls,” were a wartime version of the Weimar New Woman, not the virtuous, milk-maiden types who embodied the home front. For one secretary’s story, see Killius, Frauen für die Front, testimony entitled “Ich hatte es nicht schlecht,” pp. 69–70. Women who were assigned to military support positions “to free up men for the front” were placed in a hierarchy with the power to issue orders, from the senior staff leader down to a regular military aide. See Franka Maubach, “Expansionen weiblicher Hilfe: Zur Erfahrungsgeschichte von Frauen im Kriegdienst,” in Sybille Steinbacher, ed., Volksgenossinnen: Frauen in der NS-Volksgemeinschaft (Wallstein Verlag, 2007), p. 105. See also Ingeburg Hölzer’s memoir, “Im Sommer 1944 . . .” (Wim Snayder Verlag, 1994); and Franz Wilhelm Seidler, Blitzmädchen (Wehr und Wissen, 1979).

  [>] She grew up in the Saxon town: Liselotte Meier Lerm, statement of 19 Sept. 1963, BAL, 162/3425.

  [>] higher status as a civil servant: Dagmar Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, trans. William Templer (University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 128.

  [>] “strong, brave women”: Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, p. 41, quoting Hitler and von Schirach at a BdM rally in 1936. See also pp. 72, 101, 133, 237.

  [>] “very punctual, hard-working . . .”: Biographical material in the indictment of Altvater and verdict, BAL, B162/4524, pp. 20, 22.

  [>] Sabine Dick: Dick testimony, 27 and 29 Apr. 1960, Berlin, Oberstaatsanwalt Koblenz files, Koblenz 9 Js 716/59, Sonderkommission P. Thanks to Jürgen Matthäus for these files from the Heuser and RSHA investigations.

  [>] secretaries who worked in this: Gerhard Paul, “‘Kämpfende Verwaltung’ Das Amt IV des Reichsicherheitshauptamtes als Führungsinstanz der Gestapo,” in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallman, eds., Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: “Heimatfront” und besetztes Europa (Primus Verlag, 2000), pp. 45, 47. There were 31,374 in the Secret State Police (Gestapo), 12,792 in the Criminal Investigation Police (Kripo), and 6,482 in the Security Service (SD); see Klaus Hesse, Kay Kufeke, and Andreas Sander, eds., Topographie des Terrors (Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2010), p. 127. Thanks to Rachel Century for sharing her sources on secretaries.

  [>] “open, honest character”: NARA, RG 242, BDC, to RuSHA marriage application, and A3343-RS-D-490, frames 1584, 1640, and 1656.

  [>] scholar Michael Mann: Michael Mann determined that Germans who lived in territories lost or occupied under terms of the Treaty of Versailles (such as Silesia and Rhineland), and who were active in the Nazi era, were ultranationalist, and constituted a higher percentage of perpetrators. See his “Were the Perpetrators of Genocide ‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Real Nazis’?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14 (Winter 2000): 331–66, especially pp. 343–46.

  [>] Josefine Krepp: Biographical information on Josefine Krepp Block, Vernehmung, VCA, Strafbezirksgericht Wien, 15 Oct. 1946, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Vg 8514/46.

  [>] Austrians cemented their future: On the Vienna Model, see Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  [>] The route to success: Additional cases of female stenographers sent from Gestapo offices in the Reich to the occupied territories are in Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 116–19.

  [>] The tremendous growth: According to Richard Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, 2004): “The rapid emergence of a service sector in the economy, with its new employment possibilities for women, from sales positions in the great department stores to secretarial work in the booming office
world (driven by the powerful feminizing influence of the typewriter), created new forms of exploitation but also gave increasing numbers of young, unmarried women a financial and social independence they had not enjoyed before” (p. 127). According to Elizabeth D. Heineman in What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (University of California Press, 1999): “Whether they enthusiastically or reluctantly joined the war effort, women born roughly from 1918 to 1928 who remained single during the war contributed to it more directly than any other working group of German women” (p. 64).

  [>] “failing to meet their obligations . . .”: Frevert, Women in German History, p. 186.

  [>] two understandings of marriage: Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 49–50; and Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, p. 111.

  [>] some 240,000 German women: See Gudrun Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der “SS-Sippengemeinschaft” (Hamburger Edition, 1997), p. 11; and Kathrin Kompisch, Täterinnen: Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau, 2008), p. 204. Documentation on SS marriage applications survived the war and is archived in the United States and Germany, as part of the collection of the Berlin Document Center. See also Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut (Wallstein Verlag, 2003), pp. 54, 62 n. 47.

  [>] Vera Stähli: She was born in 1912, in Hamburg, so she does not fit into the category of post-WWI baby boomers, but her professional pre-WWII experience was largely shaped by WWI backlashes of late Weimar and Nazi era and by earlier trends of women in the emerging metropolitan working culture. When asked in her marriage application about the history of her family, she stated that she did not know much about her parents. Either she was concealing something considered by SS examiners to be “harmful” in her genetic past, or she was not close to her parents. “Fragebogen” Wohlauf, NARA, BDC, A3343-RS-G5348, frames 2214–2326.