Hitler's Furies

by Wendy Lower

  [>] She was looking to advance: In addition to the women featured here, Birgit Classen (b. 1921) was working in the Nazi Party’s Association of Lawyers, and heard through a relative of Wilhelm Kube that there were good opportunities in the East. She arrived in August 1941 in Belarus, with a group of six to seven other women, assigned to General Commissar Kube’s office in Minsk, and was questioned in Heuser case, 20 Nov. 1959, BAK, Staatsanwalt, file 9, Js 716/59.

  [>] “Sabine, quickly write this up!”: Sabine Dick testimony, 27–29 Apr. 1960, BAL, 162/5183; 14 Dec. 1960, BAL, 162/1682. Thanks to Stephan Lehnstädt, Jürgen Matthäus, and Andrej Angrick for bringing this testimony to my attention. Erna Leonhard testified against Heuser, explaining that people in the office spoke about Heuser going into the ghetto with his pistol at night, running around shooting, terrifying the Jews, who walled themselves up in fear. Statement of 14 Dec. 1960, BAL, 162/1682.

  [>] “sought our company”: Erna Leonhard testimony (14 Dec. 1960) also referred to ten other German women working in the Sipo-SD office in Minsk. Leonhard typed interrogation reports into the night, and she attended the interrogations of Jews.

  [>] decisions on the spot: Witte et al., Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, 15 Aug. 1941. On Himmler decision-making, see Wendy Lower, “‘Anticipatory Obedience’ and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–22.

  [>] who slept in the basement: Testimony of Ingeborg Gruber, Mannheim, 11 Oct. 1960, BAK, Sta, 9 Js 716/59, B162/1682.

  [>] Judenwurst: Testimony of Erna Leonhard, 14 Dec. 1960, BAL, 162/1682.

  [>] wanted more than Jewish food: The episode described in this paragraph relies on Sabine Dick testimony, 27–29 Apr. 1960, BAL, 162/1583. Leonhard also described the property depot at Gut Trostenets, statement of 14 Dec. 1960, BAL, 162/1682.

  [>] high concentrations of ethnic Germans: A series of articles appeared in July 1942 about the ethnic German celebrations in Zhytomyr surrounding the building of the kindergarten. Deutsche Ukraine Zeitung (Luzk), 1 July, 2 July, 5 July, and 9 July 1942, all on p. 3, Library of Congress Newspaper Collection. See “Vermerk,” 9 June 1942; “Einweisung von 14 Kindergärtnerinnen zur Betreuung Volksdeutscher in der Ukraine,” 21 July 1942; and “Lagebericht,” NSV, 29 Sept. 1942, Zhytomyr—all CSA, 3206-6-255, microfilm held at USHMMA, RG 31.002M, reel 6. On December 16, 1942, commissars announced that schooling was mandatory for ethnic German children. Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung (Luzk), 16 Dec. 1942, p. 3.

  [>] taught ethnic Germans: This file on educational materials for German youth in the East is undated; it is probably from late 1942 or early 1943. ZSA P1151-1-139. See Koch memo to general commissars about educating Volksdeutsche about racial crimes and punishment vis-à-vis the Jews. 13 May 1942, ZSA, P1151-1-120. Hoffmeyer report, 12 Oct. 1941, NARA, RG 242, T454, roll 100, frames 000661–670. See the NSV report of 11–12 June 1942 and RmfdbO report of 15 June 1942, CSA, 3206-6-255, microfilm held at USHMMA, RG 31.002M, reel 6. Irma Wildhagen and her staff of nurses set up infant-mother stations in Cherniakhiv, Novgorod Volynsk, Andreyiv, Horoshkyn, and Sadki. See the overview of NSV staff dated 11 Aug. 1942. CSA, 3206-6-255, microfilm held at USHMMA, RG 31.002M, reel 6.

  [>] wives of SS men: On Greiser’s wife, see Epstein, Model Nazi, pp. 64–66, 70.

  [>] Vera Wohlauf: Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite, pp. 191–94; and Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 91–94. The German perpetrators were from platoons of the first, second, and third companies of the Order Police Battalion 101, a unit of Hiwis, and the Radzyñ Security Police.

  [>] Two months before the massacre: Wohlauf’s marriage application, NARA, BDC, A3343-RS-G5348, frames 2214–2326. One child is listed in Julius Wohlauf’s personnel file, born 6.2.43, NARA, BDC, A3343 SSO 006C, frame 1182. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Knopf, 1996), pp. 241–42.

  [>] “before a rather large gathering . . .”: Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, pp. 244, 558 nn. 9, 12, 16.

  [>] “outrageous that women . . .”: Statement of the wife of Lieutenant Brand; quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 243.

  [>] Embodying the home front: The research of Claudia Koonz and Gitta Sereny, among others, established that male perpetrators returned from killing centers and concentration camps to nurturing wives and lovers who eased their conscience and in some cases incited their husbands to commit more crimes. When the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor was asked how he endured the daily strain of running a mass-murder factory, he replied, “I don’t know. My wife. Perhaps my love for my wife.” Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (Vintage, 1983), p. 348; on Frau Stangl, pp. 210–11, 361–62.

  [>] so reasoned a Nazi perpetrator: Steven K. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 131–32.

  [>] liquidation at Hrubieszow: Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite, p. 189.

  5. Perpetrators

  [>] All of this was done: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 4, 54, 231–32; and Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany, 1900–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also the USHMM Deadly Medicine online exhibition: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article “euthanasia” Program.

  [>] physicians and midwives: On midwives, see Wiebke Lisner, “‘Mutter der Mütter—Mütter des Volkes’? Hebammen im Nationalsozialismus,” in Marita Krauss, ed., Sie waren dabei: Mitläuferinnen, Nutzniesserinnen, Täterinnen im Nationalsozialismus (Wallstein Verlag, 2008).

  [>] shootings of Polish psychiatric patients: Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (Penguin, 2010), pp. 75–76.

  [>] asylums at Grafeneck and Hadamar: Interrogation summaries of nurses and office personnel at Hadamar (Irmgard Huber, Margarete Borkowski, Lydia Thomas, Agnes Schrankel, Isabella Weimer, Judith Thomas, Paula Siegert, Johanna Schrettinger, Hildegard Ruetzel, Elfriede Haefner, Elisabeth Utry, Ingeborg Seidel, Margot Schmidt, Christel Zielke, Lina Gerst), in trials against Wahlmann, Gorgass et al., OLG Frankfurt am Main, SS 10.48, 188/48. B162/28348 fol. 1, Urteil, 68–98. Experienced euthanasia nurse and early Nazi Party member Maria Appinger was also sent to Minsk for five months in the first part of 1942; see Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 235.

  [>] “relieved the suffering” of German soldiers: Burleigh, Death and Deliverance. Bishop von Galen had suspected this would happen; on August 3, 1941, in his famous speech in Münster denouncing euthanasia, he warned that “it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other ‘unproductive’ persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!”

  [>] Those killed were “our own”: Pauline Kneissler’s public statement about deployment to Minsk, reprinted in Ulrike Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten: Krankenschwestern im Nationalsozialismus (Mabuse Verlag, 2006), p. 176. Kneissler had been transferred to several facilities to introduce lethal procedures and expand the killing. Promoted to deputy senior nurse, Kneissler could order others to kill and administer deadly doses of sedatives, such as Vernal and Luminal. According to Kneissler, each day about seventy-five patients died in her ward. When her boss asked her if she was ready to murder without his guidance and supervision, she responded that she could, and had done so already. See Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 254. Georg Lilienthal’s research on biographies of Hadamar perpetrators focuses in part on a medical aide, Lydia Thomas, whose story follows the same outlines as that of Pauline Kneissler, with deployment to the East in earl
y 1942, and provides confirmation of gassings of German civilians injured in bombing raids and wounded Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. See Georg Lilienthal, “Personal einer Tötungsanstalt Acht. biographische Skizzen,” in Uta George et al., Hadamar: Heilstätte, Tötungsanstalt, Therapienzentrum (Jonas Verlag, 2006), p. 286. See also Ernst Klee, Euthanasie (NS-Staat): Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Fischer Taschenbuch, 1983), pp. 372–73; Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 231–32; and Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 153, 160, 296–97.

  [>] an asylum in Meseritz-Obrawalde: Susan Benedict and Tessa Chelouche, “Meseritz-Obrawalde: A ‘Wild Euthanasia’ Hospital of Nazi Germany,” History of Psychiatry 19 (1): 68–76; Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 214. One of the chief doctors at Meseritz-Obrawalde was a woman, Dr. Hilde Wernicke. Additional sites in Poland were the former Bernardine Monastery at Koscian, about thirty miles from Poznań, and Tiegenhof or Dziekanka in the Warthegau.

  [>] “a place of immense misery”: Quoted in Benedict and Chelouche, p. 71. See also Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Harvard University Press, 2005) and Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 153.

  [>] “caused extra work . . .” and “who had fled . . .”: Indictment text quoted in Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 160.

  [>] it took at least two nurses: Testimony of nurse Anna Gastler, reprinted in Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten, p. 170.

  [>] A county seat: Material in this section relies on Der Generalbezirk Wolhynien, Der Reichsminister für die besetzten Ostgebiete, Hauptabteilung I, Raumplanung, 5 Dec. 1941, 9, 30; and Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941–Jan 1943 (Holocaust Library, 1989), Report #24, 16 July 1941.

  [>] “gimlet-eyed runt”: Statement of Karl Wetzle, Oberhausen, 21 June 1963, BAL, 162/4522 fol. 1, II, 204 AR-Z 40/1961.

  [>] the “dead” one: Statement of Moses Messer, date unclear, corroborated by Arie Gomulka, 3 May 1964, Haifa. The testimonies were mostly given to the Untersuchungsstelle für NS-Gewaltverbrechen beim Landesstab der Polizei, Israel. Originals are deposited at BAL, B162/4522, fol. 1, II, 204 AR-Z 40/1961. Many of the testimonies were published earlier in the memorial book Pinkas Ludmir: Sefer-zikaron li-kehilat Ludmir (Tel Aviv, 1962).

  [>] “Such sadism . . .”: Statement of Moses Messer, date unclear, corroborated by Arie Gomulka, 3 May 1964, Haifa.

  [>] “like a cattle herder”: Testimony of Kurt Bettins, who from September 1941 to April 1943 was the chief of the POW camp in Volodymyr-Volynsky, reprinted in Die Tat, 27 Oct. 1978. Press clippings file, trial records, BAL, II, 204 AR-Z 40/61, Band II.

  [>] “nasty habit”: Arie Gomulka, 3 May 1964, Haifa, BAL, B162/4522, fol. 1.

  [>] “did not think highly . . .”: Statement of Erna Schirbel Michels, 12 June 1968, p. 434, BAL, B162/4523, fol. 1. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998).

  [>] farmers who were working: Banquet scene in Piatydny, testimony of Josef Opatowski, p. 7, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, ZIH 301/2014. I am grateful to Ray Brandon for providing this document. Other witnesses in Ukraine have described the banquet table scene at other mass shootings. See The Holocaust by Bullets: The Mass Shooting of Jews in Ukraine, 1941–1944, Exhibition Catalogue, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and Yahad in Unum, p. 44.

  [>] “Polish woman . . .”: Ginsburg was born in 1932, in the nearby town of Maciejow. Thanks to his daughter Suzanne Ginsburg for providing the memoir Noike: A Memoir of Leon Ginsburg, 2011 (see pp. 120–21). See also Martin Dean, ed., Encyclopedia of Ghettos and Camps, vol. 2, Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe (Indiana University Press, 2011); and Shmuel Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1941–1944 (Yad Vashem, 1990), pp. 127, 145, 186. There was a smaller ghetto in the nearby town of Ustilug. Spector’s account of the ghetto is derived from testimonies published in the Volodymyr-Volynsky Memorial Book.

  [>] “wooded area . . .”: Dieter Pohl, “The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 50, 52, 58.

  [>] Petris led their visitors: Horst Petri recalled the date of the visit as the fall of 1943; Erna dated it to the summer of 1943. However, the SS official, Fritz Katzmann, had been assigned to Danzig–West Prussia by the end of April of that year. In the Grzenda guestbook, Hilde Katzmann expressed gratitude for an afternoon visit on November 3, 1942, and a similar signature appears for a visit of March 29, 1943. Horst interrogation of 8 Sept. 1961; Erna interrogation of 15 Sept. 1961. File archive no. 403/63, BStU Aussenstelle Erfurt, fol. 2 Untersuchungsvorgang, 000131, Stasi Archive, BAB. On Katzmann’s role in the Holocaust in Galicia, see Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, 1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Oldenbourg, 1996). In the famous “Katzmann report” of 30 June 1943 presented at the Nuremberg trials (Nuremberg material, USA Exhibit 277, Document L-18), Katzmann detailed the ghettoization, murder, forced labor, and property theft carried out against the 434,329 Jews in the region. Katzmann was not captured after the war and is believed to have died in 1957.

  [>] As the women walked away: Erna Petri, first interrogation, 25 Aug. 1961. File archive no. 403/63, BSTu aussenstelle Erfurt, fol 2 Untersuchungsvorgang, 000131. Stasi Archive, BAB.

  [>] “these were the children . . .”: Interrogation of Erna Petri, 19 Sept. 1961, pp. 1–7. Horst and Erna P. Trial, BAB, BStU 000050–57; USHMMA, RG 14.068, fiche 566. Also see Wendy Lower, “Male and Female Holocaust Perpetrators and the East German Approach to Justice, 1949–1963,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 56–84, where some of this material on Erna Petri was published. I thank Oxford University Press and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for permission to use passages (in altered form) from that article.

  [>] “bloodthirsty camp commandant”: Recollection of Stepan Yakimovich Shenfeld, 1943, quoted in Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 91.

  [>] “natural-born killer” and “chaff cutter”: Excerpted testimony, BAL, Indictment Lemberg Trial, p. 273; USHMMA, RG 17.003m, reel 98, included in the preliminary Austrian investigation of Karl Kempka. Indictment of Hansberg, formerly Willhaus, BAL, 162/4688, 208 AR-Z 294/59. The Lemberg Prozess, April 1968, BAL, 162/2096, 274.

  [>] “the sport of it . . .”: Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (Jewish Publication Society, 1980), p. 311. One account has Heike also shooting at “Jewish targets” with a pistol supplied by her parents as a birthday gift. Eliyahu Yones, Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lvov in the War Years, 1939–1944 (Gefen House, 2004).

  [>] laborers in the garden: Similar balcony shootings occurred not far away at the Jaktorow camp, and in the Plaszow camp near Cracow. Author interview with Gisela Gross, 3 Nov. 2005, Baltimore.

  [>] “marriage markets”: There are numerous examples of SS men who married or had office relationships with their secretaries, including the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself, whose “second wife” was his assistant Hedwig Potthast; Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller and his secretary Barbara Hellmuth; general of the Waffen-SS Jochen Peiper and his secretary Sigrid Hinrichsen; Alois Brunner and his aide Anni Roeder. In these cases and many more, the separation of private and public spheres was not so clear-cut. See Gudrun Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der “SS-Sippengemeinschaft” (Hamburger Edition, 1997), pp. 201–2.

  [>] The children of the new elite: As the Hanweg case shows, children became embroiled in the Holocaust. In a number of cases they were brought to the wor
kshops and interacted with Jewish laborers, who were then killed. See Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (Random House, 2005). See also Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite, pp. 219–21, for the case of an SS father, Hermann Blache, who brought his son to the Tarnów ghetto for target shooting.

  [>] childrearing, femininity, and pleasure: On the sexual revolution, see Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton University Press, 2005).

  [>] “his lovely bunny”: Landau, in Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot: Ein kollektives Tagebuch, Barbarossa 1941 (btb Verlag, 2002), pp. 215, 243, 261, 282, 297, 714. Landau’s entries are corroborated by official reports of Einsatzgrupppe C. Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 21, 13 July 1941. Excerpts of original diary are held in the Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, reference E1 317 III Bue 1103–1113. Excerpted copies of the diary are in investigation files BAL 162/22380. Passages of the 13 July entry are excerpted and translated in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (Konecky & Konecky, 1991), pp. 97–98.