by Bill Yenne
With these words, he correctly predicted that the aerial assaults on the Reich by the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force Bomber Command would increase exponentially, and that the Anglo-American Allies would at last make their cross-channel invasion of northern France in 1944.
“In this winter,” he ordered, “stand, believe, strike back, fight, never give way—whereupon [victory] will come.” He continued:
Regarding the completion and a winning of the war, we must take up altogether the realization that a war must be won mentally, then physically…. Only he who capitulates says, “I do not have the faith and the will to resist any more,” which loses and lays down his weapons. Stubbornly to last, [we stand] until we stand after the peace treaty is won.
We want to show the Englishmen, Americans, and Russian untermenschen that we are harder, we, the unswerving we, we who become SS, we who will always be. We will be those who will remain in good spirits in the fifth and sixth year of the war … with humor, with will…. If we do that, then many will take us as an example for themselves and will become like us…. If we are mentally … correct, then we will win this war by the laws of history and nature, because we possess the human values, which embody naturally higher and stronger values.
Himmler concluded his remarks at Posen with words that were appropriately mystical and visionary. It was as though he had stirred himself into an Ariosophist trance.
“Into the distance we see them, because we know them,” he exclaimed. “Therefore, we are more fanatical than ever … more courageous, more obedient, and more decent devoted to our obligation. We want to be worthy of der Führer, Adolf Hitler. [We are the] first SS men in the long history of the Germanic people standing before us. Now we think of der Führer, our Führer, Adolf Hitler, who will lead the Germanic Reich to [take] us into the Germanic future.”
As the words were shouted, Himmler was met with the usual choruses of “Unser Führer Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”
CHAPTER 18
The Witches of the Schutzstaffel
AS WE PICTURE Heinrich Himmler speaking to the assembled leadership of the Schutzstaffel, we imagine an all-male fraternity of Black Knights. Little has been said about the women of the SS, and much of what has been said can be filed under the heading of misinformation.
One popular conspiracy theory tells of Himmler having created an autonomous, secret women’s unit, known as Sonderkommando H,—the H standing for hexen, meaning witches. However, this special corps seems to exist only in the fantasy world of modern gamers. Indeed, through the years, the SS Hexen seem to have inhabited mainly sensationalist and fetish films and fiction, where seductive images of beautiful blonde women in tight black leather flourish.
Nevertheless, the precedent for women existing among a corps of knights goes back into the medieval history that Himmler so loved. Though very little has been written about them, female knights, known as chevalière in French or ritterin in German, did exist. These terms did not apply to the wives of men who held the title of knight—chevalier or ritter—but to the female equivalent of the man under arms.
The first knightly order to admit women under arms was probably the Italian Frati della Beata Gloriosa Vergine Maria (Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary), better known as the Knights of the Mother of God, founded in 1233. Said to have been approved by Pope Alexander IV in 1261, and by Urban IV, who succeeded him that same year, these women warriors were granted the rank of militissa. Another such order is said to have been the Spanish Order of Calatrava, where women warriors were admitted under the name Chevalières de Calatrava.
A young member of the prewar Bund Deutscher Mädel (League for German Maidens), the girls’ component of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), as depicted in an oil painting by E. Schmitt. Heinrich Himmler observed, “We must achieve, by the selection of these girls, something truly valuable to all of us, through evoking their feeling of honor.” U.S. Army art collection
While SS Hexen did not exist, a female SS corps did, and it did begin with H. The SS Helferinnenkorps, which literally means “corps of aides” or “helpers,” was an SS auxiliary unit consisting of uniformed women who were assigned to the SS, though they were not technically members of the SS. Most of the Helferinnen came into the corps having grown up in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League for German Maidens), the girls’ component of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Organization), the Nazi Party’s youth movement. Founded in 1930 as an outgrowth of the earlier Mädchenschaften organization, the Bund Deutscher Mädel grew in popularity after 1933. It was a sort of Völkisch and nationalist analog of the Girl Scouts. Like the Girl Scouts, it was organized by age, with the Jungmädel (young maidens) for girls aged ten to fourteen, and the Deutscher Mädel for teenagers. For young women who were indoctrinated to the ideals of Völkisch ethic purity in the Deutscher Mädel, it was an easy step to the Helferinnen. During World War II, the younger members of the Deutscher Mädel were pressed into service in hospitals and as civilian administrative aides on the home front, while their older sisters were enlisted into uniform for similar tasks by the SS and the Wehrmacht.
Both the Wehrmacht and SS Helferinnenkorps were analogous to women’s uniformed auxiliary units that existed in many nations during World War II. These included the Lotta Svärd organization in Finland, the U.S. Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the USAAF Women Air Service Pilots (WASP), or the British Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as WREN. Only in the Soviet Union did women carry arms and engage in routine front-line combat duty on a large scale during World War II. There were numerous Soviet women infantry soldiers, and at least two female combat pilots achieved ace status. Katya Budanova and Lilya Litvak each shot down more than a dozen Luftwaffe aircraft.
Himmler mentioned the SS Helferinnenkorps in his Posen speech, noting that a school had been established for them at Oberehnheim (now Obernai) on the eastern slopes of the Vosges mountain range in Alsace.
While it would be interesting to imagine that Himmler had taken an interest, for history’s sake, in creating an SS Ritterinkorps, such as we see in B movies, he was reluctant at first even to consider the Helferinnenkorps. However, as he said at Posen, he was pleased with the results, and he took seriously the contributions that the women might make.
“We have already seriously thinned our ranks. Where we can still spare a man, we want to send him out,” Himmler said. “I have agreed after long hesitation … [that the SS] should create a school for SS Helferinnen. I must say, also this recent institution of the SS is off to pleasing start. Here I made it the duty of the school to be neither an institution for clerks, nor one for amusements.”
It was clear that Himmler imagined as lofty an ideal for the helpers as he did for his Black Knights.
“The German people, with all our values, must nevertheless succeed in bringing about an institution similar to the Finnish Lottas,” he said, insisting that the Germans could do as well as their fellow anti-Soviet Nordics, the Finns. “We must to achieve, by the selection of these girls, something truly valuable to all of us, through evoking their feeling of honor, that which cannot be achieved through compulsion.”
Having himself become a convert to the idea of a women’s auxiliary in the SS, he insisted that his officers fall into line, both in utilizing the capabilities of the women and in recruiting even more.
“Here, Mein Herr Obergruppenführer and Gruppenführer,” he lectured. “It is your task that every one of you endeavors himself to send this or that valuable young girl from his acquaintance or from among his relatives to us, just as we used to recruit men for the Waffen SS and Junkerschule for SS officers. Our comrade and friend Waldeck has behaved ideally in this regard and has sent us his daughter. He is now going to send us his second daughter.”
Having put Obergruppenführer Josias Waldeck—the hereditary prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont—up as an example, Himmler turned to ad
dress his officers complaints that the SS Helferinnen usurped male jobs.
Said the Reichsführer, “With each girl, we can replace a man. Yet soldiers and SS men are stubbornly resistant…. There was the commander who said, ‘I use these girls to train SS men in the intelligence service or as message aides, and then I send the girls away. I want to have no girls in my unit.’ This is not completely the sense of purpose of the institution. The sense lies in reverse, to use these girls in order that the men return to other duties.”
The Reichsführer then asked—indeed, ordered—his officers to extend to the women “your whole chivalry, your whole sense of justice and nobility, which, in other respects, really exists in our ranks…. [T]ake care that this institution remains sacred. I don’t want any service jokes here. These are our daughters, the sisters of SS men, and potential brides of young SS men and leaders.”
Speaking from his own experience, Himmler said, “When I was with [the Helferinnen] once, I told one girl that a man whom a girl wants to marry might hesitate when he learns that she was a Helferin, saying ‘Over God’s will, this is out of the question.’ But that man, when he experiences that the girl who wants to marry him was an SS aide, must reply ‘I can marry her, she is suitable.’ This must be so. The girls must hold themselves in high regard, and so must it be for you commanders to reinforce this view with your subordinates.”
Himmler mentions the Helferinnen serving in the intelligence service, or as message aides, but the women served throughout the SS, especially in the Waffen SS, as logistical and administrative support personnel.
Another, much more nefarious cadre of SS women were the SS Aufseherinnen, the roughly 3,000 female guards assigned to the concentration camps. While ranks in Helferinnenkorps used the root word “Helfer,” meaning “helper,” those in the Aufseherinnen used the root word “Aufseher,” meaning “overseer.” For example, a Helferinnenkorps SS Oberhelfer was the equivalent to an SS Oberaufseherin Aufseherinnen. Neither had an SS equivalent, because in the sexist Nazi hierarchy, all men, theoretically, outranked all women. There were, nevertheless, a number of high-ranking Aufseherinnen, notably SS Chef Oberaufseherin Luise Brunner at Aushwitz, who wielded considerable power at the camps. Because of their SS rank, the women are erroneously considered to have been actual members of the SS. However, the fact that they weren’t is a matter of mere semantics. The harsh brutality meted out at the camps by male SS Totenkopfverbände guards pales by comparison to what many of their female auxiliaries inflicted at the same camps.
One of the most notorious of the “SS women” was Irma Ilse Ida Grese, a high school dropout who worked at an SS rest camp before signing on for Aufseherinnen training. She graduated from training in 1943 at age nineteen and was assigned to Aushwitz. By the time she was twenty, she had been promoted to the rank of Oberaufseherin. She also served at Bergen-Belsen and at Ravensbrück, the camp devoted specifically to women prisoners. Grese became infamous for her unbridled sadism, which included torture and sexual abuse, as well as beating women to death or shooting people on the spot. Her trademark, however, was attacking prisoners with a pack of half-starved dogs.
The worst of the worst, however, was almost certainly Oberaufseherin Ilse Köhler Koch. She was the archetype for blatant savagery among the women at the camps. Born in 1906, she joined the NSDAP shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. In 1934, she was working as secretary at Sachsenhausen, an early concentration camp near Berlin, when she met her future husband, the camp commandant, SS Standartenführer Karl Otto Koch. After they married in 1936, she followed him to into infamy at Buchenwald—he as commandant and she, after 1941, as Chief Oberaufseherin. A sexual sadist, she also used the women’s unit at the camp as her personal voyeuristic playground, staging rapes as spectator sports. It is saying a great deal that her peculiar tastes in spectator sex went so far as to earn her a cautionary notice from the SS.
Koch’s most outrageous hobby, however, was her well-documented collection of household items, especially lamp shades, that were made from the tattooed skin of inmates. As she prowled the camp, she would look for tattoos that interested her, then order the person stripped of his or her skin—usually post mortem. This skin, in turn, would be tanned, like an animal hide, and made into whatever household accessory that the Oberaufseherin wished for her home. She is recalled as having been especially proud of a handbag with the tattoo of a tropical scene. Even the Germans called her Die Hexe von Buchenwald (the Witch of Buchenwald), but she is best known to history as the “the Bitch of Buchenwald.”
As for women being recruited as patriotic sex slaves for German troops, such practices were not institutionalized on such a massive scale, as was the case with Germany’s Axis partner. The well-organized Japanese “comfort women” program saw upwards of 200,000 young women rounded up from Korea and the Philippines, as well as China and even Japan itself, to service troops at government-owned and -operated whorehouses across the Far East.
Adolf Hitler chats with a pair of young female admirers as Heinrich Himmler looks on eagerly. Such women, who had earlier been members of the League for German Maidens, made the transition to various military auxiliary units, including the SS Helferinnen, during World War II. U.S. National Archives
When one looks at the number of women who were part of the SS, one must look also at the women who joined the SS Sippengemeinschaft, or “Kinship Clan” through marriage to SS members, often through the pagan SS Eheweihen wedding consecrations that Himmler and his black priests had crafted. As Gudrun Schwarz points out in her 1997 book, Eine Frau an seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der SS Sippengemeinschaft (A Wife at his Side: Wives in the SS Clan Community), there were around a quarter million women who “joined” the SS through marriage.
There was no doubt as to the role of the SS wives in the SS marriage: to produce a generation of meticulously pedigreed Aryan children.
Naturally, marriage was a topic that was covered occasionally in the SS in-house publication, Das Schwarze Corps. Issue number 33 of the magazine for 1942 carried an article that clearly explained “the concept of what the SS wives are to accomplish in the Sippengemeinschaft, and what place they are to occupy is established tradition. They are to be subordinated to the patriarchy of the man as protector of clan honor and blood.”
We are here reminded of that 1939 article in the magazine in which a woman describes the role of the husband and father as “the spiritual direction of the family…. [H]e founds it, he leads it, he fights for it, he defends it,” while the wife and mother “gives the family the inner attitude, she gives it soul … and builds the quiet motive in the family relationship”
These women writing in Das Schwarze Corps paint a picture that seems to depict a belief in the strength of traditional family. However, Himmler was already gravitating strongly toward a marriage doctrine that would embrace, and legalize, polygamy. The catalyst for such a thought was the realization that so many young, perfectly selected, Aryan men were dying at the front, their blood being spilled into the dark soil of the East, rather than into the bloodline of future Aryan generations. Then too, Himmler was probably thinking of a rational—or rationalized—justification for his relationship with Hedwig Potthast. As he had told Felix Kersten, “My personal opinion is that it would be a natural development for us to break with monogamy. Marriage in its existing form is the Catholic Church’s satanic achievement. Marriage laws are in themselves immoral…. With bigamy, each wife would act as a stimulus to the other so that both would try to be their husband’s dream woman—no more untidy hair, no more slovenliness. Their models, which will intensify these reflections, will be the ideals of beauty projected by art and the cinema.”
Himmler, speaking man-to-man to Kersten, the man whose hands took away the tense pain of knotted muscles and constricted nerves, went on to complain:
The fact that a man has to spend his entire existence with one wife drives him first of all to deceive her and then makes him a hypocrite as he tries to cover it up. The r
esult is indifference between the partners. They avoid each other’s embraces, and the final consequence is that they don’t produce children. This is the reason why millions of children are never born, children whom the state urgently requires. On the other hand, the husband never dares to have children by the woman with whom he is carrying on an affair, much though he would like to, simply because middle-class morality forbids it. Again it’s the state which loses, for it gets no children from the second woman either.
The man’s place was with his wife—unless he is with his other wife.
CHAPTER 19
Aryans Beyond Nationality
THE BLACK KNIGHTS of the SS were carefully screened, carefully crafted, to represent the most genetically Aryan of Aryans, men who would have been right at home among the Armanen god-kings in Asgard or Thule or in the Irminen holy city of Karl Maria Wiligut’s imagination. Their ancestry had to be Germanic back to the eighteenth century, but one of the biggest ironies of the SS in the 1941–1943 period was that not all of the Black Knights were German. Like Alexander the Great, who deliberately staffed his undefeated army with men from all nations under his rule, Heinrich Himmler saw the SS as Germanic rather than German. Adolf Hitler had imagined a Third Reich whose borders would embrace all Völksdeutsche, as well as the prewar citizens of the Reich, but Himmler imagined that the Order of Schutzstaffel, the Sippengemeinschaft of the sacred blood, should transcend mortal boundaries.
To begin with, the Scandinavians were perceived as being as purely Aryan as Germans. Indeed, the Nordic literature that formed the pagan scriptures upon which everyone from List to Himmler based his dogma originated in Iceland and the frigid northern reaches of Scandinavia. Places such as Norway, Denmark, and neutral Sweden existed on maps, but if one drew the map based on Aryan racial characteristics, the borders were meaningless in Himmler’s mind, like the prewar border between Austria and Germany that Hitler did not recognize.