Irma Grese: The Faces of Meth Naziism
The Nazi women who were every bit as evil as the men: From the mother who shot Jewish children in cold blood to the nurses who gave lethal injections in death camps
By
Tony Rennell
Blonde
German housewife Erna Petri was returning home after a shopping trip in
town when something caught her eye: six small, nearly naked boys
huddled in terror by the side of the country road.
Married to a senior SS officer, the 23-year-old knew instantly who they were.
They must be the Jews she’d heard about — the ones who’d escaped from a train taking them to an extermination camp.
But
she was a mother herself, with two children of her own. So she humanely
took the starving, whimpering youngsters home, calmed them down and
gave them food to eat.
Then
she led the six of them — the youngest aged six, the oldest 12 — into
the woods, lined them up on the edge of a pit and shot them methodically
one by one with a pistol in the back of the neck.
This
schizophrenic combination of warm-hearted mother one minute and
cold-blooded killer the next is an enigma and one that — now revealed in
a new book based on years of trawling through remote archives — puts a
crueller than ever spin on the Third Reich.
Because
Erna was by no means an aberration. In a book she tellingly calls
‘Hitler’s Furies’, Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has
unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women — many
more than previously imagined — in the sort of mass, monstrous,
murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler
sex were incapable of.
The
Holocaust has generally been seen as a crime perpetrated by men. The
vast majority of those accused at Nuremberg and other war crimes trials
were men.
The few
women ever called to account were notorious concentration camp guards —
the likes of Irma Grese and Ilse Koch — whose evil was so extreme they
could be explained away as freaks and beasts, not really ‘women’ at all.
Ultra-macho
Nazi Germany was a man’s world. The vast majority of women had, on
Hitler’s orders, confined their activities to Kinder, Küche, Kirche —
children, kitchen and church. Thus, when it came to responsibility for
the Holocaust and other evils of the Third Reich, they were off the
hook.
But that, argues Lower, is simplistic
nonsense. Women were drawn into the morally bankrupt conspiracy that was
Hitler’s Germany as thoroughly as men were — at a lower level, in most
cases, when it came to direct action but guilty just the same.
Ironically, it was the professional
carers who were the first to be caught in this evil web. From the moment
the Nazis came to power and imposed policies of Aryan racial purity,
countless nurses, their aprons filled with morphine vials and needles,
routinely slaughtered the physically disabled and mentally defective.
Pauline Kneissler worked at Grafeneck
Castle, a euthanasia ‘hospital’ in southern Germany, and toured mental
institutions selecting 70 ‘patients’ a day. At the castle they were
gassed, which she decided was not that bad because ‘death by gas doesn’t
hurt’.
Complicit: Johanner Altvater (above) and Lisolotte Meirer (below) killed Jews for sport during the Third Reich
Meanwhile,
midwives were betraying a whole generation of German women by reporting
defects in unborns and newborns and recommending abortions and
euthanasia, as well as sterilisation of mothers.
From
the outset, Lower concludes, ‘women made cruel life-and-death
decisions, eroding moral sensibilities’. A line had been crossed. It was
no big step when the racial purification process turned to the Final
Solution of exterminating millions of Jews.
That
Jews were the enemy and their annihilation the answer was taken for
granted by millions of women who would later deny knowing what was going
on under their noses.
Lower, though, dubs them ‘primary witnesses of the Holocaust’.
The worst outrages took place in the
‘Wild East’, Hitler’s newly acquired (by military conquest) territories
in Poland, Ukraine and other parts of overrun Russia. At least half a
million young women joined in this colonisation process, and became
accomplices to genocide on an unprecedented scale.
A
mass of secretaries, for example, typed the orders to kill and filed
the details of massacres. This placed them at the very centre of the
Nazi murder machinery, but they, like so many others, chose to shut
their eyes and benefit from their proximity to power.
But,
picnicking in the country on their days off, how did they miss the
mounds that hid mass graves, the gagging smell of rotting corpses? Whose
clothes and possessions — plundered from ghettos or confiscated at
camps and killing fields — did they think they were cataloguing for
redistribution back home?
Trainloads of booty went back to
Germany in what Lower calls ‘the biggest campaign of organised robbery
in history’. And German women, she charges, were among its prime agents
and beneficiaries.
Even
more caught up in the criminal madness were administrators such as
Liselotte Meier, who worked so closely with her strutting boss, an SS
officer, that they were almost indistinguishable. She joined him on
shooting parties in the snow, hunting and killing Jews for sport.
Guilty: Irma Grese, nicknamed 'The Beautiful Beast' pictured with two guards before she was hanged in 1945 at the age of 22
In the early phases of
the Holocaust, massacres were generally by shooting. In her area of
Belarus, she coordinated the arrangements with the executioners and even
decided who lived and who died.
She
spared the life of the Jewish woman who did her hair, while another
secretary removed from a woman from the death line who hadn’t yet
finished the sweater she was knitting for her.
Secretaries
had another important role, too. After each operation, it was usual for
the SS killers, many of them drunk on schnapps, to seek solace in the
women’s quarters, whether for sexual release or a shoulder to cry on
after the exertions of mass execution. In support of the men, women
even manned refreshment tables during executions so the killers could
take a break.
But much
worse than these active accomplices were the women who killed — often
the wives of SS officers. Erna Petri — callous dispatcher of those six
Jewish boys — was one such Frau. She had followed her husband to Poland
and lived in a mansion overseeing a vast estate for the Race and
Resettlement Office of the SS, with ‘sub-human’ Slavs as slaves.
The book reveals thousands of women were
complicit in the mass murder of Jews and have been dubbed the 'primary
witnesses' of The Holocaust
Another SS wife, Lisel
Willhaus, wife of a camp commandant, used to sit on the balcony of their
house and take pot shots at Jewish prisoners with her rifle.
Also
in Poland was Vera Wohlauf, whose husband Julius commanded a police
battalion ordered in 1942 to round up 11,000 Jewish inhabitants of a
small town for transportation to Treblinka for liquidation.
She
sat by her husband in the front seat of the lorry that led a convoy of
killers to the town, and stood in the market square brandishing a whip
as nearly a thousand who resisted the round-up or collapsed in the
summer heat were beaten to death or shot.
She was pregnant at the time, a further incongruity.
In
the Ukraine, 22-year-old secretary Johanna Altvater played an even more
prominent role in a massacre while working for regional commissar
Wilhelm Westerheide.
During
the liquidation of a Jewish ghetto, Fräulein Hanna, as she was known,
was seen in her riding breeches prodding men, women and children into a
truck ‘like a cattle herder’.
The Holocaust has often been depicted as a crime
perpetrated by men, but women also submitted themselves to the bankrupt
morals championed by Adolf Hitler
She marched into a
building being used as a makeshift hospital and through the children’s
ward, eyeing each bed-ridden child. Then she stopped, picked one up,
took it to the balcony and threw the child to the pavement three floors
below. She did the same with other children. Some died, and even those
who survived were seriously injured.
Her
speciality — or, as one survivor put it, her ‘nasty habit’ — was
killing children. One observer noted that Altvater often lured children
with sweets. When they came to her and opened their mouths, she shot
them in the mouth with the small pistol that she kept at her side.
The new book involves information from archives which revealed some women were as guilty as the men
On another occasion, she
beckoned a toddler over, then grabbed him tightly by the legs and
slammed his head against a wall as if she were banging the dust out of a
mat. She threw the
lifeless child at the feet of his father, who later testified: ‘Such
sadism from a woman I have never seen. I will never forget this.’
Close
to the mass-shooting site where the ghetto inhabitants were herded to
await their deaths, Westerheide and his deputies partied with some
German women. Altvater was among the revellers, drinking and eating at a
banqueting table amid the bloodshed.
Music
playing in the background mixed with the sound of gunfire. From time to
time, one of the Germans would get up, walk to the shooting site, kill a
few people and then return to the party.
Violence
to children was also the trademark of Gestapo wife and mother Josefine
Block, who liked to carry a riding crop and lash out at prisoners
waiting to be deported.
A
little girl approached her, crying and begging for her life. ‘I will
help you!’ Block declared, grabbed the girl by the hair, smashed her
with her fists, then pushed her to the ground and stamped on her head
until she was dead.
Desperate
Jewish parents often approached Block to ask for help, assuming that,
as a young woman and mother, she’d be sympathetic.
But
she would use her pram to ram Jews whom she encountered on the streets
and was said to have actually killed a small Jewish child with it. Such
treatment is an affront to any sense of humanity, let alone womanhood —
all the more so because most of these crimes went unpunished.
Erna
Petri was the exception and spent more than 30 years in prison. But all
the others mentioned here were either tried and acquitted or released
after questioning.
Their
defence was often to play the helpless woman card and blame the men. ‘I
was just a secretary,’ pleaded Johanna Altvater. Meanwhile, the millions
of other women who were complicit in these odious events got on with
their lives after the war as best they could, as if the whole Hitler era
had been a nightmare to be put aside and forgotten once everyone had
woken up.
Yet the deep
stain remains. Thirteen million women were actively engaged in the Nazi
Party. Not all of these could have been innocent bystanders.
Family life: The main role of women in the Third
Reich was to promote the philosophy of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche -
children, kitchen and church
Lower says: ‘To assume
that violence is not a feminine characteristic and that women are not
capable of mass murder has obvious appeal: it allows for hope that at
least half the human race will not devour the other, that it will
protect children and so safeguard the future.
‘But minimising the violent behaviour of women creates a false shield.’
At
least half a million women, she says, witnessed and contributed to the
operations and terror of Hitler’s genocidal war. ‘The Nazi regime
mobilised a generation of young women who were conditioned to accept
violence, to incite it, and to commit it.
‘This
fact has been suppressed and denied by the very women who were swept up
in the regime and by those who perpetrated the violence with impunity.
‘But genocide is also women’s business. When given the “opportunity”, women too will engage in it, even its bloodiest aspects.’
For
those tempted to think that things are different now, consider those
shocking photographs earlier this month of a beheading in the Syrian
bloodbath.
What was even
more gut-wrenching than the gore was to see children looking on,
unperturbed, drawn into a terrifying topsy-turvy morality, just as
German mothers and children were 80 years ago.
Perhaps,
too, the executioner wielding the sword went home to a wife who mopped
his brow, in the same way as Hitler’s firing squads did. The lesson of
the atrocities of the Holocaust is that they are not something of the
past to be filed away and forgotten, but still very much with us.
Hitler's
Furies: German Women In The Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower is
published by Chatto & Windus on October 3 at £18.99. To order a copy
for £16.99 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157.
http://tinyurl.com/ocjvxhh
1 comment:
Thank you for your excellent writeup. I will try to pick the book up the next time I am at a library.
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