In Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower documents how German women contributed to the horrors of the Holocaust. An excerpt:
For the young women who were assigned to the East or who volunteered to go—to fulfill their ambitions and the regime’s expectations, to experience something new, and to further the Nazi cause — witnessing the realities of the Holocaust had usually several effects: it hardened their determination; it confused or eroded their sense of morality (as is clear in the assertion that the Jews in the ghetto “don’t feel this humiliation”); and it triggered the search for outlets to escape what was unpleasant or repulsive, for opiates such as sexual pleasure and alcohol. Vodka flowed in nightly parties with, as one secretary recalled, the “nice lads in the office.” Moral transgressions seemed to go unnoticed, or at least unpunished. Scenes of unfettered greed and violence were common. Those who tried to stay away from what was happening around them found few places untouched by the war’s devastation, and little solace.
In a review of the book, Michael Kimmage calls the aftermath – when some guilty women defended themselves as “incapable of crime because they were women and mothers” – “the bleakest page of a bleak book”:
In many cases, Holocaust survivors were able to testify against women who had committed horrendous crimes, and either the women were not tried or their accusers were not believed. If incarcerated, the women were released—often early. Johanna Altvater—the woman who undertook to murder Jews on her own—was tried and acquitted twice. She worked, after the war, in a child welfare office.
The biography of a woman named Erna Petri is no less extraordinary. Put on trial in East Germany, she “confessed to murdering six Jewish children between six and twelve years of age.” She was found guilty and imprisoned. After German reunification, she negotiated her release, possibly with the help of Stille Hilfe (Silent Aid), a postwar SS organization in Germany. She moved to a Bavarian village “where she enjoyed the Alpine mountains and lakes with Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler and a prominent member of Silent Aid.” The entire village attended her funeral.
This is a new genre of Holocaust story. Unlike Schindler’s List, a cinematic version of it would be unbearable.
Recent Dish on women’s role in the Third Reich here.
The Dish 