History Professor Wendy Lower Bemoans the Scant Attention That German Women Have Received for Their Integral Role in Nazi War Crimes by Tibor Krausz
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Books Hitler’s harpies History professor Wendy Lower bemoans the scant attention that German women have received for their integral role in Nazi war crimes By Tibor Krausz IRMA GRESE, a young blonde with a But nor were they the norm. They were the women in German-occupied territories, is coquettish smile and a killer’s stare, earned odd female sadists amid the Nazis’ hordes sobering. German women, she stresses, had herself several monikers from the inmates of male mass murderers. Or so we’ve been a far larger role in the Holocaust than has of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen led to believe. Most histories and popular been recognized. concentration camps, where she worked as accounts have depicted German women as The book puts paid to the popular notion, a warden during World War II. long-suffering victims of the war: first, of cultivated by German women themselves “The Beautiful Beast,” aka “the Beast of heartbreak and privation with the men away afterwards, that women were passive Belsen,” and “The Hyena of Auschwitz” at the front, then of mass rape and pillage by bystanders in a brutal war of genocide loved tormenting female prisoners by marauding Red Army soldiers. fought by men. “One-third of the female whipping them savagely and setting her population [of 40 million in 1939], 13 guard dogs on them. Dolled up in tailored HITLER’S FURIES WERE million women, were actively engaged in a and perfumed finery, the actress wannabe Nazi Party organization,” Lower points out. strutted haughtily among bedraggled NOT MARGINAL More than half a million of them, most inmates, lording it over them with sadistic still in their early 20s, ended up working delight. In 1945 she was executed for crimes SOCIOPATHS – THEY in occupied Eastern Europe, from Ukraine against humanity at age 22. and Poland to the Baltics, where special Ilse Koch, aka “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” WERE REPRESENTATIVE killing squads went about their grisly was another notorious Nazi harpy. The OF A WHOLE business of ridding the area of Jews and licentious wife of Commandant Karl-Otto other undesirables to make way for a new Koch would reportedly scout around the GENERATION OF population of Aryans. Inevitably, women death camps of Buchenwald and Majdanek there became privy to the quotidian realities in search of prisoners with tattooed skin. The GERMAN WOMEN of ongoing mass murder. tattoos’ owners were promptly murdered “There was no great distance between the and their inked skin, it was alleged, made settings of small towns, where women went into lampshades – and perhaps even gloves Wendy Lower begs to differ. “Hitler’s about their daily routines, and the horrors and handbags – for her. Sentenced to life in Furies were not marginal sociopaths,” she of ghettos, camps and mass executions,” prison, she killed herself in 1967. stresses. Rather, they were representative of Lower notes. And let’s not forget some of the other a whole generation of German women who That much we’ve long known. What will female Nazis who lent a hand to genocide. came of age under Nazi rule in the 1930s – come as a surprise to non-specialists is how Maria “The Beast” Mandel, Auschwitz’s young, indoctrinated, ambitious. many German women, indoctrinated by the female commandant, sent untold numbers A professor of history at Claremont regime’s odious racial ideology, were willing of women and children to their deaths and McKenna College in California and an accessories to the murder of untermenschen adopted Jewish inmates as her “pets” before adviser to the Holocaust Memorial Museum (subhumans) and did their homicidal work having them murdered too. Alice Orlowski, in Washington, Lower focuses on some with alacrity that went well beyond the call a guard at Auschwitz, threw children on lesser-known female accomplices and of duty. Joining the ranks of tormentors, top of their mothers into tightly packed perpetrators. The historian says she spent desk murderers and executioners were gas chambers before bolting the doors two decades burrowing into archives, from schoolteachers, nurses, social workers, shut. Dorothea Binz, an SS supervisor at Nazi documents to wartime diaries and secretaries and administrators. Buchenwald, enjoyed torturing female correspondence to postwar court records, They did so out of career ambition, a prisoners, kicking one to death, killing to see what German women were really up perverted sense of duty, or for personal gain another with an axe. to during the war. Her verdict in “Hitler’s and pleasure – frequently all three. Some of Shrinking violets these women weren’t. Furies,” a treatise on the activities of them were reasonably well-educated, others 44 THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 5, 2014 A British soldier guards Bergen-Belsen warden Irma Grese, 22, photographed in August 1945 with Josef Kramer, the commandant of the concentration camp; both were convicted of war crimes and executed COURTESY IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM WAR IMPERIAL COURTESY less so. Some were barely out of their teens, from their dirty work but, in some cases, far too many suppressed whatever little others a decade or so older with children also bloodied their own hands,” she adds. sympathy they might have felt for Jews – of their own. A trait they shared was a lack In Lida, Belarus, German women in fur emaciated, filthy and starving – whom they of scruples when it came to using, abusing coats accompanied soldiers on a romantic saw on sightseeing tours inside ghettos. and at times murdering people who came to hunt in winter and, with no rabbits in sight, They wrote home unsentimentally about be at their mercy. started shooting Jewish forced laborers the miserable inhabitants. “You mostly see At the forefront of genocidal zeal were plodding through the snow. The Germans just riff-raff loafing about,” Lower quotes those 40,000 women who worked as found it jolly good fun, according to a a Nazi district chief’s daughter writing her auxiliaries in the offices of the SS, the Jewish eyewitness. Meanwhile, over in lover about the residents of the ghetto in Gestapo, and colonial administrations. Lviv, in today’s Ukraine, the wife of the Lodz, Poland. “You know, one really can’t They participated in war crimes both at their Janowska camp’s commandant entertained have any sympathy for these people.” desks as clerical enablers of mass murder her guests by shooting Jewish laborers Johanna Altvater, a secretary turned self- and, less often, out in the field as hands- from the second-floor balcony of her villa appointed executioner, certainly felt no on executioners. By compiling and typing with her young daughter by her side. sympathy for the Jewish toddler she called up lists of Jews and others for elimination, over with the promise of a treat during her many administrators “contributed [to LEGIONS OF women served the regime visit to the ghetto of the Ukrainian border genocide] in some capacity just short of in more subtle but no less repulsive ways. town Volodymyr-Volynsky on September pulling the trigger,” Lower argues. Teachers indoctrinated children in the 16, 1942. “Altvater grabbed the child by the Other German women went a step further noxious ideology of racial superiority legs, held it upside down and slammed its and busied themselves bringing meals and and selected racially, physically or head against the ghetto wall as if she were schnapps to einsatzgruppe soldiers during mentally wanting students for euthanasia. banging the dust out of a small carpet,” long hours of mass executions, cheering Nurses administered lethal injections Lower explains, based on eyewitness them on in the process. “In a small town to unsuspecting patients in mass-scale testimony. “She threw the lifeless child at of Latvia, a young female stenographer euthanasia projects, escorted children to the feet of its father.” distinguished herself as the life of the party gas chambers, and assisted in appalling The secretary shot other children, as well as a mass shooter,” the historian medical experiments on inmates at likewise lured with treats, through their notes. But often the worst were the wives concentration camps. expectantly gaping mouths with her small and lovers of SS men who “not only Some women recoiled, in private, at silver pistol. During the liquidation of the consoled their mates when they returned the scenes of brutality and slaughter, but ghetto, the woman strode into the infirmary THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 5, 2014 45 Books predominantly male, had never mentioned that role at all, but she is right that women have generally been treated as peripheral to those crimes. At just 200-odd pages long and at times meandering, episodic and repetitive, “Hitler’s Furies” is no exhaustive study and falls short of being a seminal work; yet it’s still an important book that deserves attention. Most female culprits, Lower points out, simply returned to Germany and carried on with their lives in anonymity. Apart from a handful of high-profile murderers who were executed or sentenced to prison for their crimes, female suspects were handled with kid gloves by prosecutors and escaped being brought to justice. In their memoirs, interviews and depositions they kept mum about their wartime pasts, pleaded ignorance, prevaricated, rationalized their crimes, played the victim, and blamed anyone but themselves. They frequently referred to the Holocaust WIKIMEDIA COMMONS COMMONS WIKIMEDIA COMMONS WIKIMEDIA as “that Jewish thing from the war.” Even Maria Mandel after her arrest Ilse Koch, wife of Buchenwald the sadistic child killer Johanna Altvater, by US Army troops, August 10, 1945 camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch who smiled smugly in court at witness testimonies, was acquitted in 1979 by a West German judge for an alleged lack of and began throwing young children out of lethal combination of career ambition, evidence.