JERUSALEM
— Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated
by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations
of nature.
There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma
Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the
wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted
of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied
Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary
accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto
in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according
to new research, the participation of German women in the
genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses,
was far greater than previously thought.
The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American
historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the
number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went
out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the
war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.
“Thousands would be a conservative
estimate,” Ms. Lower said in an interview in Jerusalem last
week.
While most did not bloody their own
hands, the acts of those who did seemed all the more perverse
because they operated outside the concentration camp system,
on their own initiative.
Ms. Lower’s findings shed new light
on the Holocaust from a gender perspective, according to
experts, and have further underlined the importance of the
role of the lower echelons in the Nazi killing apparatus.
“In the dominant literature on perpetrators,
you won’t find women mentioned,” said Dan Michman, the chief
historian at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’
Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
Ms. Lower, 45, presented her work
for the first time at this summer’s workshop at Yad Vashem’s
International Institute for Holocaust Research. She has been
trying to decipher what motivated these women to commit such
crimes.
“They challenge so deeply our notion”
of what constitutes normal female behavior, she said. But
the Nazi system, she added, “turned everything on its head.”
Ms. Lower said she worked for many
years at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and
is now teaching and researching at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat
in Munich.
She began traveling to Ukraine in
the early 1990s, as the Soviet archives opened up. She started
in Zhytomyr, about 75 miles west of Kiev, where the SS leader
Heinrich Himmler had his Ukrainian headquarters, and where
she found original German files, some burned at the edges,
in the local archive. She noticed the frequency with which
women were mentioned at the scenes of genocide. Women also
kept cropping up as witnesses in West and East German investigations
after the war.
In an anomalous twist on Christopher
R. Browning’s groundbreaking 1992 book, “Ordinary Men,” it
appears that thousands of German women went to the eastern
territories to help Germanize them, and to provide services
to the local ethnic German populations there.
They included nurses, teachers and
welfare workers. Women ran the storehouses of belongings
taken from Jews. Local Germans were recruited to work as
interpreters. Then there were the wives of regional officials,
and their secretaries, some from their staffs back home.
For women from working-class families
or farms in Germany, the occupied zones offered an attractive
opportunity to advance themselves, Ms. Lower said.
There were up to 5,000 female guards
in the concentration camps, making up about 10 percent of
the personnel. Ms. Grese was hanged at the age of 21 for
war crimes committed in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; Ms.
Koch was convicted of participating in murders at Buchenwald.
Mr. Browning’s book chronicled the
role of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, which helped
provide the manpower for the elimination of most Polish Jewry
within a year. The book mentions one woman, the young, pregnant
bride of one of the captains of the police battalion. She
had gone to Poland for a kind of honeymoon and went along
with her husband to observe the clearing of a ghetto.
Only 1 or 2 percent of the perpetrators
were women, according to Ms. Lower. But in many cases where
genocide was taking place, German women were very close by.
Several witnesses have described festive banquets near mass
shooting sites in the Ukrainian forests, with German women
providing refreshments for the shooting squads whose work
often went on for days.
Ms. Petri was married to an SS officer
who ran an agricultural estate, complete with a colonial-style
manor house and slave laborers, in Galicia, in occupied Poland.
She later confessed to having murdered six Jewish children,
aged 6 to 12. She came across them while out riding in her
carriage. She was the mother of two young children, and was
25 at the time. Near naked, the Jewish children had apparently
escaped from a railroad car bound for the Sobibor camp. She
took them home, fed them, then led them into the woods and
shot them one by one.
She told her interrogators that she
had done so, in part, because she wanted to prove herself
to the men.
She was tried in East Germany and
served a life sentence.
Ms. Altvater Zelle went to Ukraine
as a 22-year-old single woman and became the secretary of
a district commissar, Wilhelm Westerheide. Survivors remembered
her as the notorious Fräulein Hanna, and accused her, among
other things, of smashing a toddler’s head against a ghetto
wall and of throwing children to their deaths from the window
of a makeshift hospital.
Back in Germany, Ms. Altvater Zelle
married, became a welfare case worker for youth in her hometown,
Minden, and adopted a son.
In Commissar Westerheide’s region,
about 20,000 Jews were wiped out. He and his loyal secretary
were tried twice in West Germany, in the late 1970s and early
1980s. They were acquitted both times because of contradictions
that arose in the testimonies of witnesses gathered over
20 years, the former chief prosecutor in the case told Ms.
Lower.
One survivor, Moses Messer, said he
saw the woman he knew as Fräulein Hanna smashing the toddler
to death against the wall. He told lawyers in Haifa, Israel,
in the early 1960s: “Such sadism from a woman I have never
seen. I will never forget this scene.”
nytimes.com
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