Wendy Lower - Hitlers Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

Copyright 2013 by Wendy Lower

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Lower, Wendy.

Hitlers furies : German women in the Nazi killing fields / Wendy Lower.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-547-86338-2 (hardback)

1. World War, 19391945Participation, Female. 2. World War, 19391945WomenGermany. 3. Women war criminalsGermany. 4. National socialism and women. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945) I. Title.

D810.W7L69 2013

940.53'18082dc23

2013026081

map Peter Palm, Berlin, Germany

eISBN 978-0-547-80741-6
v2.1013

For my grandmothers, Nancy Morgan and Virginia Williamson
my mother, Mary Suzanne Liljequist
and my sisters, Virginia Lower and Lori Lower

INGELENE IVENS , schoolteacher from Kiel, sent to Pozna, Poland

ERIKA OHR , nurse from the village of Stachenhausen in Swabia, daughter of a sheepherder, sent to a hospital in Zhytomyr, Ukraine

ANNETTE SCHCKING , law student from Mnster, great-granddaughter of the esteemed writer Leon Schcking, daughter of a Social Democratic Party politician and journalist, sent as a nurse to a soldiers home in Novgorod Volynsk, Ukraine, and Krasnodar, Russia

PAULINE KNEISSLER , nurse from Duisburg in the Rhineland, born in Odessa, Ukraine, emigrated to Germany at the end of World War I, sent to Poland and Belarus

ILSE STRUWE , secretary from the suburbs of Berlin, went with the German Armed Forces to France, Serbia, and Ukraine

LISELOTTE MEIER , secretary from the town of Reichenbach, Saxony, near German-Czech border, sent to Minsk and Lida, Belarus

JOHANNA ALTVATER , secretary from Minden, Westphalia, daughter of a foundry foreman, went to Volodymyr-Volynsky, Ukraine

SABINE HERBST DICK , secretary from Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, middle-class graduate of a Gymnasium, went to Latvia and Belarus

GERTRUDE SEGEL LANDAU , SS commanders daughter, secretary from Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, volunteered to serve in Radom, Poland, and Drohobych, Ukraine, wife of Einsatzkommando squad leader and Gestapo chief Felix Landau

JOSEFINE KREPP BLOCK , typist who worked in Gestapo headquarters in Vienna and frequently visited her husband, SS major Hans Block, the Gestapo station chief in Drohobych, Ukraine

VERA STHLI WOHLAUF , socialite from Hamburg, wife of Captain Julius Wohlauf, SS and Order Police company commander, Battalion 101, joined her husband in Poland

LIESEL RIEDEL WILLHAUS , typist, daughter of a senior foreman in the ironworks of the industrial Saar region, Catholic-educated, wife of Gustav Willhaus, SS commander of the Janowska concentration camp, joined her husband in Ukraine

ERNA KRBS PETRI , farmers daughter and farmers wife, grammar school education, managed an SS agricultural estate in Ukraine with her husband, SS Second Lieutenant Horst Petri

I N THE SUMMER of 1992 I bought a plane ticket to Paris, purchased an old Renault, and drove with a friend to Kiev over hundreds of miles of bad Soviet roads. We had to stop often. The tires blew on the jagged pavement, there was no gas available, and curious peasants and truckers wanted to look under the hood to see a Western automobile engine. On the single highway stretching from Lviv to Kiev, we visited the town of Zhytomyr, a center of Jewish life in the former Pale of Settlement, which during the Second World War had become the headquarters of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust. Down the road to the south, in Vinnytsia, was Adolf Hitlers Werwolf compound. The entire region was once a Nazi playground in all its horror.

Seeking to build an empire to last a thousand years, Hitler arrived in this fertile area of Ukrainethe coveted breadbasket of Europewith legions of developers, administrators, security officials, racial scientists, and engineers who were tasked with colonizing and exploiting the region. The Germans blitzkrieged eastward in 1941, ravaged the conquered territory, and evacuated westward in defeat in 1943 and 1944. As the Red Army reoccupied the area, Soviet officials seized countless pages of official German reports, files of photographs and newspapers, and boxes of film reels. They deposited this war booty and classified the trophy documents in state and regional archives that would remain behind the Iron Curtain for decades. It was this material that I had come to Ukraine to read.