Hirler's Furies: A Review

The same day that I put up my last post, Women and National Socialism, I received my copy of Wendy Lower’s new book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Lower is an academic historian with appointments in the USA and in Germany. Since the early 1990s she has been doing research on the subject of women’s positions under the Nazis. Her work is quite illuminating. She makes the interesting point that after WWI there was a “baby boom” in Germany similar to that of post-WWII. A large cohort of children was growing up as the Nazis were cementing their bases during the late 1920s. By the time Hitler came to full dictatorial power in 1933-4 this group was entering teen years; at the beginning of the war in 1939 they were young adults, already primed for playing specific roles for the war effort. For the boys this primarily meant being drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German army. Youth groups led by members of the National Socialist were begun in the 1920 under the general name of Hitler Youth. The branch of the organization specifically for girls was called The League of German Girls in the Hitler Youth. Once Hitler was in power all other youth groups were forbidden: their alternatives were to close down or to amalgamate with the existing Nazi groups. (Catholic youth groups were exempt as part of the concordat signed with papal authorities.) Most other groups aligned themselves with Hitler Youth. In 1936 participation was made compulsory.

A young girl's introduction to Hitler Youth came at age 10. Until 14 she belonged to the Young Girl’s League. From 14-18 she was enrolled in the League proper. Later a third group was initiated on a voluntary basis for young women aged 18-21. Membership was dependent upon German ethnicity and an absence of hereditary diseases. Many activities of the League were similar to those of youth groups established in other societies: skills training, exercise, camping experiences, and so on. This particular organization, however, from its restrictive criteria of selection to its ideological underpinnings and values, had as its purpose the shaping of German youth to participate in the already articulated goals of expansion in the east through wars of conquest, and, the complete eradication of groups deemed harmful to the Aryan nation: Jews, “Gypsies,” homosexuals, black, and mentally or physically disabled people.

In the six years between the coming of Hitler to power and the beginning of the war, young Germans were inculcated with the tenets of their new national “religion” of National Socialism. Hitler was promoted as the long dreamed of “Messiah” who would restore the people to the glory and paramount position of Germanic myth, poetry and opera. Masses congregated for Goebbels’s orchestrated extravaganzas of German patriotism and adoration of their leader. His passionate speeches left no one in doubt of the earnestness of his hatred of the Jews, his intention to rid the German nation of their presence and influence, and of his ambition to claim lands in the east as the rightful patrimony of Germany. The influence of any religious or ideological training upon young people varies considerably with the individuals undergoing it. Some are swept up by its power, becoming acolytes, even fanatics in its service. Others absorb and are influenced by its tenets though these are balanced more or less by countervailing strains within the larger society. Still others are observant participants but inwardly are less affected by its values. As Germany geared for war throughout the second half of the 1930s, young people were trained physically and mentally for their particular participation.

Successful outcomes of the Nazi war effort clearly required the involvement of this cohort. Young men of 18 or older were drafted into the army, extending the military-like trainings they had been receiving for years. Women were not expected to be or wanted as soldiers. They were needed to serve in the “helping” roles traditionally reserved for women: clerks, typists, secretaries, and nurses. In these roles within Germany but even more so in the conquered lands to the east, German women assisted and facilitated the genocide perpetrated not only by the SS but by the administration of the government at all levels. Women guards or Kapos in the concentration camps have received some notoriety for the criminal abuses of women prisoners, but Lower’s book shines a light on the vast array of women in more pedestrian roles who for various reasons of their own, were fully complicit in murder and genocide.

The clearest example is that of nurses. The so-called “euthanasia” program that was implemented first in Germany required a cadre of nurses to collect and accompany, sometimes to select, patients in hospitals or long-term institutions for death by gassing in vans or by injection. The women who took on these roles did so voluntarily. They were administered an oath of secrecy about the program and their activities. It was made clear that their own lives would be forfeited if the oath was broken. Between December, 1939 and January, 1940 close to 10,000 people considered “defective” in some manner were murdered at a centre established near Stuttgart. In concentration camps and other settings nurses were used to assist with medical experiments and with forced sterilizations. Between 1933 and 1939 roughly 320,000 sterilizations were performed on non-Aryan men and women, people branded “asocial,” or ethnic German people who were believed to carry some genetic defect. The “State Health Offices” and “Departments for Gene and Race Care” that were responsible for the selection and operations on these people were heavily staffed by women. Another function of the nurses and administrators of these and other institutions was to report abnormalities found during pregnancies or in babies after birth. Forced abortions or the “disappearance” of a disabled child would result.

Women who filled the roles of administrators or secretaries in settings in the east knew about, witnessed, and/or participated in mass killings. Being a secretary became an alternative for young women who earlier in the century would have laboured mainly in domestic or agricultural settings. Also, taking opportunities to travel was easier for that generation as from 1934 girls and women between 17 and 25 were expected to leave their homes and to do a year of service on a farm or in a factory. When the war began an extra six months of auxiliary war service was added to this period. These women had already experienced a way of life separate from their own communities so were readied to respond when appeals for women to serve in the east were broadcast. The pay levels, though not high, were superior to those in factories or on farms. The women were also motivated by a sense of adventure and by the idea put forward that they would be contributing to the war efforts.

At least 10,000 young women took up secretarial positions in the east. There they were inserted into the structures of the state and of the industrial machinery that organized and implemented the forced removal of various populations from their homes and land, the creation of ghettos for Jews, deportations  to concentration, labour, and death camps.  They provided support services for the SS groups that conducted mass killing. As clerks they documented names and other details of victims for information and statistical offices in Berlin. According to Lower, the Reich’s military auxiliary service had some five hundred thousand women occupying support service roles in the army, air force, and navy. Two hundred thousand of these were sent to the occupied territories. In their various roles women were witnesses to atrocities perpetrated on the subject populations. Some were by their functions made complicit in these acts; some actively sought opportunities to aid the state-sanctioned “eradication of its natural enemies.”

Lower provides testimonies, documents, and letters of women who spoke out as witnesses after the war about the scenes that they had observed, as well as the evidence given about particular women who used their positions of privilege over prisoners or ghettoed people to criminal advantage. However, the vast majority of women who participated in supportive or direct roles in atrocities against subject people, slid at the end of the war back into anonymity. Prosecutors in all countries and at all levels concentrated mainly on the men who had led criminal organizations or who had had positions of command at the hundreds of camps throughout Europe. Few women were brought to trial and of these only three were executed. Others received prison sentences though the majority was either overlooked or acquitted.

Before the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s much of the scholarship with respect to the roles of women under the Nazis was polarized between two academics: Gisela Bock contended that the Nazi hierarchy in its control of all aspects of reproduction had oppressed and victimized all the women of its society. Claudia Koonz, however, argued that Aryan women were not victimized by their locations but rather were “motherly accomplices” of the Reich. Since that time, especially with records from formerly Soviet-dominated eastern countries made available, researchers have advocated a methodology based less on generalizations. Lower’s work is a good example of research focused on the lived experience of particular women set within a context of the economic and ideological realities of the time.

The experience of that vast group of women in the middle zone: those who clearly knew about and in some fashion agreed with the criminal activities being perpetrated before and during the war, both in the east and within Germany itself, has yet to be understood. There are over-arching themes such as the historic paucity of democratic institutions in Germany, and, the insufficiently rooted humanist ideals within a society undergoing rapid change from the time its inception as a nation in 1870-1, through the disasters of WWI and the economic breakdown of the 1930s. The age-old question: “What were you doing during the war, daddy?” has yet to be taken to the women of that generation. Because of the reluctance of people in post-war Germany to speak openly of their locations much of that history has been lost. But like the individual witnesses or perpetrators to whom Lower has given voice, the women who have maintained anonymity will have left traces of their experiences, thoughts and feelings. These may be imbedded in the memories of their children, or in letters or other documents left within their families.

In my own brief recent travel in Eastern Europe I found that talking with people whom I came upon by chance about their own or their families’ experiences, gave me a small taste of the complexity of these issues. The war ended almost 70 years ago but its aftermath is far from resolved. In the USA the civil war is an even more remote historical event but it clearly remains a major element at all political, economic, and societal levels. For me an important question remains less, “Who was complicit during the reign of terror in the east?” than, “What allowed so many to go along with, to turn a ‘blind eye’ to the clearly reprehensible crimes against humanity being perpetrated?” as well as, “How did they explain these things to themselves after the war?” – i.e., how did they manage to live with themselves?

One further thought: if we look closely into any period or country where there has been clear violations of human rights and, indeed, crimes against humanity or genocide, we will always find evidence of the involvement of women in similar ways to those documented by Lower and those that I question. We have no further to look for proof than the acknowledged involvement of women social workers, teachers, religious women, various levels of administration, and a general ideological bent among the general public which allowed what are now being termed either "genocide" or "crimes against humanity" perpetrated over the past centuries against our own native peoples.