German women and the holocaust by Judith.O.Purver - HTML preview

Introduction

The Holocaust is undoubtedly one of the most horrific events, if not the most horrific event, of modern times. At the core of the murder of six million Jews is the chilling truth that a great number of “ordinary” German people were implicated in the genocide, whether through active involvement or compliant inaction. The desire to know why so large a number of people contributed to the evil of the Holocaust has led to discussion of the acts of different groups within the German population. However, with regard to the perpetrators and bystanders there has been little or no discussion of the moral responsibility of women.

Women made up half the German population, yet very few historians have discussed the roles they played or the issue of their moral responsibility. Indeed, more often than not women are portrayed as an uninfluential sector of the population who if anything were victims of Nazi rule themselves. Historians often indicate that women were forced to remain within the non-political sphere, with no influence outside of wife-and motherhood. [Stibbe 1993, 35] Thus, it is suggested that women cannot be held morally responsible because they were unable to do anything to prevent the Shoah.1

1 I use the terms “Holocaust” and “Shoah” interchangeably to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

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Alongside this historical and moral “fact” it is important to consider the contemporary debate led by Carol Gilligan which suggests that women are more morally caring than men.2 This is supported by a feeling that women would have been morally unable to implement, perform or ignore the atrocities of the Shoah. [Owings 1993, xii]

The above view would imply that German women can be included in a group of caring individuals who were unable to help the Jews because of their own victimisation by the Nazi regime. I intend to show that this view is misguided. Whilst there is some truth in it, for women were discriminated against by both state and society, it ignores certain facts about the various roles women chose to play in Nazi society. It also discounts those women who resisted Nazi injustice and rescued victims. German women may have different levels of moral responsibility, but they cannot simply be cleared of all guilt

Before proceeding it is necessary to clarify some key terms. Under the heading of perpetrators I include all those people who directly contributed to the Shoah, both the camp guard and the bureaucrat who compiled lists of Jews for deportation. In the bystander group I put those who did nothing active either to harm or to help the Jews.

The bystanders may have been hostile towards Jews, or they may have felt disgusted by the events of the Holocaust, but they did nothing active. When I speak of German women in this paper I mean those German women who were not themselves victimised by the Nazis. They were the “superior” women who fitted in with the Nazi notion of an Aryan woman. I intend no offence by leaving out those German women who were persecuted by the Nazis, such as German Jewish women, Communists and trade unionists, gypsies and 2 See Carol Gilligan, Different Moral Voices.

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other “undesirables”; yet the boundaries of the area I have chosen do not leave room to discuss these persecuted German women.

The paper deals with aspects of the moral responsibility of German women. First, I discuss the view of German women proposed by Gisella Bock: namely that all German women were victims of the Nazi regime on account of the anti- and pro-natalist policies of the Nazis. I argue that this is a one-dimensional view of German women and that it fails to recognise and differentiate between the degree and the style of victimisation suffered by Jewish and “Aryan” women respectively. I believe it also has undesirable implications in the assessment of moral responsibility.

I then go on to an analysis of the argument that, though women may not have been true victims, they cannot be held morally responsible because they did not do much more than sustain the private sphere. I agree with Claudia Koonz that this act of sustaining the private sphere reveals, in fact, that women played a complicit role in the events of the Shoah. However, I shall argue that women did more than this as well.

Because some women chose to become Nazis and because other women decided to aid the Jews, I claim that women were able to make moral decisions and thus must be included in the discussion of moral responsibility, rather than being seen as just in a complicit role.

Finally I focus on women as perpetrators. A discussion of the moral responsibility of women would be incomplete without examining the small but significant number of women who were perpetrators. I discuss the problem of women perpetrators who were labour conscripts and how this affects their moral responsibility. I also consider the sexism within the SS, and the brutality of certain notorious female perpetrators. I include a discussion of the wives of male perpetrators, as well as some consideration of the role 3

of German women prisoner functionaries and their actions against Jewish women.

German Women as Victims

“The woman has the task to be beautiful and to bear children. This is not as crude or as old fashioned as it may sound. The female bird preens herself for the male, and hatches the egg for him. In return, the male provides the food.” [Cited in Kolinsky 1993, 14]

As the above quote makes clear, at first glance the Nazi policy on the role of women in society appears to have been simple; the mother was glorified, the emancipated woman was viewed as “an agent of degeneracy and national decline”.

[Stibbe 1993, 35] Women were officially viewed as equal but different: “Equal rights for women means that they receive the esteem they deserve in the sphere nature has assigned to them.” [Hitler, cited in Grunberger 1971, 323] In other words, women were not to hold positions of public responsibility. Most women who had occupied responsible positions in the public domain before 1933 were ejected when the Nazis gained power, and women were forbidden from occupying leading positions within the Nazi party.3 [Grunberger 1971, 322] Women were instead to concentrate on bringing up their “Aryan” children in a female-dominated private sphere. In order to persuade women to take up that role, abortions were banned and child allowances were introduced as a financial incentive to have children. This pro-natal policy existed for all those women who were deemed to be racially and socially desirable. The importance placed on child-bearing led to pressure on many women to become mothers. Matthew Stibbe mentions the harassment suffered by 3 A notable exception is Gertrud Scholtz-Klink who held the position of

“Reichsfrauenfühererin”, the head of the Women’s Bureau. However, her influence outside the domains of motherhood and wifehood was very limited. [See Koonz 1987, 392-394 and Stibbe 1993, 38]

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non-Jewish women who didn’t want to have children or who were unable to. One woman who couldn’t conceive tried to kidnap babies in order to attain the ideal of motherhood.

[Stibbe 1993, 36]

A policy of anti-natalism existed alongside the pro-natal aims of the Nazis.

People deemed to be of Aryan race were greatly valued by the Nazis, whereas those considered to be of a lower race, or socially undesirable, or “lacking an orderly family life”, were not esteemed or honoured. [Bock 1983, 169] The Nazi pro-natalist programme excluded these “undesirables”, many of whom were actively prevented from procreation through compulsory sterilisation. Both men and women underwent this horrific procedure.4 One estimate states that by the end of 1934, 27,958 women had been forcibly sterilised and five per cent of these had died from it. [Cited in Stibbe 1993, 36]

Gisella Bock, who has written extensively on this subject, suggests that women were more affected by it than men: sterilization affected mainly the poorer strata of the population and women were over-represented - servants, unskilled workers and jobless housewives, particularly those married to unskilled workers. [Bock 1983, 172]

It is reported by von Saldern that Bock claims women suffered more than men qualitatively as well as quantitatively owing to the close psychological connection between women and their sexual fertility.5 [von Saldern 1994, 143] Bock thus concludes that these Nazi policies were not only imbued with racism but also contained an aggressively sexist component. Bock makes similar claims about the pro-natalist 4 Many of the sterilisation methods were highly experimental and were carried out in concentration camps in terrifyingly inhumane conditions. [See Lengyel 1947, 124-125]

5 I have been unable to obtain a copy of Bock’s book Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Thus, some of the arguments which I present as Bock’s are taken from von Saldern’s article “The Role Of Women in the Nazi State".

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policies. Both pro- and anti-natalist policies discriminated against women, for they controlled their lives, forcing them to adopt certain roles and victimising all women, “the inferior as well as the superior”. [Bock 1983, 177] If this portrayal of women under Nazi rule is correct, it implies that women cannot be held responsible for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Women who were viewed as superior were pushed out of positions of social and political power and into the realm of motherhood, whereas those deemed to be inferior were taken to concentration camps and sometimes forcibly sterilised. Bock believes that both groups of women were victims, so implying exclusion from moral guilt for the “superior” Aryan women.

Bock’s argument is thought-provoking. She highlights the anti-natalist policy which ran parallel with the pro-natalism of Nazi Germany. The existence of these policies alongside one another demonstrates the potential applications of eugenic aims, through the employment of anti-natalist and pro-natalist policies. Nonetheless, her conclusion that all women were victims of the regime is a hasty one and needs to be carefully examined.

The implications of the eugenic aim of the Nazis for women are thoroughly considered by Gisella Bock. However, she appears to ignore the question of how it affected men. She is aware that men suffered from compulsory sterilization; indeed she documents the fact that men were subject to castration three years before women were affected. [Bock 1983, 167] In spite of this, men are scarcely mentioned as having suffered (or as having suffered sufficiently) from the eugenic aims of the Nazis. Whilst women may have suffered more at a quantitative level it is rather disturbing to suggest that women suffered qualitatively more than men. This claim implies that men who were forcibly castrated suffered less than women who were compulsorily sterilised; a claim 6

which I believe it is difficult to justify. Von Saldern contends that Bock’s argument that women were affected more than men because their social identities as sexually fertile individuals were destroyed is flawed:

Bock presumes that all women found their identity in child-bearing and motherhood, an argument which applied to some of the women who were sterilized but certainly not to all of them. . . Bock comes “curiously close to implying that non-mothers are not really women”. [Van Saldern 1994, 144]

The pro-natalist policies obviously deeply affected women owing to their biological function and the existence of the strong social pressures to be a mother.

However, men were also affected by pro-natalism. They were positively encouraged to father children, and it was highly desirable to be a family man within the SS. [Koonz 1988, ch.11] This is not to claim that men were targeted by eugenic policies to the same extent as women. Women were regarded as inferior to men by the state and it was men who made and implemented policy decisions. However, men were also targeted by anti-and pro-natalist policies. To state that women were victimised through the pursuit of eugenics, implies that if men also suffered from this policy, they must either be included in the category of “victims” or neither women nor men in general can be classified in this way.

My second objection to Bock’s argument is the use of the term “victim” to describe all women. Women were discriminated against in the Third Reich, and therefore in a certain way they were victimised. However, to label women as victims implies that they were part of the same group as the Jewish victims. But a woman who was under social pressure to have more children was not victimised to the same degree as a Jewish woman or man ripped away from their home, separated from their family, placed in a camp with atrocious living conditions, or sent to the gas chamber. Bock’s claim that 7

“[b]oth Nazi racism and sexism concerned all women, the inferior as well as the superior” is true, but it fails to recognise and differentiate between the degree and style of victimisation suffered by different women. [Bock 1983, 177] Although the Nazis did view women as inferior to men, they did not place women on the same level as the Jews.

Aryan women were still members of a “superior” race. Whilst I accept that different levels of victimisation existed, I believe that it is preferable to avoid the term with reference to German women. To label German gentile women, without qualification, as victims places them on the same plane as male and female Jews, when most German gentile women suffered neither to the same extent as nor in similar ways to the Jewish victims. It also removes the possibility of finding German women morally responsible for aspects of the Holocaust.

Bock’s views on the women of Nazi Germany are misleading, for she appears to ignore the roles women chose to play in Nazi life. Some women actively supported Hitler and his aims. This is demonstrated by the large number of women who voted for the Nazi party in 1932 and 1933 (nearly as many women voted for the Nazis as men). [Koonz 1988, 4] Thus, a large number of women chose to follow a party which was “no friend of female suffrage” and one which they knew was aggressively anti-Semitic. Some women not only voted for the Nazis, but appeared to idolise Adolf Hitler himself. Many love letters were sent to Hitler, calling him such things as “My dear, sugar-sweet Adolf” and

“My heart’s own”. [GRANTA 51 1995, 75] There are numerous reports of female “mass hysteria” in crowds, women with an “uncontrollable urge to touch” Hitler. [Grunberger 1971, 339] Also, by 1936, eleven million of the thirty-five million German women had joined the NS-Frauenschaft, the Nazi women’s organisation. [von Saldern 1994, 151]

Some women played extremely active roles, aiding the eugenic aims through the 8

kidnapping of blonde Polish children, and a small but significant number were guards in concentration and death camps. Thus, one can see that a large number of German women did not just passively acquiesce to racist and sexist rule but actively embraced Nazism and its aims.

Finally, it is worth noting that the desire for a stronger, more “healthy” population and the reactionary policies towards women were not confined to Nazi Germany.

European countries other than Germany introduced measures to curb abortion and restricted contraceptives in order to increase the number of people from “good racial stock”. France introduced awards for “productive” mothers before Germany, with abortion becoming a capital offence in Vichy France in 1942. [Stibbe 1993, 36]

Restrictions were also placed on the professional roles which women could occupy in various countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain, where married women were largely excluded from teaching until 1944 when a new state education policy was introduced. [ibid.] This shows that women in many other countries than Nazi Germany were discriminated against as a way of pressuring them to produce more children. If we are to argue that German women who suffered from pro-natalist policies and restrictions on their public roles should be viewed as victims and are therefore free of responsibility for the acts of their country and fellow (male) citizens, then should British, Dutch and French women also be seen as free of blame for guilty acts committed by their countries? Can we or should we assert that half of the population of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were victims and therefore free of moral responsibility? This seems both unlikely and undesirable. Discrimination touches many individuals at times, but we do not want to say that such large numbers of people are all victims in the same way as the Jews under Nazi rule and therefore free of moral blame. Whilst pro-natalist policies did 9

discriminate against women both in Germany and in other countries this does not mean that German women are entirely free from moral responsibility for the events of the Holocaust.

The Private Sphere

Some feminist scholars have argued that German women cannot be held responsible for the Shoah. They claim that even though women were not victims, their actions are still blameless because they did nothing more than uphold the private sphere.

[von Saldern 1994, 145] The proponents of this view argue that as a group women did little more than bring up their children and provide a pleasant home for their husbands.

Thus, to say they bear some responsibility for the Holocaust is incorrect.

Claudia Koonz argues against this view. In her book Mothers in the Fatherland Koonz argues that, because women upheld the private sphere, a backdrop of normality was created, helping to divert attention from murderous acts. Women cooked, cleaned, brought up their children and provided a stable family life. They equipped the perpetrators with a family which “offers refuge to its members [and] prepares them to face society outside.” [Koonz 1988, 388] Whilst Koonz does not call these acts guilty she insists they were acts of complicity which enabled the perpetrators to forget about their job of murder while at home.

Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness provides some practical examples that serve to support Koonz’s argument. Sereny’s book documents her conversations with Franz Stangl. Stangl was Kommandant at the Treblinka and then the Sobibor death camps, and he oversaw the deaths of more than a million victims. [Rittner and Roth 1993, 270]

Talking of Stangl and his wife, Sereny concludes that “he was profoundly dependent on 10

her approval of him as a husband, a father, a provider, a professional success - and also as a man.” [Sereny 1974, 78] Stangl himself claimed that his main joy was his home and his wife: “All I wanted was just to close the door of my house and be alone with my wife.” [Sereny 1974, 30] The continuation of a normal family life seemingly enabled him to come home and forget about his day, just as today a banker may work from nine until five and yet be able to cease thinking about his job when he returns home, relaxed by the comfort of seeing his children, eating dinner, and watching a film with his wife.

According to Koonz, German women do not escape responsibility through their occupancy of a non-political private sphere. The upholding of the private sphere was in itself a morally relevant act. German women have a special female guilt, because they continued as normal, cooking, cleaning, and looking after their children. This notion of a special female guilt has been criticised by some feminist scholars, for they argue that it is wrong to condemn women for continuing to practise their gender-specific roles, particularly in a society where there was little flexibility in changing roles: As long as the “guilt” of women is seen as bearing and raising children, in the work done for the family and in the “traditional” role of women, who were said to be at the centre of National Socialist racial policy, there is hardly a chance of obtaining a new view. [Cited in von Saldern 1994, 147]

Also, it is argued that “the real contribution of women to Nazi crimes occurred in non-traditional functions external to the home.” [Cited in von Saldern 1994, 155] Whilst this is a valid retort to Koonz, I do not believe that it invalidates her argument. I believe that one of the implications of Koonz’s position is that both men and women under the Nazi regime should have been aware of the consequences of their actions and that to continue as normal, as though nothing was happening, was morally reprehensible. Men also continued to work in roles viewed as traditionally male; through joining the army and 11

protecting the nation from people viewed as “enemies of the state”. Yet few, surely, would propose that this removes their moral responsibility.

It is true that for the most part women didn’t appear to change their daily lives in Nazi Germany. They continued to do the same sort of things as they had before 1933.

Their jobs did not change from that of an unemployed builder to a member of a police battalion who killed Jews, as a man’s might have. Also women’s actions in general did not actively harm the Jews. Later I shall address the fact that women’s roles in some ways did change. They too marched in Nazi rallies or joined Nazi groups such as the NS-Frauenschaft (the Nazi women’s organisation). First I shall explore the proposal that German women are excluded from moral responsibility because they did not actively harm anyone, on account of their occupancy of the private sphere.

The primary role6 of many women in Nazi Germany was that of wife and mother.

Women in the Third Reich had little choice about their occupation. They simply performed the “non-political” tasks of the housewife and mostly did not choose to perform acts which harmed Jews. Is this sufficient exoneration for their lack of resistance to the Shoah? The majority of Germans were bystanders, and an even larger majority of German women were bystanders, yet it is not only action which causes harm; inaction, too, can contribute to evil. The absence of protest and of efforts to help Jewish people enabled anti-Jewish persecution to continue and escalate. If a greater number of Germans had resisted these policies of the Nazis, it is likely that fewer innocent lives would have been taken. The bystander must accept some responsibility for what happened. Thus, even if the role of German women did not change, I argue that it should have done.

6 I say primary role, for as I shall discuss later, many women also adopted more aggressively political positions.

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German society had changed, a fascist state was snatching the freedom of innocent citizens, and therefore a moral woman should have changed the role she was playing in society.

I have argued that as a group German women cannot be viewed simply as victims. Indeed some women were perpetrators. However, as for the majority, most German women suffered some level of discrimination, though not to an extent that they were unable to exercise a degree of control over their lives. If German women in the Third Reich knew what was happening and could have helped the Jews, can we say they bear some burden of guilt? I believe we can.

Women knew that something evil was happening to the Jews. Even if they had no secure knowledge of the death camps, they saw their Jewish neighbours compelled to wear the Star of David, prevented from shopping in Aryan shops, and finally taken forcibly from their homes and to an unknown destination from which they did not return.

Sereny argues that women whose husbands worked for the SS often knew of the crimes their husbands were involved in:

No one who has gone into these matters can continue to believe that SS men never told their wives about their activities. One example of this is Gustav Münzberger, who was at the Sonnenstein euthanasia institute before he went to Treblinka. “Well,” Frau Münzberger told me, “I knew after a while what he was doing. He wasn’t supposed to say of course, but you know what women are,” and she smiled comfortably. “I probed and probed and finally he told me. It was awful of course,” she added, just as comfortably, “but what could we do?” [Sereny 1974, 106]

She could in fact have done something, as is demonstrated by the answer to Sereny’s questioning of Frau Stangl on what her husband would have chosen if she had given him an ultimatum - either her or the job. “I believe that if I had ever confronted Paul with the alternatives: Treblinka - or me; he would . . . yes, he would in the final analysis have 13

chosen me.”7 [Sereny 1974, 361]

Whilst women were not in a strong economic position to help the Jews, some women did help. A particularly poignant example reported by Frances Henry is of a woman throwing food through the windows of Jewish houses after Jews had been banned from Aryan shops. [Henry 1984, 99] This does not, on the face of it, appear to be an act of great significance. Whilst it required courage, neither great planning nor a large amount of money were needed. Nor was it an act which would have helped large numbers of people or saved Jews from the fate of the concentration and death camps.

Nevertheless, it was an act of resistance, an act of compassion for fellow human beings, and most importantly it was an act which was a natural extension of the housewife’s role.

It is important to note, further, that some German women did more than this; they actually risked their lives in order to rescue Jews and resist the Nazis. Take for example the German woman, Maria Countess von Maltzan. Von Maltzan helped to save Jews from 1936 onwards. Along with other rescuers, she escorted groups of Jews out of Berlin and on to a train headed for Sweden, bribing the train conductor. Her flat was always

“crammed with people” seeking refuge from Nazi persecution, and it was invaded by the SS on at least one occasion. [Block and Drucker 1992, 154] At the age of 24 Gitta Bauer also made the decision to provide a refuge for a Jewish woman whom she hid for the last year of the war. Bauer not only hid this woman but decided not to tell her parents, so as to protect them from the burden of knowledge and possible persecution. [Block and Drucker 1992, 136-141] The acts of these two woman show us that some women were 7 Frau Stangl actually changes her mind about this later, sending a letter to Sereny saying

“I have always lived honourably”, but Sereny believes the first response was the more heartfelt and true.