“I received and distributed the personal mail addressed to the Führer. Many women wrote to him passionately. Some had nothing better to do than write to him every week.” Until Adolf Hitler‘s suicide on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker, his secretary Traudl Junge continued to receive love letters. Such female fascination for the mustachioed chancellor of the Reich might seem anecdotal. However, upon reading Hitler’s Furies, it becomes clear that this fascination reflects a broad approval among women for the Nazi regime, its expansionist policies, and its racial ideology.
In the popular imagery propagated by Nazi propaganda, German women of the Third Reich were portrayed as loving wives and robust mothers. As exemplary patriots, they replaced men fighting on the front lines, worked in fields or factories, served as nurses, and formed battalions of teachers and secretaries.
In the immediate post-war period, several trials of female camp guards, such as the “Hyena of Auschwitz” Irma Grese or the “Bitch of Buchenwald” Ilse Koch, shed light on shocking female participation in the genocide of Jews. However, these highly publicized and dramatized cases in cinema did not significantly tarnish the heroic image of the millions of German women who, considered victims of Nazism, suffered from war, hunger, and rape. These courageous women were even honored with statues for clearing the rubble of ruined cities.
Accomplices or Actors
Yet, as Professor Wendy Lower emphasizes, “the apoliticism of German women is part of post-war myths.” By July 1932, German women were already as likely as men to vote for the Nazi Party. “The entire female population of Germany (nearly 40 million in 1939) cannot be labeled as victims. A third, or 13 million women, actively joined organizations linked to the Nazi Party, and the number of female party members steadily increased until the end of the war,” she notes in a widely acclaimed study that has been translated into twenty languages and recently published in French.
Drawing on multiple sources—German war archives, Soviet investigations into Nazi war crimes, East German secret police files, trial records, Simon Wiesenthal archives, diaries, private correspondence, and testimonies—the researcher observes a massive participation of women as witnesses, accomplices, or active participants in the genocide of Jews, particularly in the Nazi-occupied territories of the East: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Colonization of the East
Based on official figures from the time, the historian estimates that half a million German women were deployed in the Eastern and Southeastern territories, including the Polish provinces annexed by Germany in 1939. Aged 17 to 30, often single, these representatives of the lower middle class enlisted out of patriotism, having already been recruited at 14 into the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel) and heavily indoctrinated from primary school.
While they joined the vast colonization program of the East—Heinrich Himmler’s Generalplan Ost—they were also driven by ambition, as opportunities for advancement in Germany were limited. Whether they were nurses, teachers, resettlement advisors, secretaries, wives of SS officers, or camp guards, all played a role in the functioning and expansion of the Nazi destruction machine.
Racial Selection
Women’s participation in the Final Solution took many forms. For example, the 2,500 teachers sent to Poland, like young Ingelene Ivens on a “civilizing mission” in the remote village of Reichelsfelde, were required to report any children with disabilities to the authorities. “If a child couldn’t button their coat properly, had poor academic performance, or lacked coordination in sports or playground activities, they were subjected to a screening test,” the historian recounts. Non-German children were excluded from the school system, while German children in Poland were privileged but also indoctrinated.
Racial selection also involved sending “orphans” to Germany for adoption. These children were actually stolen from their parents before the latter were thrown into camps or murdered. Estimates suggest that between 50,000 and 200,000 children were abducted from the Eastern territories. Racial “hygiene” selection was even more systematic in hospitals, where the nursing profession had acquired “a deeply nationalist and ideological character.” To obtain the status of a certified nurse, one had to provide proof of Aryan ancestry and political reliability.
Crossing the Line
While some nurses turned out to be serial killers (see below), crossing the line into violence could occur in any profession. For instance, typist Gertrude Segel would shoot at her gardeners from her balcony for amusement. Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer, cold-bloodedly murdered six children who had escaped a death train. As for the ambitious secretary Johanna Altvater, she had the “horrifying habit”—as one survivor put it—of luring Jewish children with sweets to kill them…
The secretaries and mistresses of SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, who managed the loot stolen from Treblinka deportees, may have been less violent. “But they nonetheless contributed to the normalization of perversity,” comments Professor Wendy Lower.
Hitler’s furies were not marginal sociopaths.
They were convinced that the violence of their actions was justified as vengeful punishment against the enemies of the Reich. From their perspective, these acts were merely expressions of their loyalty. Given that none of these women were forced to kill, such an attitude is all the more staggering. The horror knows no bounds…
Arbitrary Violence
The SS female guards of concentration camps for women have been the subject of meticulous historical studies. In 1945, these guards represented a professional body of 3,508 members spread across 13 camps throughout Europe. Their training primarily took place at Ravensbrück camp. For these young women, averaging 26 years old and mostly from working-class backgrounds, this job offered attractive salary prospects and opportunities for advancement. They earned twice as much as a female armaments factory worker and, at least initially, enjoyed a level of comfort they had never known at home. The uniform made an impression, and the prospect of wielding power was not without its appeal.
Some of these guards had criminal pasts. However, their extreme brutality and arbitrary violence are better explained by the context of the camps: the guards were often understaffed and had to assert their authority despite social and cultural deficits. The most sadistic among them were eventually brought to justice. The “Hyena of Auschwitz,” Irma Grese, was sentenced to hang. And the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch, wife of camp commander Karl Koch, ended her life in prison, committing suicide in 1967.
The Guardians of “Racial Hygiene”
“Of all the female professions engaged in the East, nursing was the deadliest. The genocidal operations planned by the central authority did not begin in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or on Ukrainian execution sites. They started in the hospitals of the Reich,” historian Wendy Lower reminds us.
The first victims were children. During the war, specially trained nurses administered overdoses of barbiturates or morphine to thousands of infants they deemed malformed, as well as to disabled adolescents. Meticulously following the Reich’s euthanasia program, some nurses participated in the selection and elimination of the mentally ill and disabled. They also worked in the infirmaries of concentration camps. They were among the first witnesses to the Final Solution.
In Poland, mass executions of patients began as early as September 1939. Mobile units traveled across the country, then through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, killing thousands of patients in asylums and hospitals or gassing them in special trucks. According to Wendy Lower, “racial hygiene” was also secretly applied to severely mutilated German soldiers on the Eastern Front to “deliver them from their suffering.” Families were told they had died “in combat.”
