Women & The Holocaust

by Dennis Green

The Nazi Beast in Holocaust memory is inevitably male. And yet, recent research shows that as many as 5,000 of concentration camp guards were women, nearly 10% of the force. The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has uncovered some very startling facts.

We tend to think, and like to think, that women are kind, nurturing, compassionate — not vicious or aggressive, as some men can be. But Lower’s research proves us wrong. Besides such notorious camp guards as Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, Lower has turned up such lesser known killers as Erna Petri, wife of an S.S. officer and mother, who was convicted of shooting six Jewish children in the head in a camp in Poland. And Johanna Atwater Zelle, a German secretary also found guilty of killing Jewish children.

Many of these women migrated to the eastern front, where genocide was going on quite openly. She estimates that they numbered in “the thousands.” Most did not bloody their own hands but cooperated in the systematic rounding up and slaughter of millions.

(And from my own admittedly limited personal experience, I can testify that “Anything we can do they can do better!”)

Such startling revelations about gender do more than merely highlight the extent to which the Nazi mentality and machinery infected the German people. Many who participated in the Hitler Youth Corps are still alive, and still in denial about national socialism and their nation’s sins.

In 1964, I was living in Isla Vista with my first wife, Linda. She had just earned her M.S. at Cal Berkeley, where I had taken a year off from my own studies to work in a gas station on University Ave. Linda got a great lab job at UCSB’s Biology Department, and we were flush with savings, so rented a very nice apartment on the ground floor less than a block from the northern edge of campus.

Our landlady was an immigrant from Germany, a nice enough middle-aged woman, small in stature but outgoing and talkative. One day, she confessed to me that she had been an active member of the Hitler Youth Corps herself. “We marched proudly in our uniforms, and worked small gardens inside the city of Berlin, like your own ‘Victory Gardens’ I believe.”

“What were you thinking?” I asked.

“Deutschland Uber Alles!” she replied. “The glory that was the Third Reich. Ours was the most powerful nation on earth. One day, I even marched past the review stand right past my Fuehrer!”

I was speechless.

“Now,” she said proudly. “I am American. And now, America is the most powerful nation on earth!”

Gave me pause. We were facing an election that year. Kennedy’s assassination had put LBJ in the White House, and he was being challenged by Barry Goldwater. Some of Goldwater’s pronouncements also gave me pause. As I listened to one of his speeches on the radio one day, he talked about how in Vietnam we had to “Defoliate those jungles and kill every last Vietcong!” Agent Orange.

So the next day, I hung a large paper banner on the tiny patio railing in front of our apartment reading, “Defoliate Goldwater!”

In class later that day, I was taken to task by a Goldwater supporter, who demanded to know what the hell my banner was all about. I explained quite calmly to him that I opposed the war in Vietnam, and that some of the biologists I knew had good reason to believe that Agent Orange would prove toxic to innocent civilians and even to our own troops. He scoffed.

But although she frowned mightily, my landlady didn’t object to my proclamation, and it stayed up until November, when we voters sent Barry scurrying back to Arizona with his tail between his legs.

The only thing he ever said that made any sense to me was that, “You can’t legislate morality!” I told my classmate, his big fan, “Great! Why not apply that to marijuana, abortion and the bashing of homosexuals?”

As I read about new Holocaust research findings, and how widespread Nazism truly was, I’m not surprised. We have the seeds of it right here. I find that some of the female bloggers and commentators online regarding local political issues can be just as vicious as the men. Yet, I think we still cut them some slack, thinking, oh, she’s just having a Mid-Month Moment. Wrong!

©2010 Dennis Green