Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower

Author:Wendy Lower
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History, Women's Studies, Social Science, Holocaust
ISBN: 9780547863382
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

I would never have committed theft. I know that one is not supposed to do that. In the bad times [prewar depression years] I was a saleswoman, and I had in those times easy opportunities to do that. But I never did such a thing, because I simply knew that it is not permitted. Even as a child I had learned: you are not allowed to steal. The administration of medication for the goal of killing a mentally ill person, I viewed as my duty, which I was not allowed to refuse.

In her mind, she was not a criminal. She had a good upbringing and learned that stealing was a crime. Doing her duty was not a crime, she believed, even if doing that duty meant killing another human being.

Besides sharing tools of violence (the hypodermic needle, the whip, and the gun), a passionate commitment to an ideological cause, an immoral perception of duty, and pacts of loyalty and secrecy, German male and female perpetrators exhibited similar psychologies of denial and repression. Those confronted with their misdeeds replied along standard lines. I don’t know; I know nothing about that. I can’t remember; I had to follow orders; I was on furlough. I heard from others about certain actions against Jews, but I did not see any Jews. When I arrived at my station, all the Jews were gone. Female defendants were aware of male testimony, were well versed in the art of verbal self-defense, and also developed their own strategies.

Of course anyone being questioned by a prosecutor or investigator for a major crime will be circumspect and will try to avoid punishment. In fear and desperation, to save oneself and to spare one’s family added shame and burden, one might lie, especially if the crime was committed in a place and time far removed from that of the trial, and is thus hard to prove. Many did lie. Is it so surprising that, among the more than three hundred thousand Germans and Austrians investigated across Europe, very few confessed?

More complex than the basic strategy of flat-out denial was the defense of being the martyr or victim. As the nurse Pauline Kneissler put it, “I never understood mercy killing as murder . . . My life was one of dedication and self-sacrifice . . . Never was I cruel to persons . . . and for this today I must suffer and suffer.” Perpetrators who deny their crimes do not see themselves as evildoers who deserve punishment. It is the victim and the prosecutors who believe otherwise. In his exploration of evil, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that perpetrators “may see something wrong in what they did, but they also see how they were affected by external factors, including some that were beyond their control. They see themselves as having acted in a way that was fully appropriate and justified.”

Erna Petri did not deny her killing or overtly assign herself victimhood, but she did attribute her deed to circumstances at the time, not least to the influence of her husband, who was certainly a brutal man.

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