Hitler's Handmaidens (2024) s01e02 Episode Script
Nazi She-Devils
1
(dramatic music)
- (explosions)
NARRATOR: Nazi Germany,
two words synonymous
with barbarity, terror,
hate and death.
A shock defeat in
World War One sows
the seeds for discontent in
a once prosperous nation.
Adolf Hitler, an unassuming,
uninspiring man seizes the
opportunity to take control
..promising to make
Germany great again.
But he won't do it alone.
Willing accomplices rally
from the most
unlikely of places.
The female Fuhrers
Nazi she-devils
cougars
fantasists
and secret lovers.
These are the forgotten Nazis.
These are Hitler's Handmaidens.
- (speaks German)
- (crowd cheers, chants)
NARRATOR: It was
one of the greatest,
most seductive of the
Nazi propaganda myths.
- (reporter speaks German)
NARRATOR: Motherhood,
the one and only purpose
for women of the fatherland.
Kinder, Kuche, Kirche -
Children, Kitchen, Church.
The Nazis created a fantasy
land of milk and honey,
sun-kissed pastures,
and fresh-faced maidens.
A utopia for virtuous women
and their racially
pure "Kinder."
The incubator for a glorious
thousand-year Reich.
In their millions, German women
embraced that submissive vision.
But not all would.
A select few sought a more
active role in the Nazi dream
of global domination
and racial purity.
NARRATOR: They
were Hitler's she-devils,
ready to follow any order,
no matter how horrific,
and it's something history
has struggled to reconcile.
- I think there's a real social
taboo around female violence
and the idea that
women participated,
may even have actively chosen
to commit acts of brutality
and sadism in World War Two.
It's fundamentally
anathema to stereotypes
about womanhood,
motherhood, femininity.
NARRATOR: From all
walks of life they came,
to keep the Nazi death
machine running at full speed.
Farm girls and factory hands
to middle class professionals,
Teachers, nurses and doctors.
They flocked to the
killing fields and camps
where cruelty knew no bounds.
Not only were they organisers,
these women were
active participants.
Secretaries who
typed the death lists,
who scrupulously recorded
the gruesome details
of butchery on an
unimaginable scale.
Medical professionals who
betrayed their solemn oaths
to care for the sick and
vulnerable, instead poisoning,
mutilating, and murdering
without pity or remorse.
What makes female
guards beat pregnant women
and whip prisoners to death?
Or a mother of three coldly
execute a row of children
with pistol shots to the head?
These are the stories
of Hitler's she-devils
and how only a few of them
would ever be brought to justice.
When American soldiers liberated
the Ravensbruck
concentration camp for women,
they saw evidence of
unimaginable atrocities.
- Ravensbruck was exclusively
for for female prisoners,
and that's where most
of them sort of had
their female
overseers of the camp.
That's where most of
them had their initiation.
That was seen as a
kind of a starting block
for a career as a
female camp guard.
And from there they could go
to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen,
and any of the other
camps around the Reich.
That was certainly, for
most, a sort of a starting block.
NARRATOR: But it was not
just the sadism and brutality
of the camp guards
that haunted survivors.
They told of 'a beast
masquerading as a human'
..a beast who was a
doctor and a woman
who betrayed every
oath and tenet of medicine
in the most inhumane ways.
Her name was Herta Oberheuser.
- Herta got her
medical degree in 1937,
and then, she becomes involved in
these experiments at Ravensbruck
and is working in
Ravensbruck inside.
She's been assigned
to experiments to test
the effects of wounds
on the human body.
If they can see how a wound
that's inflicted by shrapnel
is going to affect an
ordinary German soldier
and all the ways
that could be treated.
She's putting sawdust in there,
putting glass shards
putting various chemicals
and rubbing that in.
Of course, these so-called
kind of procedures are done
with no anaesthetic.
Um There could The
prisoners are conscious.
It's torture. It's sadistic.
NARRATOR: Using
a smuggled camera,
prisoners documented
all they could.
Evidence that would later be used
in war crime trials at Nuremberg.
Bones broken with hammers,
limbs cut off and transplanted
onto other prisoners.
all performed without
anaesthetic of any kind.
It was a butcher's shop,
and those that survived were
routinely killed by Oberheuser
with injections of petrol.
Murders she'd later try to
pass off as humanitarian acts.
- One of the victims
who testified said that,
when she was administering
these lethal injections,
she had an
expression on her face,
a kind of smug, self-satisfied
expression on her face,
and you could see her
contempt for humanity.
NARRATOR: Neither were
children spared any of the horror.
Oberheuser killed
them with injections
of oil and barbiturates
and then cut off their limbs
and removed vital organs.
Oberheuser would even
beat pregnant women
to cause miscarriages
before killing the newborns.
Oberheuser insisted at her trial
that she tried to
give her patients care.
But witnesses told
how she denied
her mutilated victims
medical help, even water.
Oberheuser was one of
the few Nazi she-devils
who'd ever see a court room.
And there, she
denied everything.
- Oberheuser was charged with
crimes against humanity, was convicted.
She was actually given
a a pretty stiff sentence
relative to the other cases
that were tried at this time.
She was given a
ten-year sentence,
but she was released earlier,
around 1950, early '50s.
And she actually resumed her
practice her medical practice.
And a former prisoner from
Ravensbruck identified her
..and then, that was shut down.
So, by 1960s, she was
she was out of business,
and then, she kind of died
in her eighties, peacefully.
NARRATOR: Oberheuser was a butcher
and a murderer of the highest order.
She betrayed her
Hippocratic oath
,,and serves as perhaps
the clearest example
of the power of
Nazi indoctrination.
That a doctor could
turn murderer speaks
to the collective brainwashing
in Nazi Germany at the time.
It was all-pervasive,
and as Hitler shifted his focus
to State-sanctioned torture,
eugenics and euthanasia
in the pursuit of racial purity,
doctors like Herta Oberheuser
wouldn't be the only converts.
(dramatic music)
- (people cheering)
NARRATOR: Forty
miles from Stuttgart,
it still looks picture perfect.
But the fanatical Nazi
obsession with the "imperfect"
continues to haunt the corridors
and halls of Grafeneck Castle.
In late 1939, Hitler
signed a euthanasia law,
the sinister and
secret T4 programme.
- And this programme
was an opportunity for
the Nazi party to murder
anybody who they
thought of as disabled,
whether they were
actually disabled or not.
And people would come there,
and they would be murdered.
- It was brutal. It
was absolutely brutal.
And that's where a lot
of women were involved
because women were
actually nurses, and they
they had been involved with
caring for less abled people,
people who had disabilities,
and it was an extension of
that, and they just, you know,
we will use this,
and we will execute.
NARRATOR: These nurses
had trained to protect human life.
But, in these wards, they
routinely slaughtered their patients
with morphine injections.
One nurse hand-picked
to make Grafeneck Castle
an efficient killing site
was Pauline Kneissler.
Her task?
To travel to nearby
institutions with a list of patients,
bus them back to
Grafeneck and murder them.
- Pauline Kneissler
became a career killer.
She killed on average
between 1939 and 1945
seventy people a
day. Mostly children.
She moved around
different facilities.
She was transferring her
expertise to these different facilities,
including going to, um
the eastern territories.
NARRATOR: So what made
Nurse Pauline Kneissler decide
to kill rather than care?
From a wealthy, ethnic
German household
in the Odessa region of Ukraine,
she was born to privilege.
But her family was targeted
and stripped of their money
in The Bolshevik Revolution.
So they fled to Germany
where her father worked
in the German National Railway.
Kneissler studied nursing and
qualified as a psychiatric nurse.
Perhaps it was her
grievance against communists
or a need for belonging.
But like so many other woman,
Kneissler was easily
seduced by Nazism.
- Any woman is likely to have
had years of indoctrination.
You know, she may have
been at school with textbooks.
She would have been a member of
the BDM: the Bund Deutscher Madel.
She may have been a member of a
different German youth movement.
Jewish people would have
been completely dehumanised,
to the point where they were
able to detach the situation,
and they saw the Jewish
people not as people anymore,
and therefore were
able to murder them.
NARRATOR: This
detachment was so ingrained
that it remained evident
in the trials of women
like Kniessler
long after the war.
At her post-war
trial, she confessed,
"We didn't feel
very good about it,
but we had no
moral reservations."
- I think that tells you
everything you need to know.
That any feelings of
"Should we question this?"
were quickly dismissed,
and any human instinct to protect
or care for others was quelled.
And it shows us the mentality
of the Nazi soldiers
and the efficacy
of the SS in
and Hitler himself,
in creating that absolute
obedience and wish to serve.
NARRATOR: In one
year at Grafeneck Castle,
the medical personnel murdered
nearly 10,000 German people.
- And this programme
made it look on the outside
like a nice place that you
could send your family member
if they were disabled,
mentally or physically disabled.
And it was here that gas
was tested on these patients,
on these people,
before being taken to
concentration camps.
NARRATOR: Kneissler
found the gassings frightening
but said at her trial they
were 'not really all that bad'
..because, she reasoned,
'death by gas doesn't hurt'.
To their credit, some German
families risked everything
to openly protest
the T4 programme.
- And families started realising
what was actually happening,
that these people
were being murdered.
And in total, it's estimated
that a quarter of a million
people were murdered this way.
Families started protesting,
and the Nazi Party,
rather than stopping the
T4 programme altogether,
just made it even
more secretive,
even more undercover.
(sinister music)
- Initially, it was fairly easy to
disguise, in some respects, the
the Nazi euthanisation
programme.
When, um the
children that were affected
with physical or
mental disabilities
when they were examined by
a doctor, and the doctor says,
"Well, look, we we may be able
to help this this child of yours,
but we need to have them
sent to the correct establishment.
And the parents would get a
letter some months later saying,
"We're sorry to inform
you your child has
has died of measles
or chicken pox."
In effect, they've probably
been given a lethal injection
and sort of euthanised
under this programme.
NARRATOR: Unbelievably,
at her trial in Frankfurt in 1948,
Pauline Kniessler was sentenced
to only four years in prison.
She would continue to work as
a nurse until retirement in 1963.
- (man speaks German)
NARRATOR: She was
able to live out the full life
she denied the thousands
she helped to murder
in the name of racial purity.
- I think, in the '40s and
'50s, the gender of women,
including those concentration
camp guards standing trial
was absolutely
central in their receiving
lenient sentences or
no sentences because,
again, the prevailing view
that women can't be violent,
that women don't have agency,
that if they're cruel, it's only
under the coercion of man,
it's a myth. But it's
a pervasive one.
So the women's participation
in Nazi brutality was
rendered invisible or
really only focussed on just
a few cases, when, in fact,
it was far more pervasive.
NARRATOR: There
was, however, one woman
whose crimes were
so prolific and terrible
that even the Nuremberg
judges would have no choice
but to order her execution.
At the camps where
she plied her evil trade,
she was known variously
as The Hyena of Auschwitz,
The Beautiful Beast,
The Angel of Death.
REPORTER: No men or
women have ever faced
charges of such a
loathsome nature.
One of the most prominent amongst
the women prisoners is Irma Grese.
Number nine.
- Irma Grese had a
very notorious reputation
for being a sadistic guard.
Like, stomping on
prisoners, and shouting,
and sending her guard
dogs, attack dogs on prisoners.
She was attractive
woman, but she also just fit
this kind of stereotype of
of a tough German woman,
and she looked,
you know, the part.
- When she was at Auschwitz,
she seemed to as if she
had something to prove.
I mean, her violence
knew no bounds.
She would She would hit
beat a prisoner virtually to death
for no reason at all.
And certainly in Auschwitz,
they they nicknamed her the
the Hyena of Auschwitz
was one of her names.
NARRATOR: To this day,
historians ponder how a woman could
commit such heinous crimes.
But there were forty million
German women in 1939,
and thirteen
million of them were
actively engaged
in the Nazi Party,
whether directly or
through youth groups
like the Bund Deutscher Madel,
the League of German Girls.
While not a BDM member herself,
Irma was fanatical
from a young age,
and her penchant for violence
would soon shock all around her.
- When women are violent,
it actually offends our whole
set of social stereotypes
about womenkind,
about femininity.
And it's anathema, it's taboo,
and it becomes much more
disturbing, exciting, horrific.
So it does stick
in our mind more.
- The BDM and other units like that
were indoctrinated with Nazi ideals.
So that was a theoretical
view of it, you know,
that, uh the Aryan
race, the superiority,
the position of women and
all of that was indoctrinated.
Get them young, keep them old.
But that was what
they did in these groups.
One, indoctrination,
two, training.
NARRATOR: As a teenager,
Irma was infatuated
by Hitler and the Nazis.
She wanted to join the
BDM, but her father forbade it.
So Irma took matters
into her own hands,
leaving home at fifteen.
- (explosions)
NARRATOR: The year
the war began, 1939,
she joined an SS hospital.
Her mentor was Karl Gebhardt,
the man who would go on
to facilitate Herta Oberheuser's
horrific human experiments.
Nursing didn't suit Irma,
so, at the age of sixteen, she
moved on to an SS female helpers
training base near
Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Her Nazi zeal and
devotion to duty
caught the eye of
the SS hierarchy,
and at the tender
age of nineteen,
Irma Grese was made a
supervisor at Ravensbruck.
- Shortly after the training,
she entered the
Ravensbruck camp,
where, straight away, she
became pretty notorious.
And she was quite
disliked at Ravensbruck,
obviously, because of a violence
violence she was prone to
to violence without provocation.
NARRATOR: It was
at Auschwitz, though,
that Grese really
came into her own,
as the lover and accomplice
of the notorious
Doctor Josef Mengele.
She helped with The Selections,
a process in which
prisoners were chosen
for Mengele's monstrous
medical experiments
or sent to the gas chambers.
Grese was highly sexualised,
both at the camp and
in the media post-war.
Apart from Mengele,
she also had affairs with the
camp commandant Josef Kramer
and male guards.
It was alleged she even
raped female prisoners.
- There were
others who were also
kind of sensationalised
in the press.
Ilse Koch is probably
the most famous.
She was the wife of a
commandant at Buchenwald.
It kind of stirs up their
sense of lurid fascination
and the kind of
pornography of violence.
They're kind of these
caricatures, eroticising evil,
as one scholar says, my
colleague, Claudia Koonz says.
It's a kind of
eroticisation of evil.
So Ilse Koch and Irma Grese
are very good examples of that.
NARRATOR: When she
was arrested after the war,
Grese was unrepentant.
When asked why she took
part in the atrocities, she replied,
"It was our duty to
exterminate anti-social elements
so that Germany's
future would be assured.
- They were xenophobic.
They were racists.
And they believe they're
on the right side of history.
They were trying to restore
Germany's place in the sun
and even expand it as an empire.
And they weren't remorseful.
- Irma Grese was one of the most
sadistic concentration
camp guards
..known to be sexually sadistic,
as well as just generally.
And yet, at her trial, she's
rolling her eyes, smiling
..acting as though this is a
matter of great indifference to her.
It's very interesting
to know about that
because it makes me wonder,
was there such a
dissociation in her,
such a disavowal of
our own aggression?
NARRATOR: Despite Irma Grese
ultimately facing the death penalty,
most of the female concentration
guards escaped justice.
- Most of the guards,
the camp guards,
who were pursued after
the war and stood trial, um
did so between 1945 and 1955.
So there were about 3,600
guards, according to this document
that we found in '45,
but in the post-war period
only sixty actually stood trial.
And so, you know, as
far as the pursuit of justice,
uh we don't see as
many women being tried
and even fewer who were actually,
uh given the death sentence.
NARRATOR: The failure to confront
the crimes of some Nazi women is
something history
will have to deal with.
Many got away with
a slap on the wrist.
Many went on to live
long and happy lives
..like a woman known
simply as The Stomping Mare.
NARRATOR: Perhaps a
consequence of their gender
..but many of the Nazi she-devils
managed to escape justice.
And even when
they were prosecuted,
the process could
sometimes take decades.
One particularly strange case
was that of the grey-haired woman
who finally stood trial in 1975.
Presenting herself as an
innocent suburban housewife
Hermine Braunsteiner
was anything but.
She was in fact the ghastly camp
guard of Majdanek Prison in Poland,
known by inmates as
'The Stomping Mare'.
- Hermine Braunsteiner was
a camp guard at Majdanek
..which was near Lublin, Poland,
another one of the
big killing centres.
She was known for
stomping on prisoners
and just for her excessive
cruelty and sadism.
So she was given this,
like, Mare of Majdanek,
uh kind of label.
NARRATOR: Yet, for
many years after the war
Hermine lived a life of
comfort and safety in the USA.
After meeting an American on
vacation in her native Austria,
she married him and
moved to the USA in 1959.
Four years later, she
was an American citizen.
- She made her way
to Queens, New York.
And at some point, I know
that Simon Wiesenthal
and others Nazi hunters
were pursuing her.
Survivors were talking about
her, and they couldn't find her.
But she was
identified in Queens.
NARRATOR: Her husband
would testify in her defence saying
.."My wife wouldn't hurt a fly.
There's no more decent
person on this Earth.
She told me this was a
duty she had to perform."
How do these women,
after all they've done,
re-enter society with
such little remorse
..that even their partners carry
a sense of denial on their behalf?
- Women who took part
in the Nazi machinery,
like Hermine Braunsteiner,
did re-enter society
and, in many ways,
the kind of denial
of their perpetration
and their roles
helped them to feel that
they could simply reintegrate.
However, my awareness of
of how they would have
functioned would be my
my suggestion about how
they would have managed is
that they would have gone
into denial and dissociation.
They would have shut away the
horrors that they had perpetrated.
NARRATOR: Braunsteiner
was the first Nazi war criminal
to be extradited from the US.
She finally stood trial
in Dusseldorf in 1975
alongside other Majdanek
guards in what would become
the longest and most
expensive trial in West Germany.
In 1981, nearly forty
years after her crimes,
The Stomping Mare was
convicted on three counts:
direct participation in the
murders of eighty people;
abetting the murder
of 102 children;
and collaborating in the
murder of 1,000 people.
She was sentenced
to life in prison
but released on
health grounds in 1996.
She died three years later,
having lived more than half a
century longer than her victims.
- These individuals like
Hermine Braunsteiner,
those who lived
on decades, right,
who were not executed by The
Allies immediately after the war,
they didn't continue to be
serial killers or career killers.
The violence that they demonstrated
and committed during the war
they did not continue to
behave violently after the war.
So when the Department
of Justice came knocking
on Hermine Braunsteiner
door in Queens
and identified her, and she
opened the door in her nice
you know, apron, or
whatever she had on,
you know, people couldn't believe
that she was that other person,
uh forty years before.
- (explosions)
- (rapid gunfire)
NARRATOR: It wasn't
just the female camp
and prison guards that
showed a taste for brutality.
In the occupied east,
lawlessness would bring out
the worst in seemingly
ordinary German women.
Just as America
had its 'Wild West',
Germany saw its new
frontiers like Poland,
Ukraine and Belarus,
as the 'Wild East.'
Heinrich Himmler saw the
expansion of Lebensraum
as the Nazi's great destiny.
More than half a million German
women enthusiastically joined
this surging colonisation.
Though, few would ever
pull the trigger on a Luger
or the levers in a gas chamber,
they'd work their evil through
efficient administration.
They were the 10,000 secretaries
who carefully typed up
orders and death lists
..assisting with the paperwork
and logistics of mass murder,
and forensically
filing it all away.
In the east
the devil was
truly in the detail.
- Women relied, as part
of the Holocaust, greatly,
just as much as the men really.
Their roles was as
significant as the men certainly,
I mean, everybody who was a
Nazi was was a part of that.
They were tram drivers,
telephonists, secretaries.
They were working in the munitions
factories, as well as the camps.
They were doing a
huge variety of roles,
literally more than what was
ever envisaged by Hitler in fact.
- (speaks German)
- (applause and cheering)
- The truth is, for the
Holocaust to happen,
the Nazi Party
needed the support
of thousands of
people in every role,
from the secretaries
taking down the orders,
to the train drivers driving the
trains to concentration camps,
to the concentration
camp guards.
And an awful lot of the people
in these roles were women.
The Nazi Party would
not have been able
to commit the
genocide that it did -
the murder of six million Jewish
men, women, and children -
without massive
support from women.
NARRATOR: Shockingly, many of
these willing participants would go on
to live full and happy lives
..changing their identities
and hiding the horrors
of national socialism,
in which they were complicit.
- One of the secretaries
that I interviewed afterwards
..said to me that she didn't
see anything wrong with her job.
She wasn't directly involved
in the murder of any Jewish
people or anybody else.
And she actually really enjoyed
her time as a secretary for the Nazis
because she was
very well looked after.
And when she was sick,
she got sent what was
called a "Fuhrerpaket,"
a gift from the Fuhrer,
to help her get better.
And she was made
to feel appreciated.
NARRATOR: One such secretary
went to the East in a support role,
with no direct orders
to take part in killings.
But whether it was her lust for
blood or twisted sense of duty,
she quickly became
immersed in murder.
Her name was Johanna Altvater.
- Johanna Altvater grew
up in this small town,
went through the
League of German Girls.
Also about twenty years old when
she was sent to the Eastern Front.
And she wanted to
go to the Eastern Front.
She's someone who
was described as, um
someone who had the
toughness to go the Eastern Front.
NARRATOR: Like a
cattle herder, a Frontier Girl,
that's how Altvater
was described
during the liquidation of the
Warsaw Ghetto in May 1943.
She would roam the
camp in her riding breeches,
cracking her whip and
prodding prisoners into a truck.
Altvater started as
an administrative aid,
but she couldn't help but
get involved in the killing.
- So there was a machinery of
that, and she helped organise that,
but she also participated.
When the Jews are
being rounded up
and brought to the
mass murder site -
the forests outside
of Vladimir Volynsky -
she went into the infirmary
and grabbed the children
and the patients in the infirmary.
And if some of
them were too ill,
she just threw them
over the balcony, and
and they died; you know,
it was several storeys.
She was seen going
into this ghetto, one day,
and gesturing to a Jewish
child and to come over to her.
And the father was standing
nearby; he witnessed the whole thing.
And she picked the
child up by the legs, um
and bashed it against the
ghetto wall until it until it died.
NARRATOR: Killing Jewish
children wasn't enough
for the Nazis of the
occupied Eastern territories.
They also abducted children
they classified as Aryan.
This was part of a
program to stock the Reich
with what were seen as
'racially valuable' children.
- (babies crying) NARRATOR:
The Lebensborn Program,
once a beacon of
the regime's promise
to help German women
become successful mothers,
became a state-sanctioned
kidnapping program.
The kidnappers were
called the 'Brown Sisters'.
Women in brown coats who
trawled through the countryside,
searching for Aryan-looking
children to steal
and send to German
nurseries and SS families.
- This Lebensborn it
didn't stay in Germany.
It moved it, particularly Poland,
but other countries as well.
Even the extent of
kidnapping children,
which I think is the
most amazing thing,
The Brown Sisters,
you know, in particular,
how they would move
in, kidnap the children,
purely people who looked Aryan -
blonde hair, you
know, pale skins.
- Many children that were
encountered by the German forces
..they were sort
of viewed as, um
being children who
could be Aryanised.
And they, of course, would be
taken from their parents forcibly.
Sometimes, if the parents
protested, they'd be shot.
Sometimes, though, the
parents would be shot anyway.
And these children would
then be moved back to Germany
and placed with,
um German families
where they would
be raised as Germans
with no former
history whatsoever.
NARRATOR: Using candy
and slices of bread as lures
to attract boys and girls,
the 'Brown Sisters' travelled
behind advancing German
forces into the occupied East,
locating and interrogating
youngsters about their family trees.
This horrific harvesting was
grotesque in practice and scale.
It's estimated that
up to 400,000 children
were abducted from their
families in Eastern Europe.
Women stood at the
forefront of this effort
as trustworthy and
motherly figures.
- Women being used in
this way makes me think
about some of the work I do now
with female sex
offenders, for example,
who are using their status
as trustworthy figures -
mothers, sisters, uh
friends, teachers,
nursery nurses, whatever -
and then, using that
power and that respect
in order to access
and damage children.
- (children crying)
NARRATOR: Nazi doctrine determined
that Aryan-looking Polish children
were actually Nordic and
could be taught to be German.
Birth documents were destroyed,
and many children never
discovered their origins.
It is estimated that only
20% of the stolen children
were reunited with their
families after the war.
NARRATOR: The Nazi
occupied territories in the East
were a free-for-all.
Jews were murdered by the
thousands in slums and ghettos
..while Aryan children
were snatched up
and taken back to
pure German families.
Alongside the barbarity of
the concentration camps,
the horrors of the Wild
East were among the worst
of the Nazi crimes.
- Half of the victims
of the Holocaust
died in ghettos and
in mass shootings.
One out of four victims of the
Holocaust died in places like,
you know, Ukraine and these
these ravines and
these mass shootings.
So as we understand
the history of the Holocaust
as this much bigger,
uh operation
that enters into all these
realms of everyday life,
of professional work,
of how you wage a war.
NARRATOR: In a
forest near Lida, Belarus,
there are stark
monuments to a massacre
of more than 6,000 Jews
on the 8th May, 1942.
One depicts two
mournful female figures,
the personification
of inconsolable grief.
The cruel irony is that the
massacre was organised by a woman:
a Nazi secretary
called Liselotte Meier.
Meier was the
constant companion,
lover and secretary of the district
commissar Hermann Hanweg.
They had an all-consuming
passion for each other,
for the high life
of their luxury villa
and for the sport of
hunting and killing Jews.
- When I think about the
psychology of the wives of soldiers
who then go on to perpetrate,
I mean, it's an exhilarating,
intoxicating, freeing experience
to remove your moral shackles.
And once it's happened once,
you see it just takes
on a different meaning.
So having overcome that
moral force, that boundary,
we know this in forensic
psychotherapy that,
once you've broken
the body boundary
it's so much easier to
do it again and again.
- (machines whirring)
NARRATOR: Liselotte Meier was
a woman who rejected factory work
as her contribution
to the Reich.
Instead, she chose to join the
exodus to the Nazi's Wild East
to ply her trade as a secretary.
Through her relationship
with Hermann Hanweg,
Lisolette got caught up in what
the Nazis called "Ostrausch"
.."Eastern Rush."
An orgy of sex and violence
in the occupied territories.
Lisolette and her lover were
all powerful in their domain.
They had the authority to
decide who lived and who died.
- Hanweg and Meier end up, um
taking over a villa
with a swimming pool.
And they're having
their relationship there.
And these Jewish labourers are
like serving them post coital delicacies.
And they're, you know,
so there's the debauchery.
NARRATOR: And when the
couple got bored, it was hunting time.
- And we hear
stories after the war
a survivor ended up
testifying that he saw, um
Hanweg and his
female colleagues.
It was a It was a
Sunday afternoon.
You know, the
the office was close.
And there were Jews nearby
who were shovelling the snow.
And when the Germans
couldn't find any rabbits,
or any any
animals to to shoot,
they told the Jewish
labourers just just run
into the direction
of the forest,
and they were just going
to take shots at them.
And they just started shooting
them and killed some of them.
NARRATOR: When later questioned,
Liselotte denied ever
killing anyone herself,
but she continued to
refer to the Jews as 'Dreck',
which basically means 'scum'.
According to post-war
trial statements,
all the logistics of the
massacres carried out
in Lida were orchestrated by
the Secretary from Saxony
..Liselotte Meier.
- So she's never indicted.
But she's, you know,
has life and death power
over that Jewish population.
She also was seen issuing
orders to execute Jews.
She was handling those orders
and the distribution
of the the bullets
and the material to carry
out those executions.
NARRATOR: In 2007,
a photo album was donated to the
United States Holocaust Museum,
the scenes in and
around Auschwitz reek
of symbolism,
obscenity, cynicism.
But the photos
are not of corpses.
They show Nazi men
and women at play,
enjoying picnics with
their families in the sun.
This is the true picture of
Nazi female perpetrators.
Women who could live two lives
during one of history's
most atrocious chapters.
- It's very common
for people to cut off
or deny unacceptable
aspects of themselves.
And the women who
seem to be picnicking
and frolicking with
their families by day -
or on the weekends - and are
brutally sadistic in the camps,
on other days,
don't really see any
contradiction in that behaviour.
So, on the one hand,
it's absolutely human to cut off
and compartmentalise
unacceptable behaviour,
deny that it happens.
On the other hand,
even if the female
prison guards were
to acknowledge
what they were doing,
because the Jews weren't people
anyway, it really doesn't matter.
- (speaks German)
NARRATOR: To suggest they
didn't know what was going on,
or they were simply
following orders,
isn't compatible with
what we know today.
The story of women
in Nazi Germany is
one of means,
motive, and opportunity.
Not all were camp
guards or torturers,
and yet, most played some role in
propping up the Holocaust machine.
- And part of it was the actual
day-to-day administration,
typing the orders,
answering the telephone.
And part of it was
creating an environment
that allowed the men to
then go and physically be
the murderers
behind the genocide.
And it's interesting that women
were involved in every single role,
across the spectrum,
and very few of the
women I researched
saw a problem with
what they were doing,
saw any issues with
what they were doing.
- (speaks German)
- (crowd chanting
supportively in German)
- Lots of women afterwards
pleaded that they were just young.
They didn't know
what was going on.
But I don't think
that's a great response
because there are examples of
young women that did stand up to Hitler.
But I think it's fair to say
that ordinary German people
knew what was happening.
It was in the newspapers.
It was in the radio.
Concentration camps were in Germany.
Jewish people were disappearing.
And so, if ordinary German
people knew about the Holocaust,
the women who
were the secretaries,
the woman who were
the administrators
were even closer
to the knowledge.
They had evidence
in front of them.
They knew the names
of concentration camps,
They knew what
was happening there.
NARRATOR: In many ways, history
let Hitler's she-devils off the hook.
A justice system which
either failed to prosecute them,
or gave light sentences
and early releases.
Traditional views of gender
and violence played a part in this.
Perhaps they still do.
But history mocks
the female cliches.
Given the right circumstances
and environment,
women, too, will
commit genocide,
as faithful enablers
and bloody participants.
(dramatic music)
(intense, reflective music)
(dramatic music)
- (explosions)
NARRATOR: Nazi Germany,
two words synonymous
with barbarity, terror,
hate and death.
A shock defeat in
World War One sows
the seeds for discontent in
a once prosperous nation.
Adolf Hitler, an unassuming,
uninspiring man seizes the
opportunity to take control
..promising to make
Germany great again.
But he won't do it alone.
Willing accomplices rally
from the most
unlikely of places.
The female Fuhrers
Nazi she-devils
cougars
fantasists
and secret lovers.
These are the forgotten Nazis.
These are Hitler's Handmaidens.
- (speaks German)
- (crowd cheers, chants)
NARRATOR: It was
one of the greatest,
most seductive of the
Nazi propaganda myths.
- (reporter speaks German)
NARRATOR: Motherhood,
the one and only purpose
for women of the fatherland.
Kinder, Kuche, Kirche -
Children, Kitchen, Church.
The Nazis created a fantasy
land of milk and honey,
sun-kissed pastures,
and fresh-faced maidens.
A utopia for virtuous women
and their racially
pure "Kinder."
The incubator for a glorious
thousand-year Reich.
In their millions, German women
embraced that submissive vision.
But not all would.
A select few sought a more
active role in the Nazi dream
of global domination
and racial purity.
NARRATOR: They
were Hitler's she-devils,
ready to follow any order,
no matter how horrific,
and it's something history
has struggled to reconcile.
- I think there's a real social
taboo around female violence
and the idea that
women participated,
may even have actively chosen
to commit acts of brutality
and sadism in World War Two.
It's fundamentally
anathema to stereotypes
about womanhood,
motherhood, femininity.
NARRATOR: From all
walks of life they came,
to keep the Nazi death
machine running at full speed.
Farm girls and factory hands
to middle class professionals,
Teachers, nurses and doctors.
They flocked to the
killing fields and camps
where cruelty knew no bounds.
Not only were they organisers,
these women were
active participants.
Secretaries who
typed the death lists,
who scrupulously recorded
the gruesome details
of butchery on an
unimaginable scale.
Medical professionals who
betrayed their solemn oaths
to care for the sick and
vulnerable, instead poisoning,
mutilating, and murdering
without pity or remorse.
What makes female
guards beat pregnant women
and whip prisoners to death?
Or a mother of three coldly
execute a row of children
with pistol shots to the head?
These are the stories
of Hitler's she-devils
and how only a few of them
would ever be brought to justice.
When American soldiers liberated
the Ravensbruck
concentration camp for women,
they saw evidence of
unimaginable atrocities.
- Ravensbruck was exclusively
for for female prisoners,
and that's where most
of them sort of had
their female
overseers of the camp.
That's where most of
them had their initiation.
That was seen as a
kind of a starting block
for a career as a
female camp guard.
And from there they could go
to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen,
and any of the other
camps around the Reich.
That was certainly, for
most, a sort of a starting block.
NARRATOR: But it was not
just the sadism and brutality
of the camp guards
that haunted survivors.
They told of 'a beast
masquerading as a human'
..a beast who was a
doctor and a woman
who betrayed every
oath and tenet of medicine
in the most inhumane ways.
Her name was Herta Oberheuser.
- Herta got her
medical degree in 1937,
and then, she becomes involved in
these experiments at Ravensbruck
and is working in
Ravensbruck inside.
She's been assigned
to experiments to test
the effects of wounds
on the human body.
If they can see how a wound
that's inflicted by shrapnel
is going to affect an
ordinary German soldier
and all the ways
that could be treated.
She's putting sawdust in there,
putting glass shards
putting various chemicals
and rubbing that in.
Of course, these so-called
kind of procedures are done
with no anaesthetic.
Um There could The
prisoners are conscious.
It's torture. It's sadistic.
NARRATOR: Using
a smuggled camera,
prisoners documented
all they could.
Evidence that would later be used
in war crime trials at Nuremberg.
Bones broken with hammers,
limbs cut off and transplanted
onto other prisoners.
all performed without
anaesthetic of any kind.
It was a butcher's shop,
and those that survived were
routinely killed by Oberheuser
with injections of petrol.
Murders she'd later try to
pass off as humanitarian acts.
- One of the victims
who testified said that,
when she was administering
these lethal injections,
she had an
expression on her face,
a kind of smug, self-satisfied
expression on her face,
and you could see her
contempt for humanity.
NARRATOR: Neither were
children spared any of the horror.
Oberheuser killed
them with injections
of oil and barbiturates
and then cut off their limbs
and removed vital organs.
Oberheuser would even
beat pregnant women
to cause miscarriages
before killing the newborns.
Oberheuser insisted at her trial
that she tried to
give her patients care.
But witnesses told
how she denied
her mutilated victims
medical help, even water.
Oberheuser was one of
the few Nazi she-devils
who'd ever see a court room.
And there, she
denied everything.
- Oberheuser was charged with
crimes against humanity, was convicted.
She was actually given
a a pretty stiff sentence
relative to the other cases
that were tried at this time.
She was given a
ten-year sentence,
but she was released earlier,
around 1950, early '50s.
And she actually resumed her
practice her medical practice.
And a former prisoner from
Ravensbruck identified her
..and then, that was shut down.
So, by 1960s, she was
she was out of business,
and then, she kind of died
in her eighties, peacefully.
NARRATOR: Oberheuser was a butcher
and a murderer of the highest order.
She betrayed her
Hippocratic oath
,,and serves as perhaps
the clearest example
of the power of
Nazi indoctrination.
That a doctor could
turn murderer speaks
to the collective brainwashing
in Nazi Germany at the time.
It was all-pervasive,
and as Hitler shifted his focus
to State-sanctioned torture,
eugenics and euthanasia
in the pursuit of racial purity,
doctors like Herta Oberheuser
wouldn't be the only converts.
(dramatic music)
- (people cheering)
NARRATOR: Forty
miles from Stuttgart,
it still looks picture perfect.
But the fanatical Nazi
obsession with the "imperfect"
continues to haunt the corridors
and halls of Grafeneck Castle.
In late 1939, Hitler
signed a euthanasia law,
the sinister and
secret T4 programme.
- And this programme
was an opportunity for
the Nazi party to murder
anybody who they
thought of as disabled,
whether they were
actually disabled or not.
And people would come there,
and they would be murdered.
- It was brutal. It
was absolutely brutal.
And that's where a lot
of women were involved
because women were
actually nurses, and they
they had been involved with
caring for less abled people,
people who had disabilities,
and it was an extension of
that, and they just, you know,
we will use this,
and we will execute.
NARRATOR: These nurses
had trained to protect human life.
But, in these wards, they
routinely slaughtered their patients
with morphine injections.
One nurse hand-picked
to make Grafeneck Castle
an efficient killing site
was Pauline Kneissler.
Her task?
To travel to nearby
institutions with a list of patients,
bus them back to
Grafeneck and murder them.
- Pauline Kneissler
became a career killer.
She killed on average
between 1939 and 1945
seventy people a
day. Mostly children.
She moved around
different facilities.
She was transferring her
expertise to these different facilities,
including going to, um
the eastern territories.
NARRATOR: So what made
Nurse Pauline Kneissler decide
to kill rather than care?
From a wealthy, ethnic
German household
in the Odessa region of Ukraine,
she was born to privilege.
But her family was targeted
and stripped of their money
in The Bolshevik Revolution.
So they fled to Germany
where her father worked
in the German National Railway.
Kneissler studied nursing and
qualified as a psychiatric nurse.
Perhaps it was her
grievance against communists
or a need for belonging.
But like so many other woman,
Kneissler was easily
seduced by Nazism.
- Any woman is likely to have
had years of indoctrination.
You know, she may have
been at school with textbooks.
She would have been a member of
the BDM: the Bund Deutscher Madel.
She may have been a member of a
different German youth movement.
Jewish people would have
been completely dehumanised,
to the point where they were
able to detach the situation,
and they saw the Jewish
people not as people anymore,
and therefore were
able to murder them.
NARRATOR: This
detachment was so ingrained
that it remained evident
in the trials of women
like Kniessler
long after the war.
At her post-war
trial, she confessed,
"We didn't feel
very good about it,
but we had no
moral reservations."
- I think that tells you
everything you need to know.
That any feelings of
"Should we question this?"
were quickly dismissed,
and any human instinct to protect
or care for others was quelled.
And it shows us the mentality
of the Nazi soldiers
and the efficacy
of the SS in
and Hitler himself,
in creating that absolute
obedience and wish to serve.
NARRATOR: In one
year at Grafeneck Castle,
the medical personnel murdered
nearly 10,000 German people.
- And this programme
made it look on the outside
like a nice place that you
could send your family member
if they were disabled,
mentally or physically disabled.
And it was here that gas
was tested on these patients,
on these people,
before being taken to
concentration camps.
NARRATOR: Kneissler
found the gassings frightening
but said at her trial they
were 'not really all that bad'
..because, she reasoned,
'death by gas doesn't hurt'.
To their credit, some German
families risked everything
to openly protest
the T4 programme.
- And families started realising
what was actually happening,
that these people
were being murdered.
And in total, it's estimated
that a quarter of a million
people were murdered this way.
Families started protesting,
and the Nazi Party,
rather than stopping the
T4 programme altogether,
just made it even
more secretive,
even more undercover.
(sinister music)
- Initially, it was fairly easy to
disguise, in some respects, the
the Nazi euthanisation
programme.
When, um the
children that were affected
with physical or
mental disabilities
when they were examined by
a doctor, and the doctor says,
"Well, look, we we may be able
to help this this child of yours,
but we need to have them
sent to the correct establishment.
And the parents would get a
letter some months later saying,
"We're sorry to inform
you your child has
has died of measles
or chicken pox."
In effect, they've probably
been given a lethal injection
and sort of euthanised
under this programme.
NARRATOR: Unbelievably,
at her trial in Frankfurt in 1948,
Pauline Kniessler was sentenced
to only four years in prison.
She would continue to work as
a nurse until retirement in 1963.
- (man speaks German)
NARRATOR: She was
able to live out the full life
she denied the thousands
she helped to murder
in the name of racial purity.
- I think, in the '40s and
'50s, the gender of women,
including those concentration
camp guards standing trial
was absolutely
central in their receiving
lenient sentences or
no sentences because,
again, the prevailing view
that women can't be violent,
that women don't have agency,
that if they're cruel, it's only
under the coercion of man,
it's a myth. But it's
a pervasive one.
So the women's participation
in Nazi brutality was
rendered invisible or
really only focussed on just
a few cases, when, in fact,
it was far more pervasive.
NARRATOR: There
was, however, one woman
whose crimes were
so prolific and terrible
that even the Nuremberg
judges would have no choice
but to order her execution.
At the camps where
she plied her evil trade,
she was known variously
as The Hyena of Auschwitz,
The Beautiful Beast,
The Angel of Death.
REPORTER: No men or
women have ever faced
charges of such a
loathsome nature.
One of the most prominent amongst
the women prisoners is Irma Grese.
Number nine.
- Irma Grese had a
very notorious reputation
for being a sadistic guard.
Like, stomping on
prisoners, and shouting,
and sending her guard
dogs, attack dogs on prisoners.
She was attractive
woman, but she also just fit
this kind of stereotype of
of a tough German woman,
and she looked,
you know, the part.
- When she was at Auschwitz,
she seemed to as if she
had something to prove.
I mean, her violence
knew no bounds.
She would She would hit
beat a prisoner virtually to death
for no reason at all.
And certainly in Auschwitz,
they they nicknamed her the
the Hyena of Auschwitz
was one of her names.
NARRATOR: To this day,
historians ponder how a woman could
commit such heinous crimes.
But there were forty million
German women in 1939,
and thirteen
million of them were
actively engaged
in the Nazi Party,
whether directly or
through youth groups
like the Bund Deutscher Madel,
the League of German Girls.
While not a BDM member herself,
Irma was fanatical
from a young age,
and her penchant for violence
would soon shock all around her.
- When women are violent,
it actually offends our whole
set of social stereotypes
about womenkind,
about femininity.
And it's anathema, it's taboo,
and it becomes much more
disturbing, exciting, horrific.
So it does stick
in our mind more.
- The BDM and other units like that
were indoctrinated with Nazi ideals.
So that was a theoretical
view of it, you know,
that, uh the Aryan
race, the superiority,
the position of women and
all of that was indoctrinated.
Get them young, keep them old.
But that was what
they did in these groups.
One, indoctrination,
two, training.
NARRATOR: As a teenager,
Irma was infatuated
by Hitler and the Nazis.
She wanted to join the
BDM, but her father forbade it.
So Irma took matters
into her own hands,
leaving home at fifteen.
- (explosions)
NARRATOR: The year
the war began, 1939,
she joined an SS hospital.
Her mentor was Karl Gebhardt,
the man who would go on
to facilitate Herta Oberheuser's
horrific human experiments.
Nursing didn't suit Irma,
so, at the age of sixteen, she
moved on to an SS female helpers
training base near
Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Her Nazi zeal and
devotion to duty
caught the eye of
the SS hierarchy,
and at the tender
age of nineteen,
Irma Grese was made a
supervisor at Ravensbruck.
- Shortly after the training,
she entered the
Ravensbruck camp,
where, straight away, she
became pretty notorious.
And she was quite
disliked at Ravensbruck,
obviously, because of a violence
violence she was prone to
to violence without provocation.
NARRATOR: It was
at Auschwitz, though,
that Grese really
came into her own,
as the lover and accomplice
of the notorious
Doctor Josef Mengele.
She helped with The Selections,
a process in which
prisoners were chosen
for Mengele's monstrous
medical experiments
or sent to the gas chambers.
Grese was highly sexualised,
both at the camp and
in the media post-war.
Apart from Mengele,
she also had affairs with the
camp commandant Josef Kramer
and male guards.
It was alleged she even
raped female prisoners.
- There were
others who were also
kind of sensationalised
in the press.
Ilse Koch is probably
the most famous.
She was the wife of a
commandant at Buchenwald.
It kind of stirs up their
sense of lurid fascination
and the kind of
pornography of violence.
They're kind of these
caricatures, eroticising evil,
as one scholar says, my
colleague, Claudia Koonz says.
It's a kind of
eroticisation of evil.
So Ilse Koch and Irma Grese
are very good examples of that.
NARRATOR: When she
was arrested after the war,
Grese was unrepentant.
When asked why she took
part in the atrocities, she replied,
"It was our duty to
exterminate anti-social elements
so that Germany's
future would be assured.
- They were xenophobic.
They were racists.
And they believe they're
on the right side of history.
They were trying to restore
Germany's place in the sun
and even expand it as an empire.
And they weren't remorseful.
- Irma Grese was one of the most
sadistic concentration
camp guards
..known to be sexually sadistic,
as well as just generally.
And yet, at her trial, she's
rolling her eyes, smiling
..acting as though this is a
matter of great indifference to her.
It's very interesting
to know about that
because it makes me wonder,
was there such a
dissociation in her,
such a disavowal of
our own aggression?
NARRATOR: Despite Irma Grese
ultimately facing the death penalty,
most of the female concentration
guards escaped justice.
- Most of the guards,
the camp guards,
who were pursued after
the war and stood trial, um
did so between 1945 and 1955.
So there were about 3,600
guards, according to this document
that we found in '45,
but in the post-war period
only sixty actually stood trial.
And so, you know, as
far as the pursuit of justice,
uh we don't see as
many women being tried
and even fewer who were actually,
uh given the death sentence.
NARRATOR: The failure to confront
the crimes of some Nazi women is
something history
will have to deal with.
Many got away with
a slap on the wrist.
Many went on to live
long and happy lives
..like a woman known
simply as The Stomping Mare.
NARRATOR: Perhaps a
consequence of their gender
..but many of the Nazi she-devils
managed to escape justice.
And even when
they were prosecuted,
the process could
sometimes take decades.
One particularly strange case
was that of the grey-haired woman
who finally stood trial in 1975.
Presenting herself as an
innocent suburban housewife
Hermine Braunsteiner
was anything but.
She was in fact the ghastly camp
guard of Majdanek Prison in Poland,
known by inmates as
'The Stomping Mare'.
- Hermine Braunsteiner was
a camp guard at Majdanek
..which was near Lublin, Poland,
another one of the
big killing centres.
She was known for
stomping on prisoners
and just for her excessive
cruelty and sadism.
So she was given this,
like, Mare of Majdanek,
uh kind of label.
NARRATOR: Yet, for
many years after the war
Hermine lived a life of
comfort and safety in the USA.
After meeting an American on
vacation in her native Austria,
she married him and
moved to the USA in 1959.
Four years later, she
was an American citizen.
- She made her way
to Queens, New York.
And at some point, I know
that Simon Wiesenthal
and others Nazi hunters
were pursuing her.
Survivors were talking about
her, and they couldn't find her.
But she was
identified in Queens.
NARRATOR: Her husband
would testify in her defence saying
.."My wife wouldn't hurt a fly.
There's no more decent
person on this Earth.
She told me this was a
duty she had to perform."
How do these women,
after all they've done,
re-enter society with
such little remorse
..that even their partners carry
a sense of denial on their behalf?
- Women who took part
in the Nazi machinery,
like Hermine Braunsteiner,
did re-enter society
and, in many ways,
the kind of denial
of their perpetration
and their roles
helped them to feel that
they could simply reintegrate.
However, my awareness of
of how they would have
functioned would be my
my suggestion about how
they would have managed is
that they would have gone
into denial and dissociation.
They would have shut away the
horrors that they had perpetrated.
NARRATOR: Braunsteiner
was the first Nazi war criminal
to be extradited from the US.
She finally stood trial
in Dusseldorf in 1975
alongside other Majdanek
guards in what would become
the longest and most
expensive trial in West Germany.
In 1981, nearly forty
years after her crimes,
The Stomping Mare was
convicted on three counts:
direct participation in the
murders of eighty people;
abetting the murder
of 102 children;
and collaborating in the
murder of 1,000 people.
She was sentenced
to life in prison
but released on
health grounds in 1996.
She died three years later,
having lived more than half a
century longer than her victims.
- These individuals like
Hermine Braunsteiner,
those who lived
on decades, right,
who were not executed by The
Allies immediately after the war,
they didn't continue to be
serial killers or career killers.
The violence that they demonstrated
and committed during the war
they did not continue to
behave violently after the war.
So when the Department
of Justice came knocking
on Hermine Braunsteiner
door in Queens
and identified her, and she
opened the door in her nice
you know, apron, or
whatever she had on,
you know, people couldn't believe
that she was that other person,
uh forty years before.
- (explosions)
- (rapid gunfire)
NARRATOR: It wasn't
just the female camp
and prison guards that
showed a taste for brutality.
In the occupied east,
lawlessness would bring out
the worst in seemingly
ordinary German women.
Just as America
had its 'Wild West',
Germany saw its new
frontiers like Poland,
Ukraine and Belarus,
as the 'Wild East.'
Heinrich Himmler saw the
expansion of Lebensraum
as the Nazi's great destiny.
More than half a million German
women enthusiastically joined
this surging colonisation.
Though, few would ever
pull the trigger on a Luger
or the levers in a gas chamber,
they'd work their evil through
efficient administration.
They were the 10,000 secretaries
who carefully typed up
orders and death lists
..assisting with the paperwork
and logistics of mass murder,
and forensically
filing it all away.
In the east
the devil was
truly in the detail.
- Women relied, as part
of the Holocaust, greatly,
just as much as the men really.
Their roles was as
significant as the men certainly,
I mean, everybody who was a
Nazi was was a part of that.
They were tram drivers,
telephonists, secretaries.
They were working in the munitions
factories, as well as the camps.
They were doing a
huge variety of roles,
literally more than what was
ever envisaged by Hitler in fact.
- (speaks German)
- (applause and cheering)
- The truth is, for the
Holocaust to happen,
the Nazi Party
needed the support
of thousands of
people in every role,
from the secretaries
taking down the orders,
to the train drivers driving the
trains to concentration camps,
to the concentration
camp guards.
And an awful lot of the people
in these roles were women.
The Nazi Party would
not have been able
to commit the
genocide that it did -
the murder of six million Jewish
men, women, and children -
without massive
support from women.
NARRATOR: Shockingly, many of
these willing participants would go on
to live full and happy lives
..changing their identities
and hiding the horrors
of national socialism,
in which they were complicit.
- One of the secretaries
that I interviewed afterwards
..said to me that she didn't
see anything wrong with her job.
She wasn't directly involved
in the murder of any Jewish
people or anybody else.
And she actually really enjoyed
her time as a secretary for the Nazis
because she was
very well looked after.
And when she was sick,
she got sent what was
called a "Fuhrerpaket,"
a gift from the Fuhrer,
to help her get better.
And she was made
to feel appreciated.
NARRATOR: One such secretary
went to the East in a support role,
with no direct orders
to take part in killings.
But whether it was her lust for
blood or twisted sense of duty,
she quickly became
immersed in murder.
Her name was Johanna Altvater.
- Johanna Altvater grew
up in this small town,
went through the
League of German Girls.
Also about twenty years old when
she was sent to the Eastern Front.
And she wanted to
go to the Eastern Front.
She's someone who
was described as, um
someone who had the
toughness to go the Eastern Front.
NARRATOR: Like a
cattle herder, a Frontier Girl,
that's how Altvater
was described
during the liquidation of the
Warsaw Ghetto in May 1943.
She would roam the
camp in her riding breeches,
cracking her whip and
prodding prisoners into a truck.
Altvater started as
an administrative aid,
but she couldn't help but
get involved in the killing.
- So there was a machinery of
that, and she helped organise that,
but she also participated.
When the Jews are
being rounded up
and brought to the
mass murder site -
the forests outside
of Vladimir Volynsky -
she went into the infirmary
and grabbed the children
and the patients in the infirmary.
And if some of
them were too ill,
she just threw them
over the balcony, and
and they died; you know,
it was several storeys.
She was seen going
into this ghetto, one day,
and gesturing to a Jewish
child and to come over to her.
And the father was standing
nearby; he witnessed the whole thing.
And she picked the
child up by the legs, um
and bashed it against the
ghetto wall until it until it died.
NARRATOR: Killing Jewish
children wasn't enough
for the Nazis of the
occupied Eastern territories.
They also abducted children
they classified as Aryan.
This was part of a
program to stock the Reich
with what were seen as
'racially valuable' children.
- (babies crying) NARRATOR:
The Lebensborn Program,
once a beacon of
the regime's promise
to help German women
become successful mothers,
became a state-sanctioned
kidnapping program.
The kidnappers were
called the 'Brown Sisters'.
Women in brown coats who
trawled through the countryside,
searching for Aryan-looking
children to steal
and send to German
nurseries and SS families.
- This Lebensborn it
didn't stay in Germany.
It moved it, particularly Poland,
but other countries as well.
Even the extent of
kidnapping children,
which I think is the
most amazing thing,
The Brown Sisters,
you know, in particular,
how they would move
in, kidnap the children,
purely people who looked Aryan -
blonde hair, you
know, pale skins.
- Many children that were
encountered by the German forces
..they were sort
of viewed as, um
being children who
could be Aryanised.
And they, of course, would be
taken from their parents forcibly.
Sometimes, if the parents
protested, they'd be shot.
Sometimes, though, the
parents would be shot anyway.
And these children would
then be moved back to Germany
and placed with,
um German families
where they would
be raised as Germans
with no former
history whatsoever.
NARRATOR: Using candy
and slices of bread as lures
to attract boys and girls,
the 'Brown Sisters' travelled
behind advancing German
forces into the occupied East,
locating and interrogating
youngsters about their family trees.
This horrific harvesting was
grotesque in practice and scale.
It's estimated that
up to 400,000 children
were abducted from their
families in Eastern Europe.
Women stood at the
forefront of this effort
as trustworthy and
motherly figures.
- Women being used in
this way makes me think
about some of the work I do now
with female sex
offenders, for example,
who are using their status
as trustworthy figures -
mothers, sisters, uh
friends, teachers,
nursery nurses, whatever -
and then, using that
power and that respect
in order to access
and damage children.
- (children crying)
NARRATOR: Nazi doctrine determined
that Aryan-looking Polish children
were actually Nordic and
could be taught to be German.
Birth documents were destroyed,
and many children never
discovered their origins.
It is estimated that only
20% of the stolen children
were reunited with their
families after the war.
NARRATOR: The Nazi
occupied territories in the East
were a free-for-all.
Jews were murdered by the
thousands in slums and ghettos
..while Aryan children
were snatched up
and taken back to
pure German families.
Alongside the barbarity of
the concentration camps,
the horrors of the Wild
East were among the worst
of the Nazi crimes.
- Half of the victims
of the Holocaust
died in ghettos and
in mass shootings.
One out of four victims of the
Holocaust died in places like,
you know, Ukraine and these
these ravines and
these mass shootings.
So as we understand
the history of the Holocaust
as this much bigger,
uh operation
that enters into all these
realms of everyday life,
of professional work,
of how you wage a war.
NARRATOR: In a
forest near Lida, Belarus,
there are stark
monuments to a massacre
of more than 6,000 Jews
on the 8th May, 1942.
One depicts two
mournful female figures,
the personification
of inconsolable grief.
The cruel irony is that the
massacre was organised by a woman:
a Nazi secretary
called Liselotte Meier.
Meier was the
constant companion,
lover and secretary of the district
commissar Hermann Hanweg.
They had an all-consuming
passion for each other,
for the high life
of their luxury villa
and for the sport of
hunting and killing Jews.
- When I think about the
psychology of the wives of soldiers
who then go on to perpetrate,
I mean, it's an exhilarating,
intoxicating, freeing experience
to remove your moral shackles.
And once it's happened once,
you see it just takes
on a different meaning.
So having overcome that
moral force, that boundary,
we know this in forensic
psychotherapy that,
once you've broken
the body boundary
it's so much easier to
do it again and again.
- (machines whirring)
NARRATOR: Liselotte Meier was
a woman who rejected factory work
as her contribution
to the Reich.
Instead, she chose to join the
exodus to the Nazi's Wild East
to ply her trade as a secretary.
Through her relationship
with Hermann Hanweg,
Lisolette got caught up in what
the Nazis called "Ostrausch"
.."Eastern Rush."
An orgy of sex and violence
in the occupied territories.
Lisolette and her lover were
all powerful in their domain.
They had the authority to
decide who lived and who died.
- Hanweg and Meier end up, um
taking over a villa
with a swimming pool.
And they're having
their relationship there.
And these Jewish labourers are
like serving them post coital delicacies.
And they're, you know,
so there's the debauchery.
NARRATOR: And when the
couple got bored, it was hunting time.
- And we hear
stories after the war
a survivor ended up
testifying that he saw, um
Hanweg and his
female colleagues.
It was a It was a
Sunday afternoon.
You know, the
the office was close.
And there were Jews nearby
who were shovelling the snow.
And when the Germans
couldn't find any rabbits,
or any any
animals to to shoot,
they told the Jewish
labourers just just run
into the direction
of the forest,
and they were just going
to take shots at them.
And they just started shooting
them and killed some of them.
NARRATOR: When later questioned,
Liselotte denied ever
killing anyone herself,
but she continued to
refer to the Jews as 'Dreck',
which basically means 'scum'.
According to post-war
trial statements,
all the logistics of the
massacres carried out
in Lida were orchestrated by
the Secretary from Saxony
..Liselotte Meier.
- So she's never indicted.
But she's, you know,
has life and death power
over that Jewish population.
She also was seen issuing
orders to execute Jews.
She was handling those orders
and the distribution
of the the bullets
and the material to carry
out those executions.
NARRATOR: In 2007,
a photo album was donated to the
United States Holocaust Museum,
the scenes in and
around Auschwitz reek
of symbolism,
obscenity, cynicism.
But the photos
are not of corpses.
They show Nazi men
and women at play,
enjoying picnics with
their families in the sun.
This is the true picture of
Nazi female perpetrators.
Women who could live two lives
during one of history's
most atrocious chapters.
- It's very common
for people to cut off
or deny unacceptable
aspects of themselves.
And the women who
seem to be picnicking
and frolicking with
their families by day -
or on the weekends - and are
brutally sadistic in the camps,
on other days,
don't really see any
contradiction in that behaviour.
So, on the one hand,
it's absolutely human to cut off
and compartmentalise
unacceptable behaviour,
deny that it happens.
On the other hand,
even if the female
prison guards were
to acknowledge
what they were doing,
because the Jews weren't people
anyway, it really doesn't matter.
- (speaks German)
NARRATOR: To suggest they
didn't know what was going on,
or they were simply
following orders,
isn't compatible with
what we know today.
The story of women
in Nazi Germany is
one of means,
motive, and opportunity.
Not all were camp
guards or torturers,
and yet, most played some role in
propping up the Holocaust machine.
- And part of it was the actual
day-to-day administration,
typing the orders,
answering the telephone.
And part of it was
creating an environment
that allowed the men to
then go and physically be
the murderers
behind the genocide.
And it's interesting that women
were involved in every single role,
across the spectrum,
and very few of the
women I researched
saw a problem with
what they were doing,
saw any issues with
what they were doing.
- (speaks German)
- (crowd chanting
supportively in German)
- Lots of women afterwards
pleaded that they were just young.
They didn't know
what was going on.
But I don't think
that's a great response
because there are examples of
young women that did stand up to Hitler.
But I think it's fair to say
that ordinary German people
knew what was happening.
It was in the newspapers.
It was in the radio.
Concentration camps were in Germany.
Jewish people were disappearing.
And so, if ordinary German
people knew about the Holocaust,
the women who
were the secretaries,
the woman who were
the administrators
were even closer
to the knowledge.
They had evidence
in front of them.
They knew the names
of concentration camps,
They knew what
was happening there.
NARRATOR: In many ways, history
let Hitler's she-devils off the hook.
A justice system which
either failed to prosecute them,
or gave light sentences
and early releases.
Traditional views of gender
and violence played a part in this.
Perhaps they still do.
But history mocks
the female cliches.
Given the right circumstances
and environment,
women, too, will
commit genocide,
as faithful enablers
and bloody participants.
(dramatic music)
(intense, reflective music)