The Disturbing History Of The Killer Women Under Hitler's Regime

The role of women in the Third Reich is a fascinating one. On one hand, they were famously celebrated for their role as child-bearers: Blonde-haired, blue-eyed women were the progenitors of Hitler's ideal Aryan race, and even as they were tasked with bearing children, they were also relied on to be teachers, passing down Nazi doctrine to future generations.

But that's not all they were. Research has shown that a shocking number of women filled other, bloodier positions, and carried out Hitler's vision in ways other than just multiplying and reinforcing his racial ideals.

Historian, academic, and author Wendy Lower spearheaded extensive research into the role of the Nazi regime's women and found some shocking things — starting with the fact that the full extent of their participation in the so-called Final Solution will likely never be understood. She explained to The Jewish Chronicle: "[T]housands ... would have had some role in the Holocaust, whether as secretaries administrating the mass murder or in a more direct form. Because of the lack of documentation, it's hard to calculate figures. But, we did some statistical analysis and the probability is that [one woman] could be multiplied a thousand times." That said, let's look at some of the roles women played in the widespread slaughter that swept across World War II Europe ... and some of the women who did the killing.

The following article includes depictions of mass violence and hate crimes.

The Nazi war machine wasn't just made up of tanks and soldiers. According to historian Wendy Lower's book, "Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields," there were around half a million women who served in various military positions as auxiliary personnel. That included women like Liselotte Meier, who opted for a secretarial job with the new regime.

Meier caught the eye of a man named Hermann Hanweg, and when Hanweg was assigned to the city of Lida (pictured) with orders to exterminate the Jewish presence there, Meier went with him ... and his wife, and his children. What followed was a bizarre scene of mass executions organized, overseen, and attended by both Hanweg and Meier, even as Meier handed out orders to Jewish artisans for special projects, gifts, and home renovations. 

Meier became such a trusted confidante that she was given full authority to sign and issue orders on Hanweg's behalf. That included giving overseers permission to execute Jewish workers who showed up late for work. She was the lynchpin, coordinating between executioners, law enforcement, and the pit diggers, but it wasn't all work: She would later admit to taking part in hunting trips where Jewish men were sent into the brush to flush out prey ... and become the hunted themselves. However, when she was put on trial, she would only testify: "I cannot say if the people who were shot were even Jews."

Not all women who ended up serving the Third Reich found their way there after chasing a fanatical dream. According to research done by Wendy Lower for "Hitler's Furies," some women — like Johanna Altvater — found their niche in the local Hitler Youth movement, knowing it would open doors. It did: Aided by the fact that she fit the profile of the Third Reich's perfect woman, she was welcomed with open arms and sent to Ukraine as a secretary of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

The Jewish ghetto (pictured) had already been established by the time Altvater arrived there with a boss who had a pastime — shooting workers carrying barrels of fuel — that set the tone of the place. Altvater, it turned out, fit right in, and discovered she had a horrible talent: killing children. She appears to have gotten a taste for it after picking up a toddler, smashing the child against a wall, and throwing the body at the father. Every story that follows is just as terrible: She was known to pluck children from their hospital beds and hurl them from third-floor windows, and shoot others in the face when they asked for food.

In the World War II aftermath, Altvater was put on trial, proclaimed that she had only been a lowly secretary, and was ultimately acquitted in spite of the testimony of dozens of people who described the brutal murders they'd see her commit.

Wartime shortages are well-known but less well-known are some of the ways Nazi Germany tried to combat those shortages. In the spring of 1944, authorities established a facility in Velpke, Germany. The idea was that Polish children would be removed from their parents' care and raised in the baby home, which would free up parents to labor in the fields. The facility and the children moved there were put under the care of a former schoolteacher named Valentina Billien, and over the course of the next six months, somewhere around 80 children died.

Some shocking details unfolded during her 1946 trial. According to documentation recorded in the United Nations War Crimes Commission's "Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals," Bilien tended to treat the facility as the kind of job where she could just sort of leave for the night. Bilien, on the other hand, testified that she had been short-staffed and underfunded, and when she raised concerns about having enough to feed the children, she was forbidden from doing, well, anything at all.

The building chosen by Heinrich Gerike to house the baby home was described as "a corrugated iron hut, without running water, light, telephone, or facilities for dealing with sickness," which makes it perhaps less surprising that he was ultimately found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in 1946. For her part in the Velpke home, Billien was sentenced to 15 years (via the Jewish Virtual Library).

[Featured image by German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's often debated just how much the ordinary German citizen — and even the ordinary soldier — knew about the extent of Hitler's Final Solution, but the story of Erna Petri is an eerie one: Not only was she totally on board with the extermination of the world's Jews, but she was ready, willing, and able to help the cause.

According to "Hitler's Furies," Erna married Horst Petri, an SS soldier who also happened to have a degree in agriculture. Embodying Hitler's idea of the noble farmer fighting for his race and country, Horst and Erna were assigned to live in and work on a plantation in Poland (pictured). They quickly established their own regime on their new estate, handing out beatings, hunting down escaped prisoners who fled through their land, and making regular forays into surrounding villages to find anyone who might be hiding out. 

A few months after Horst captured and executed four Jewish prisoners escaping from a train — after telling his dutiful wife that executions were men's work, not women's — Erna was returning from a shopping trip when she came across six children. Dressed in rags and cowering in a ditch, she determined that they had escaped from the nearby train station. She invited them home, fed them, and when her husband didn't return from his own outing, she decided to kill them herself. So she did: She lined them up alongside the estate's mass grave and killed each with a single shot.

[Featured image by Aeou via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

Eric Brown was one of the British soldiers at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and when he spoke with ITV at age 96, he said it was a scene that had haunted him his entire life. "The first thing that struck me as you walked in were these mounds of bodies — I'm not exaggerating when I say they were as high as the ceiling." He could still remember the fanatical devotion of the notorious Irma Grese, too. Brown was one of the men who interviewed her: "I asked her four times [whether she had any regrets over her actions] when she suddenly leaped to her feet and with a salute called out at the top of her voice, 'Heil Hitler!' and sat down again."

Eerily, before Grese was trained as a concentration camp guard, she lived a perfectly ordinary life as an employee on a dairy farm (via HistoryToday). When the war was over, the evidence presented at Nuremberg famously revealed the lampshades she had made from the skins of the dead, while witnesses gave testimony about her random cruelty, the dogs she trained to savage prisoners, and the boots she wore to stomp on the dead.

Grese wasn't the only woman renowned for her cruelty. Around 10% of the 37,000 concentration camp guards were women, and although there are stories of kindness — with some witnesses naming guards who would share their food and supplies — those stories are few and far between.