German housewife Erna Petri was on her way home from a shopping trip near her wartime house in the Ukraine when she saw six naked boys hiding by the side of the road. As the wife of an SS officer, she realised that they were Jewish escapees. She took them into her home and fed them. Once she had gained their trust she marched them to woods near her house and shot each of them in the back of the head.
Petri’s sadistic violence against Jews and others during the war is one of a number of case studies in a new book by US academic Wendy Lower, called Hitler’s Furies, which documents the extent of female participation in the Holocaust.
There are other horrifying instances of random violence against Jews by German women in the east. There was Johanna Altvater, the secretary of an SS official, who took a toddler by the legs and killed him by smashing his head against a ghetto wall. Then there was Liesel Riedel Willhaus, the wife of an SS official, who used to shoot at Jews labouring in the garden of her house in Poland, sometimes while her three-year-old looked on. There was Gertrude Segel, who allegedly trampled a Jewish child to death. And then there were the many wives of SS officers, such as Vera Stahli and Josefine Block.
While these cases unearthed by Ms Lower were extreme, she says they were by not exceptional. “An estimated 500,000 German women circulated in the East during the war. Many thousands of these 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 Petri could be multiplied a thousand times.”
