![]() ![]() At the castle they were gassed, which she decided was not that bad because ‘death by gas doesn’t hurt’. Pauline Kneissler worked at Grafeneck Castle, a euthanasia ‘hospital’ in southern Germany, and toured mental institutions selecting 70 ‘patients’ a day. From the moment the Nazis came to power and imposed policies of Aryan racial purity, countless nurses, their aprons filled with morphine vials and needles, routinely slaughtered the physically disabled and mentally defective. Ironically, it was the professional carers who were the first to be caught in this evil web. Women were drawn into the morally bankrupt conspiracy that was Hitler’s Germany as thoroughly as men were - at a lower level, in most cases, when it came to direct action but guilty just the same. Thus, when it came to responsibility for the Holocaust and other evils of the Third Reich, they were off the hook.īut that, argues Lower, is simplistic nonsense. The vast majority of women had, on Hitler’s orders, confined their activities to Kinder, Küche, Kirche - children, kitchen and church. Ultra-macho Nazi Germany was a man’s world. The few women ever called to account were notorious concentration camp guards - the likes of Irma Grese and Ilse Koch - whose evil was so extreme they could be explained away as freaks and beasts, not really ‘women’ at all. The vast majority of those accused at Nuremberg and other war crimes trials were men. The Holocaust has generally been seen as a crime perpetrated by men. In a book she tellingly calls ‘Hitler’s Furies’, Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women - many more than previously imagined - in the sort of mass, monstrous, murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler sex were incapable of. This schizophrenic combination of warm-hearted mother one minute and cold-blooded killer the next is an enigma and one that - now revealed in a new book based on years of trawling through remote archives - puts a crueller than ever spin on the Third Reich.īecause Erna was by no means an aberration. Then she led the six of them - the youngest aged six, the oldest 12 - into the woods, lined them up on the edge of a pit and shot them methodically one by one with a pistol in the back of the neck. ![]() So she humanely took the starving, whimpering youngsters home, calmed them down and gave them food to eat. They must be the Jews she’d heard about - the ones who’d escaped from a train taking them to an extermination camp.īut she was a mother herself, with two children of her own. Married to a senior SS officer, the 23-year-old knew instantly who they were. At the heart of Nazi killings: Irma Grese was a concentration camp guard and one of the few women to be called to account for her crimesī londe German housewife Erna Petri was returning home after a shopping trip in town when something caught her eye: six small, nearly naked boys huddled in terror by the side of the country road.
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