FOR Hitler, the women of Nazi Germany had one sole purpose – motherhood.
Their motto was to be Kinder, Kuche, Kirche – children, kitchen, church – to create a perfect home and refuge for their men and produce as many children as possible for Hitler’s dream of the Aryan race.
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Irma Grese, pictured with Josef Kramer, ‘Beasts of Belsen’, was known as ‘sexually sadistic’Credit: Alamy
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Herta Oberheuser has been described as a ‘beast in human disguise’ for her horrific experiments on prisoners Credit: © A&E Television Networks
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Hitler, pictured with his lover Eva Braun, teamed up with some women in Nazi Germany to commit brutal murdersCredit: Getty – Contributor
But when war broke out, these women had to leave their kitchen sinks and nursing roles to return to work in munitions factories and farms, while well-to-do girls from well-to-do families got office jobs.
For some women, however, their roles in Hitler’s Third Reich were far more sinister. They were to become Hitler’s witches, ready to follow every order, no matter how horrible.
From secretaries who wrote death lists, to doctors who reneged on their solemn oath to care for the sick and dying, to women who poisoned, beat and maimed without remorse, all these women played a key role in keeping Hitler’s killing machine going. in full operation.
A new Sky History documentary, Hitler’s Handmaids, now looks at the role the Fuhrer’s wives played in the war and how society struggled to reconcile the appalling brutality of these women, so few were ever brought to justice.
When American soldiers liberated the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women, they saw evidence of unimaginable crimes.
But one person in particular haunted the survivors. They said about “the beast that disguised itself as a man” – doctor Herti Oberheuser.
Historian Wendy Lower explains: “She was assigned an experiment to examine the effects of wounds on the human body. If I can see how a shrapnel wound will affect the average German soldier and all the ways it can be treated.
“She puts sawdust in there, she puts glass shards, she puts various chemicals and she rubs it.
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Oberheuser’s sick experiments involved rubbing shrapnel into wounds without anestheticCredit: Alamy
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A pile of human bones and skulls is seen in 1944 at the Majdanek Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, the second largest death camp in Poland after AuschwitzCredit: AFP – Getty
“Of course, those so-called types of procedures are done without anesthetic. The prisoners are conscious there. It’s torture, it’s sadism.”
The prisoners tried to document everything they could, and footage captured by a smuggled camera was later used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
Five skeletons with missing hands and feet discovered in the home of Hitler’s friend Hermann Goring ‘Wolf’s Lair’
There were bones broken with hammers, limbs cut off and transplanted to other prisoners, all done without anesthesia.
She would even beat pregnant prisoners to induce miscarriages before killing their newborns.
At her trial, she claimed she tried to provide care to her patients, but was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to two years in prison.
But she was released early and, incredibly, resumed her medical practice before being identified by an ex-prisoner and jailed. She died peacefully at the age of 80.
Psychologist Anna Motz says: “The idea that someone trained as a doctor, a doctor, who took the Hippocratic Oath like Herta Oberhauser, could go to the camps and start doing horrible experiments on people shows us something about the success of the Nazi ideology. .
“That the greatest duty is not to your medical profession or your sense of moral good, but your duty to the party and your duty to advance the cause of Nazism.”
“Career Killer”
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Pauline Kneissler was specially selected to be one of the nurses at Hitler’s death camp Credit: © A&E Television Networks
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Kneissler is responsible for the murder of hundreds of people in Nazi GermanyCredit: Alamy
In late 1939, Hitler turned his attention to euthanasia in his quest for racial purity. His sinister secret T4 program was his opportunity to kill anyone they thought was disabled.
The name T4 stands for Tiergartenstraße 4, the street address of the department that recruited staff for the harrowing campaign.
The victims were taken to Grafeneck Castle near Stuttgart and killed by the nurses who were supposed to care for them with lethal injections of morphine.
Pauline Kneissler was one of the nurses selected to make the castle an effective killing site.
She would travel to various institutions with a list of names, then bus them back to the castle and kill them.
“Pauline Kniessler has become a career killer,” says Wendy Lower. “She killed an average of seventy people a day between 1939 and 1945. Mostly children.
“She moved around different facilities. She brought her expertise to those different facilities.”
Experts have different theories as to why she became a cold-blooded killer – perhaps out of hatred for communism after her family lost money in the Bolshevik Revolution, or being seduced by years of Nazi indoctrination.
At her post-war trial, she admitted: “We didn’t feel very good about it, but we had no moral reservations.”
Auschwitz in statistics
• 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz concentration camps.
• 1.1 million of them were killed.
• Most of the people sent there were Jews. They accounted for 90% of all deaths.
• 865,000 people were gassed upon arrival.
• People who were not gassed were starved or beaten to death.
• 802 prisoners tried to escape – 144 succeeded.
• Freight trains brought people from all over Germany.
In Grafeneck, the Nazis first tried gas as a means of murder, before releasing it in the concentration camps.
Kniessler testified at trial that she found the gasses terrifying, but said that “they weren’t really that bad” because, she said, “death by gas doesn’t hurt.”
At the trial in Frankfurt in 1948, she was sentenced to only four years in prison, and then continued to work as a nurse until her retirement in 1963.
Psychologist Anna Motz believes that in the 1940s and 50s, the gender of women who were involved in war crimes was key to getting lighter or shorter sentences.
“Because, again, the prevailing attitude is that women cannot be violent, that women have no freedom of choice, that if they are cruel, it is only under the coercion of a man, that is a myth,” she says.
“But he is omnipresent. Thus the participation of women in Nazi brutality was invisible or in fact only focused on a few cases, when in fact it was far more pervasive.”
“Hyena from Auschwitz”
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Irma Grese was one of the most twisted women in Hitler’s camp Credit: Getty
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Her crimes were so horrific that she was sentenced to death Credit: © A&E Television Networks
There was one woman whose crimes were so brutal and sadistic that the judges at Nuremberg had no choice but to order her execution. – Irma Grese.
Known as the Hyena of Auschwitz, she had a reputation for trampling prisoners or unleashing her attack dogs on them.
She was the lover and accomplice of the camp’s ‘angel of death’ Josef Mengele, assisting him in the selections where prisoners were chosen for monstrous medical experiments or sent to the gas chambers.
In addition to her affair with Mengele, Grese was also believed to have had affairs with male guards and allegedly even raped female inmates.
But after her arrest, she was unrepentant about her role in the crimes, saying it was their duty to exterminate anti-social elements to ensure Germany’s future.
“Irma Grese was one of the most sadistic concentration camp guards,” says Motz. “Known as a sexual sadist, as in general.
“And yet, at the trial, she rolls her eyes, smiles, acts as if this is a matter of utter 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 denial of her own aggression?”
‘Stomping Mare’
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Hermine Braunsteiner led a normal life in the US until she was discovered and extradited for trial in Germany
Despite Irma Gresa’s death sentence, most of the concentration camp guards escaped justice, and many went on to live long and happy lives.
One of them was Hermine Braunsteiner, a woman known as the “Stomping Mare” – a camp guard at Majdanek who liked to stomp on prisoners and was known for her particular sadistic tendencies.
She married an American in her native Austria after the war and moved to the USA. However, it was later discovered that she was living in New York and she was extradited.
Hermine was tried in Dusseldorf in 1975 along with other guards in what would become the longest and most expensive trial in West Germany.
In 1981, almost 40 years after her crimes, she was convicted of directly participating in the murders of 80 people, inciting the murder of 102 children and collaborating in the murder of 1,000 people.
She was sentenced to life in prison, but was released for health reasons in 1996. She died three years later, having outlived her victims by more than half a century.
Motz says that these women would have to live in a state of denial in order to continue life after the war.
“Women who participated in the Nazi machine, like Hermina Braunsteiner, re-entered society, and in many ways, the kind of denial of their perpetration and their roles helped them feel that they could simply reintegrate,” she explains.
“They would shut up the horrors they committed.”
Hitler’s Handmaids is on Sky HISTORY every Tuesday at 9 p.m
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Child prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland photographed in the 1940s Credit: AFP
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Female war criminals on trial with other Nazis in Lueneberg, Germany. Recognizable are Herta Ehlert, 8; Irma Greše, 9 years old; and IIse Lithe, 10 Credit: Getty
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Source: HIS Education