Broken Lives Read online

  Young women coped with this painful experience in different ways, ranging from suicide to indifference. Due to widespread ignorance of “this sexual act,” the most difficult part was the “sense of defenselessness” against strange soldiers’ whims and the loss of control over one’s own body. When resistance was impossible, one victim recounted, “I just let it happen to me.” One way to survive was to distance oneself from what could not be stopped: “This is not you yourself, this is only the body, the miserable body! You are far, far away.” Those mostly upper-class women who had developed an idealized version of their own purity experienced rape as a profound desecration, a profanation of their honor that would taint them forever. Lower-class women were more matter-of-fact in dealing with the inevitable, considering their violation merely “a war wound.” Often female solidarity helped, whether protecting one another or sharing dreadful experiences. While some women ended their lives, the great majority found the courage to live on by feeling needed by their children or parents.82

  As a collective gender fate, the mass rapes by the Red Army in the spring and summer of 1945 were a systematic product of a Stalinist dictatorship bent on avenging “what [Germans] had done in their lands.” While victorious Western soldiers also raped defeated women, in the Soviet case such behavior was apparently so frequent as to be largely condoned from above.83 Only some decent officers such as Lev Kopelev tried to stop the practice out of compassion. Diaries such as Marta Hillers’ gripping account A Woman in Berlin show the peculiarity of this frenzy of sexual violence. Due to the breakdown of discipline, the soldiers raped indiscriminately across the entire age range, from prepubescent girls to aged grandmothers. Incited by liberal doses of vodka, they not only abused women once but repeatedly and in groups. Often they used physical force or even killed their helpless victims. If the violated women survived, they had to worry about pregnancy and sought out folk remedies or doctors willing to provide abortions. Powerless to stop the outrage, many German men compounded the humiliation by blaming their own women.84

  The Third Reich dissolved in general chaos even before the end of the fighting because the Nazis lost control over their own population. Initially the arrival of refugees from the East and the cleaning up after bombing attacks had been “well organized” by trek marshals or NSV women. But when party functionaries fled to save their own skins, public order disappeared from the cities even before these were conquered. Similarly, the senseless command “to hang whoever shows a white flag” could not stop courageous mayors or individual homeowners from showing their readiness to surrender. Even the military police’s practice of “stringing up all men and boys who try to run” failed to keep individual soldiers or whole units from fleeing toward the West in order to be captured by the Americans. At the same time, some starving slave laborers rebelled and rampaged to repay their prior suffering. Even German civilians started “to rob and plunder” food stores and military depots. It was “madness and futility wherever one looks.” With Silesia occupied by the Poles, Ruth Weigelt sighed, “I believe we are lost.”85

  The collapse of the Nazi order made survival an individual challenge that helped liberate young women from social constraints. When public authorities crumbled, they had to take charge themselves, either falling back on family ties or relying on friendships, however temporary, in order to help one another. Girls and young women began a frantic search for ways to assure food and shelter as well as safety from marauding enemies. Ignoring the prohibition of desertion, Reich Labor Service worker Agnes Moosmann simply ran home. In spite of her protests, Lore Walb left her mother to seek safety with a girlfriend in a remote village of the Swabian Alps. Angered by her mother’s unwillingness to leave, Ursula Mahlendorf followed her military hospital westward into Bohemia, relying on the safety of serving wounded soldiers. Refusing to accept that the Nazi Reich was falling apart, Renate Finckh ran away from her family to a BdM leader who counseled her to “go home” to take care of her mother. “You have to live. Already too many have died.”86

  For the Nazified youths, the failure of their ideals was rather shattering, for it required admitting that they had followed a false idol. Most moderates, such as Christel Beilmann, were simply relieved: “We did not cheer. We cried. The bombing had ceased. The war was over for us.” But nationalists such as Lore Walb found it “hard to believe that the countless sacrifices of this war should have been in vain” and considered the surrender, though necessary, “deeply shameful and humiliating.” Nazi true believers like Eva Peters were appalled at how the opportunists “tried to jump from the train which was ever more quickly speeding toward catastrophe.” Having to cope with the death of her brothers, she added bitterly, “Liberation?—yes from everything which I loved and held dear.” Similarly, the BdM leader Renate Finckh stubbornly clung to her faith: “I saw that the end had come and that it would be terrible and unimaginable. But I wanted to stand up for everything I had said. I belonged to the Führer even now.”87

  The “immense national catastrophe” nonetheless raised troubling questions about female support for National Socialism, and initiated a prolonged self-examination. Ursula Mahlendorf admitted that “much of what I had learned in the HJ leadership group began to evaporate in the heat of my disillusionment with the Nazi bosses in the last days of the war.” Still resenting efforts at reeducation, Eva Peters deplored the “boundless stupidity and cynical hypocrisy of ‘political enlightenment.’” But the totality of the defeat and the immensity of Nazi crimes made Lore Walb realize that “all faith, all sacrifices were in vain.” Time and again, she heard “that we must have accumulated great guilt, especially the SS must have committed shameful deeds, we don’t even know what atrocities.” Such uncensored information inspired Renate Finckh to “a terrible recognition: Whatever I had loyally tried to keep in my heart had changed into remorse and shame.” When the Third Reich collapsed, a painful self-questioning began.88

  COSTS OF COMPLICITY

  Female authors write ambivalently about their role in the Third Reich because they are trying to reconcile their earlier Nazi enthusiasm with their later disillusionment. Nostalgia for an innocent youth before Auschwitz suggests many positive memories. But presenting an honest account also compels them to admit that “most of us, boys and girls alike, participated with ‘heart and soul’” in the Nazi regime. Only “under the pressure of war experiences did a process of disenchantment and rethinking begin,” which accelerated when the full extent of German crimes became known. This “confrontation with [their] collaboration” precipitated a rather painful self-examination that compared the earlier naïve self to a later critical one. Each in her own way, Christel Beilmann, Renate Finckh, Ursula Mahlendorf, Eva Peters, and Lore Walb were haunted by “anger, grief, shame, and remorse” that inspired their autobiographical search.89 Hence they wrote fractured texts in which positive memories were inextricably linked to negative results.

  Taken together, these autobiographies suggest that women had quite a different war experience from men that was trying in its own right. As long as the Wehrmacht was winning, many followed a traditional pattern of caring for their families, dealing with shortages, and keeping up the home front. At the same time, they coped with the separation from the men by writing letters to soldiers and sending packages in order to keep up their morale. But when the struggle escalated into a total war and losses mounted, they supported the effort more actively by working hard in munitions factories, growing food with slave laborers on the farms, and serving in military support roles as Wehrmacht aides, flak gun helpers, or hospital nurses. Agnes Moosmann justified her service at an antiaircraft battery simply as “self-defense.” Especially for the half-million women in the military, the half a million in air-defense, and the four hundred thousand in nursing, the war mobilization offered paths of advancement and escape from home. In a subaltern emancipation, women made an essential contribution to the war effort that kept the conflict going.90

  These personal remini
scences also show that National Socialism had more support than was acknowledged during the postwar years. Some religious youths such as Edith Schöffski or working-class teenagers such as Erika Taubhorn kept their distance from the Nazis and noted “occasional opposition to Hitler.” But the apolitical majority of women such as Ingrid Bork inadvertently stabilized the regime by their effort to carry on normal lives by going to school, training for jobs, or laboring in war production. More openly nationalist individuals such as Gisela Grothus were ready to serve the embattled fatherland as nurses, considering patriotic engagement their wartime duty. Most enthusiastic were the BdM leaders such as Eva Peters, who applauded German victories, considered the persecution of Jews justified, and bought into the Nazis’ imperialism in the East. Even if such fanatics whose “belief in Hitler and the greater German Reich was unshakable” remained a minority, it was their enthusiastic embrace of volkish femininity that coerced their lukewarm peers into maintaining the war effort.91

  For this complicity, the young women of the Weimar cohort paid a terrible price that destroyed their own lives, families, towns, and country. In the beginning only the Jewish, Communist, and other targets of persecution suffered. The increasing deaths in the Wehrmacht were limited to men such as these women’s fathers, brothers, or lovers, who had themselves killed enemies. But with the shift toward total war, women themselves became targets of saturation bombing, which claimed between six hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand civilian lives, most of them female. Similarly, the desperate flight of about twelve million from Nazi-held areas and German provinces in the East, triggered by the panic that “the Russians are coming,” killed perhaps another million people, the majority once again being women. The up to two million rapes by the victorious soldiers, mostly of the Red Army, were directed only against women.92 Though the total number of female deaths was lower than that of men, these sacrifices were nonetheless horrifyingly large and left a bloody trail in collective memory.

  After such terrifying experiences, it was not surprising that many young women constructed victimization narratives to explain their suffering. Preoccupied with their own pain about “flight, hunger, expulsion, rape, loss of home [and] separation of families,” most just “complained, groaned, cursed and felt sorry for themselves.” Some simple souls such as Liselotte S. claimed that the horror “came over us like a fate, at least for girls like myself.” More sophisticated observers such as Lore Walb blamed the cruelty of the Russians and other enemies for “robbery and probably also murder” while railing against the “bombing terror” of the Anglo-Americans. Disappointed Nazi supporters such as Ruth Bulwin also held the party leaders responsible for their misery: “We were betrayed … left alone in our misfortune.” Only a few clear-eyed observers “recognized that [they] had been loyal to evil.” Shocked by the totality of the defeat, Renate Finckh acknowledged her own contribution to the disaster, writing, “Searching for comfort, I let myself be captured by a great lie.”93 It would take decades to spread this insight to others.

   6

  VICTIMS’ SUFFERING

  For endless hours the train rolled eastward. The prisoners in the crowded cattle car clung to each other, choked by nauseating stench. When the motion stopped, SS men ripped the doors open and barked orders to “get out” and “hurry up.” Stumbling down the ramp, the Ukrainian Jew Anna Fränkel realized that she had been taken to Auschwitz, “a death camp” in which “only one in ten thousand remained alive!” Marching between electric fences and passing a “pile of charred corpses,” she resolved to do everything in her power to live. “My horror about what I saw was so great that I no longer had the energy to be shocked.” An older prisoner explained that the smoke billowing from crematoria indicated that “all Jews who arrived today have been taken there immediately.” Then Fränkel was stripped naked and had her hair shorn and a number tattooed on her arm. But because she was young and healthy, she survived the selection process. Repeated thousands of times, this arrival in hell in April 1944 was a scenario of ultimate victimization.1

  Originally such concentration camps (KZ) were not directed against Jews, but rather potential opponents of the Third Reich. According to Fritz Stern, “it is all too often forgotten that the first victims of National Socialism were its domestic political enemies, the brave people who had fought and in previous elections sometimes bested the Nazis.” After the seizure of power in 1933 the SA arrested thousands of anti-Fascists, vastly exceeding the holding capacity of ordinary prisons. Hence the storm-troopers improvised detention centers in factories or fields close to towns such as Dachau and Oranienburg in order to eliminate leftists from public life and intimidate them through brutality to make them acquiesce to Nazi rule. In public, concentration camps were justified as reeducation facilities that would teach their inmates to respect the new order through discipline and hard labor.2 Eventually the SS took control and widened the circle of victims to asocials, homosexuals, Sinti, and Roma, as well as others excluded from the national community. Yet ultimately the lawless terror of the Nazi system focused most on Jews.

  The persecution of Jews was complicated process, because it involved a complex linguistic and legal separation from gentile Germans and a reconfiguration of their hybrid identities as solely Jewish. Even when persecuted, Communists always remained Germans, but when Jews were stripped of their Germanness they were thrown back upon religious or ethnic identifications. Exclusion from the national community was a shocking insult, especially for successful secular and assimilated families such as the Fröhlichs and Sterns, who felt German in every sense of the word. Moreover, the deprivation of their livelihoods by successive decrees and the revocation of their citizenship left the older generation at a loss. Suddenly they were forced to recover Jewish roots about which many knew little or hardly cared, to assume a new self-image in order to function in a segregated society. For the younger generation, this rediscovery often led to an exciting process of Zionist commitment, but for their parents it threatened lifelong emotional ties.3

  The politics of memory have created an odd competition between the various groups claiming victimhood. In East Germany, mostly anti-Fascist opponents of the Third Reich were considered “Victims of Fascism” in order to make them into Communist heroes. In neighboring countries, slave laborers, refugees of ethnic cleansing, and war dead were exemplars of a narrative of national martyrdom. With the rise of a broader Holocaust sensibility, Jews assumed primacy among the persecuted groups, since only they were targeted for complete annihilation, ignoring even the twisted logic of serving the war effort.4 Surprisingly enough, German soldiers and civilians also began to stress their own suffering at the front and at home and claim to have been victimized by the Nazi leadership. Because critical memory insists on the priority of those persecuted by the Nazis, the emphasis on victimhood in popular German recollections has created a troubling rivalry that effaces the causal difference.5

  One way of countering such obfuscation is to look more closely at the stories told by political opponents or racial victims, which deal with unspeakable horrors and intense agony. Survivors chronicle the disintegration of their lives under Nazi pressure and the endless debates about emigration until it became too late to escape. Those caught in the SS prisons or concentration camps relate their desperate struggle for survival, contrasting many acts of vile brutality with a few instances of kindness. Their accounts stand for untold voices that were silenced by the oppressors, but offer only an indirect and partial understanding of those who perished. These autobiographies also tell of courageous efforts at resistance by the anti-Fascist underground, captives, and the Allied forces that finally defeated the Third Reich. Due to their emotional charge, Ruth Klüger counsels that these testimonies need to be read with critical sympathy: “neither traditional forgiveness nor martyr worship” will do their terrifying experience justice.6

  NAZI PERSECUTION

  For Hitler, “fighting Marxism” was both an ideological aim of reinvigorati
ng culture and a practical necessity of solidifying his hold on power. From the beginning, the Nazi movement had denounced the corrosive effects of Marxism on cultural traditions and deplored the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Moreover, he considered the radical Communist Party (KPD) a political rival when unemployed workers during the Great Depression saw a social revolution as their only hope for a better life. In the streets and beer halls, the Hitler Youth and SA brawled with the Communist Youth and Red Brigades for control of public space, hailing Hitler or Stalin while beating or even killing their enemies. Accusing a Dutch Communist of having set the Reichstag on fire on February 27, 1933, the Nazi leadership seized upon the opportunity to incarcerate most KPD and some Social Democratic (SPD) leaders and bourgeois democrats on the pretext of preserving order. Only by suppressing the Left could the Nazi rule be secure.7

  Thereafter rebellious working-class youths and intellectuals who opposed Hitler had no choice but to continue their struggle underground. In order to carry on, they began to adopt “conspiratorial forms of class struggle,” forming small cells and adopting code names. In secret meetings, anti-Fascist youths studied the Marxist classics and heatedly debated the “predictions of revolution.” Camouflaged as ordinary members of the Youth Movement, they hiked in the countryside, discussed the irresistible extension of Nazi control over public life, coped with their disappointment in the party leadership, and reinforced their faith in the Soviet Union as a beacon of a better future. The more daring ones, such as Heinz Zöger, printed leaflets on hidden presses and scrawled anti-Nazi slogans such as “Hitler Means War” and “Communism Lives” on factory walls. Seeking to maintain their courage, they channeled their anger at repression into “a firm resolution to resist with all means.”8