Ulrike Weckel, Edgar Wolfrum. "Bestien" und "Befehlsempfänger": Frauen und Männer in NS-Prozessen nach 1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. 271 S. EUR 22.90 (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-525-36272-3.

Reviewed by Frank Buscher (Department of History and Political Science, Christian Brothers University)
Published on H-German (February, 2005)

The Value of Gender History

Postwar trials of National Socialist perpetrators number into the tens of thousands, and it is likely that the exact numbers of such proceedings and the defendants they have targeted will remain unknown. At the same time, it is common knowledge that the vast majority of the accused were male. This should not come as a surprise. After all, the power structures of the party, the state, and the military were firmly in the hands of men and excluded women. Men gave the Hitler regime its seemingly boundless criminal energy and established its giant, ruthless terror apparatus. Men unleashed and conducted the wars against the Third Reich's external and internal enemies, and in the process presided over a genocide of unprecedented proportions and countless war crimes. Thus it was only natural that male defendants predominated in the docks of allied and other courts after Nazi Germany's collapse. But women also found themselves facing justice. Excluded from the decision-making elites and reduced to the ranks of subordinates, women committed far fewer criminal acts than men. Nonetheless, after May 1945 several were prosecuted, alongside male co-defendants, for their actions as concentration camp supervisors or as privileged prisoners. Others stood trial for their involvement, as health care professionals, in the euthanasia murders.

Popular stereotypes determined the perception and self-perception of all defendants. Although a small minority among the accused, women drew a disproportionate share of public attention. Their presence in the dock violated social and gender norms. Long-held prejudices caused the media and the general public to show a particular interest whenever a woman had to answer charges of National Socialist crimes (nationalsozialistische Gewaltverbrechen, abbreviated below as "NSG"). These clichés tended to depict women either as good by nature--essentially incapable of serious crimes--or as particularly evil and conniving. The editors consider it probable that such views influenced both NSG trials and jurisprudence. Moreover, male defendants generally portrayed themselves as mere subordinates who had followed orders and who were otherwise model citizens. Their claims gave rise to a vibrant Täterforschung. It posits that the perpetrators were "ordinary men" who killed not because they felt threatened but due to a combination of factors such as peer pressure, career ambitions, apathy, a heightened willingness to resort to violence, etc. But there were apparently no "ordinary women." The contemporary media delighted in describing female defendants as lust-driven monsters, and, except for a small number of gender historical studies, historians have paid scant attention to them.

The editors emphasize that no gender-historical studies exist of the male defendants and their treatment by the media. They criticize Täterforschung for dismissing the gender-specific approach as a fad. Weckel and Wolfrum point to the larger Holocaustforschung, which initially also eschewed the new method but has since recognized its value. They urge the Taeterforschung to do the same because "men and women who had participated in National Socialist crimes and stood trial after 1945 were perceived most differently and--at least outside the courts--judged in accordance with a double-standard that was amalgamated with diverse gender representations" (pp. 17-18).

The volume's first part--entitled "Nuernberg und die Folgen: Maenner vor Gericht"--begins with Irmela von der Lühe's essay on Erika Mann and her reporting on the Nuremberg Trial. Mann began her work as a war correspondent in 1940 and eventually reported for the BBC and several print media. As a former cabaret producer and actress, she had a well-developed sense for the macabre and the grotesque. One of a small number of female reporters at Nuremberg, Mann was the only woman to gain access to the Luxembourg hotel that served as the pretrial detention facility for the Hitler regime's top representatives. There, the experienced actress encountered prisoners preparing for a "ghostly-grotesque stage production" (p. 31) that would later be performed at Nuremberg. Reporting on her visit for Liberty Magazine, she refers to the Third Reich's movers and shakers as "ein trauriger, gottverlassener Haufen" (p. 35). Once the trial was underway, she considered the conduct of the defendants nothing more than a performance by "Schmierenkomödianten" (p. 33).

While von der Lühe focuses on the impressions of one correspondent, Anneke de Rudder takes a broader view and sets out to examine the contemporaneous media coverage from a gender-specific perspective. Many articles express disbelief that "these pathetic characters" (p. 47) had determined the history of the past twelve years. German accounts also show a great interest in the issue of guilt and whether it belonged to Hitler, the spineless Nuremberg defendants, the lower-ranking perpetrators and fellow travelers, or German society in its entirety. The correspondents, male and female, agreed that the accused were "great criminals, but insignificant men (p. 52)." Their conduct in the courtroom, their cowardly denial of any responsibility, and the "feminine" characteristics of some defendants destroyed once and for all the masculine ideal propagated by the national socialists. Goering et al., the trial demonstrated, "had failed as military officers and politicians, and also as human beings and--not least--as men" (p. 65).

The devastating image of the perpetrators thus served to discredit National Socialism and its ideals. After all, one of the trial's principal functions was to contribute to the reeducation and democratization of the Germans. How one particular media outlet, the Berliner Rundfunk, employed perpetrator images in its reports is the topic of Christine Bartlitz's essay. Managed by reliable communists, the radio station broadcast numerous reports and editorials on the Nuremberg proceedings and especially the accused. In fact, Bartlitz was able to examine over 100 manuscripts for her research. These sources shed light not only on the reporting priorities of a communist-led medium, but also the mental state of German postwar society. The station regularly portrayed the defendants as greedy crooks and pathetic creatures. They alone were guilty. By reporting in this way, Bartlitz argues, the Berliner Rundfunk made it possible for the German people to exculpate itself and view itself primarily as an "abused victim" (p. 90). Its reports and editorials were written to address the perceived need of the German people not to be held responsible for the recent past. That need was satisfied quickly. By late 1945 "the German people, as a 'community of victims,' turned its attention to the future and reconstruction" (p. 91) and no longer concerned itself with its own complicity and responsibility.

While the "male world" of Nuremberg dominates the volume's first part, the second section--entitled "Gespaltene Frauenbilder"--focuses on women as defendants in NSG trials. Based on her research of indictments and judgments against thirty-five female Ravensbrück concentration camp supervisors tried by SBZ and East German courts from 1947 to 1954, Insa Eschenbach detects decidedly divided images of women. Typically the indictments portray the accused women in negative terms, while the judgments "emphasize female innocence" as justification for the overwhelmingly mild sentences handed down by the courts in the late 1940s. Eager to exonerate these defendants, East German courts resorted to three arguments: the defendants' youth and working-class status, and the belief that the accused had merely slipped up. The judges were particularly lenient in cases where women had engaged in criminal behavior in an effort to support their families. Beginning in the 1950s, however, the situation changed dramatically. The East German authorities now resorted to greater repression and saw a greater role for criminal law in the construction of a socialist society. The courts promptly responded by resorting to other stereotypes of women. They now portrayed the defendants as "beasts" driven by base desires, and handed down considerably harsher sentences.

Stereotypes of women also played important roles in western Germany. Kathryn Meyer examines how such stereotypes influenced the decisions of denazification courts (Lagerspruchkammern) and appeals courts (Berufungskammern) in the U.S. zone of occupation in cases involving politically seriously incriminated women. Meyer argues that women benefited from the general trend to exonerate defendants. At the same time, however, the Lagerspruchkammern and appeals courts on average assigned them to the more serious of the five denazification categories (Hauptschuldige, Belastete, Minderbelastete, Mitläufer, Entlastete) and included in their verdicts gender specific assumptions of morality. Meyer attributes this state of affairs to "the fact that these women were pursuing careers, exercised power and applied physical force, wore uniforms and carried weapons, [and] thus deviated from their traditional gender roles" (p. 131). Women were expected to meet higher moral standards than men. Female defendants who had engaged in violent behavior and brutalities could expect harsher treatment, whereas others whose conduct had not violated gender expectations benefited from the prejudices of the courts and received leniency.

While Meyer researched the files of 280 denazification cases tried at the Ludwigsburg internment camp for women, Regula Ludi devotes her contribution to portrayals of the Swiss Nazi perpetrator Carmen Mory, whose story and outward appearance have fascinated observers so much that she has become the stuff of legend. Mory joined the NSDAP in Germany in the early 1930s and worked for the Gestapo only to fall from grace and end up in Ravensbrück, where she eventually held the position of block elder. A British court sentenced her to death in 1947, but the sentence was not executed because Mory committed suicide. Ludi shows a particular interest in Lukas Hartmann's 1999 book on Mory (which I admittedly have not read).[1] She considers Hartmann's portrayal of the accused as beautiful, exotic, cruel, intelligent, and opportunistic as a paradigm for the widely accepted depiction of women perpetrators since the end of the war. Ludi does not pull punches. She portrays Hartmann as an apologist for those who willingly became National Socialism's disciples. She accuses him of "resorting to the known cultural clichés, which negate personal responsibility: the erotic attraction and its overpowering nature, the quasi-religious experience of becoming utterly absorbed by the masses, the veneration of Hitler and the inevitability of fate" (p. 161). Hartmann, Ludi concludes, turned Mory into a character seduced by National Socialism and thus made her a symbol for the contemporary Swiss version of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The latter concedes that Switzerland collaborated with the Nazis. Yet the country did so not by choice, but because it was seduced by a force it was unable to resist.

Part three--entitled "Männlichkeit, Weiblichkeit, Geschlechterneutralität"--begins with an essay by Isabel Richter, who compares Weimar and Nazi political trials. She finds that the Weimar Republic's Reichsgericht and Staatsgerichthof recognized a specific feminine sphere. Traditional stereotypes such as the "caring nature" of women often led to milder verdicts compared to male defendants. So did claims of diminished responsibility or the common assumption that female defendants had sexual motives for their offenses. The Volksgerichtshof was less willing to accept such gender-specific defense arguments. Gender polarities symbolically ceased to exist in the Nazi court's verdicts. Richter detects "the growing radicalization of a symbolic process of assimilation in which the social gender, confronted with the threat of capital punishment or death in a concentration camp, plays an increasingly negligible role" (p. 192). In short, the Volksgerichtshof adopted a position of gender neutrality. Richter is quick to caution that, in a dictatorship, this concept should not be confused with gender equality and equal treatment. Hitler's highest court considered both male and female defendants enemies of the people and consigned them to a segregated sphere outside the people's community. They became the "other," for which National Socialism allowed no gender.

Michael Greve engages in a comparison of a different sort. After summarizing the many reasons for the Federal Republic's disappointing record with respect to the prosecution of Nazi crimes, Greve sheds light on one particular shortcoming: the difference West German prosecutors and courts drew between actual perpetrators (Täter) and accomplices (Gehilfen). West German judges convicted 6,500 defendants of NSG. While a small number received the maximum punishment, most defendants were found guilty as assistants and drew mild sentences that frequently had no relation to the enormity of their crimes. A 1962 decision by the FRG's highest appeals court for non-constitutional issues, the Bundesgerichtshof, essentially gave lower courts the choice whether to treat a defendant as a perpetrator or an accomplice. Lacking firm guidance and supervision, the trial courts promptly convicted even Einsatzgruppen officers as accomplices, arguing that the defendants had been under the influence of Nazi propaganda, had killed reluctantly in fulfillment of their orders, and had not initiated the killings. In addition, the courts accepted numerous mitigating circumstances as justification for low sentences. Here the accused benefited from the fact that most judges and jurors had been fellow travelers themselves and thus understood their perspective much better than that of the victims. Greve blames the NSG-jurisprudence for creating an image of the killers that failed to conform to reality. The Hitler regime's annihilation policies, he concludes correctly, could not have been carried out by "an army of weak-minded assistants, who inwardly resisted the execution of criminal orders" (p. 221).

Sabine Horn compares the depiction and self-portrayal of the Majdanek trial's nine male and six female defendants in contemporaneous television accounts and Eberhard Fechner's documentary Der Prozeß. She also contrasts the television coverage of the earlier Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-1965) with the much longer Majdanek proceeding (1975-1981). Although the West German networks showed no particular interest in the female accused, Horn identifies several gender-specific connotations in the television accounts. Men were identified by their full names and ranks, women only by the nicknames given to them by their prisoners. The journalists provided specific examples of criminal behavior and discussed Exzesstaten, i.e., particularly brutal crimes, exclusively in connection with the female defendants. They further implied that the women had enjoyed torturing and killing, whereas the men had acted as almost rational functionaries. Der Prozess featured a similar dichotomy. It depicted the women as "beasts," but showed little interest in the psychological condition of the male accused. The female and male defendants also resorted to different defense strategies. The men saw themselves as soldiers, subject to military discipline and charged with establishing and maintaining order. The women provided more personal explanations, describing the psychological pressure they had endured in a terrible environment. They also emphasized that they had treated their prisoners humanely. The Majdanek trial received less coverage than the Auschwitz trial. Similarly, journalists showed much greater interest in the Auschwitz than the Majdanek defendants. Horn criticizes the television networks for the overall sparse attention they paid to women as Nazi perpetrators during the Majdanek proceeding. She speculates that the growing public awareness of women's issues and the presence of "more interesting female perpetrators" (p. 249), or more specifically, the women of the Red Army Faction, caused the ARD and ZDF to tread carefully.

Christina von Braun's thought-provoking, albeit sparsely documented, essay comparing the perception and self-perception of male and female NSG perpetrators from a media-historical perspective concludes this volume. Braun posits that the public has perceived male perpetrators as "normal" and thus "invisible," whereas portrayals of their female counterparts have emphasized their "visibility" by claiming that their outward appearance differed from that of "normal" women. She describes Eichmann as "the best known example of the 'invisible,' apparently 'normal' perpetrator" (p. 251). In contrast, female defendants such as Ilse Koch and Carmen Mory were particularly "visible." Braun attributes these perceptions to the gender codifications inherent in western Christian history. These depict the male body as the norm and thus ensure its invisibility, whereas the female body is considered an anomaly and hence visible. This "symbolic order of the genders," Braun claims, "contributed not only to an at all times specific perception of male and female criminals and crimes, but also influenced the perpetrators themselves in their actions" (p. 265). She urges a greater public awareness of this state of affairs due to its relevance for ethical thinking and behavior, as well as its importance for the politics of memory and remembrance.

In conclusion, this book makes a valid case that the gender-specific approach will enhance Täterforschung. To be sure, the number of female perpetrators was very low; Michael Greve counted only seventy women among the thousands of accused in West German trials. Nonetheless, the study of gender stereotypes leads to a better understanding of both the men and women who participated in NSG. It assists historians in explaining the public's, the media's, and the courts' perceptions of the perpetrators. It also improves our understanding of defense strategies and helps us explain why many judgments and sentences were too mild. Finally, the inclusion of this approach in Täterforschung will lead to new questions and areas of research. That, after all, is one of the editors' express goals.

Note

[1]. Lukas Hartmann, Die Frau im Pelz: Leben und Tod der Carmen Mory: Roman (Zürich/Frauenfeld: Nagel and Kimche, 1999).

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Citation: Frank Buscher. Review of Weckel, Ulrike; Wolfrum, Edgar, "Bestien" und "Befehlsempfänger": Frauen und Männer in NS-Prozessen nach 1945. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10200

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