Nazi Women in Court

Few people could name even a handful of female perpetrators of Nazi-era crimes. Among those who have gained at least some notoriety are Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the leader of the National Socialist Women's League (whose criminal responsibility is debatable), and a few others whose postwar prosecution by the Allies exposed them to the public: concentration camp guard Irma Grese; Ilse Koch, wife of Buchenwald’s commandant; Herta Oberheuser, who experimented on prisoners at Ravensbrück; and Lebensborn official Inge Viermetz. Beyond these relatively well-known cases, though, even experts would be hard pressed to draw up long lists of female offenders. This reflects the fact that the police, military, and paramilitary forces that were the primary agents of physical destruction under the Nazi regime were nearly exclusively male. There was no dearth of women in German uniforms in the killing fields of Eastern Europe, providing clerical services to mass murder, but only very few sported weapons, as Kathrin Kompisch and Wendy Lower have shown. The share of female guards in the Nazi concentration camp system is estimated to have been no higher than 10 percent.

But the lack of visibility, as political scientist Jessica Trisko Darden perceptively notes in her new book, was a result not only of relatively small numbers but also of the obscurity of their trials. Usually prosecuted before lower-level courts in cases that only rarely implied mass murder, their names were anonymized in official documentation, effectively preventing the women and their actions from entering collective memory and, indeed, history. Instead, lurid tales about the few notorious, frequently sexually charged cases, such as those of Grese and Koch, would come to dominate public perception of female perpetrators as even greater exceptions to the rule than their male counterparts and, essentially, the product of flawed femininity.

Trisko Darden has therefore done a major service to historians and scholars of collective memory by digging deep, uncovering a large number of those forgotten names, and telling their stories. Her study builds on an empirical corpus of 238 German trials spanning the period from 1945 to 1982 and involving 344 women, further supplemented by additional cases tried in liberated Europe, Israel, and the United States. Trisko Darden sorts these women into four useful categories: (a) dynamic, driven, and “empowered perpetrators,” who had access to social and institutional power, for example, Nazi functionaries and camp personnel; (b) “subjected servants,” that is, women acting within institutional frameworks but with rather little control, such as nurses and secretaries; (c) “opportunistic beneficiaries,” who could draw on social power yet had no formal role in state institutions, with denunciations a typical crime; and (d) “entangled victims,” such as informants and kapos forced to make what Lawrence Langer has called “choiceless choices.”

The vast majority of cases concerned crimes committed by Germans against other Germans (many of them Jews), and denunciation—often with deadly consequences when it led to arrest and deportation—was the most common crime women were accused of. Under Allied Control Council Law 10, denunciation qualified as a crime against humanity and, somewhat ironically, was the typical offense clad into the newly available terminology when applied by German courts. These cases more often than not involved individual wrongdoings and frequently had a strong private dimension. Those in which camp guards and nurses in the T4 murder killing institutions (the so-called euthanasia murders) were tried—some 20 percent of all women prosecuted after the war—did not: The crimes in these proceedings resembled those of male perpetrators in substance and severity. Interestingly, Trisko Darden finds that while courts in the Federal Republic of Germany had higher acquittal rates for women than for the men with whom they were prosecuted together, the women who were actually found guilty “tended to receive stiffer sentences in mixed-sex trials than those who were prosecuted individually or alongside other women.”

Other patterns emerge. If the accused had been arrested at or in proximity to concentration camps or “euthanasia” centers, the likelihood of their being prosecuted increased: It was easier to investigate and find witnesses, there was critical mass to stage large trials, and the crimes that were charged were more often marked by brutality, cruelty, and deadliness. Location also mattered. Judges in East German courts found a far higher number of women guilty than their counterparts in the Federal Republic did. Timing was no less significant, and in different ways: The urgency of prosecution was felt acutely in the immediate aftermath of the war, especially in the East, but less so in the years to come. And in determining what people might or should have known when they denounced others, courts often differentiated carefully between early and later phases of Nazi rule; crimes committed in the last year of war were met with considerably less leniency than those dating back to 1939 or even further.

But the most striking feature of how trials of the accused women played out was the implicit and explicit gender norms that informed both the rendering of the accusations and the defenses of the accused. In a deeply patriarchal society, helped by a criminal code that sought to distinguish precisely between perpetrators and those who aided and abetted (implying different sentences and, crucially, statutes of limitations, a problem that would impede prosecution of perpetrators for years), female criminal agency was hard to imagine and unlikely to be admitted. Depictions of those on trial as middlemen, or rather “middlewomen,” of those “really” in charge thus abounded, as these portrayals spoke to preconceptions about women’s lack of intellectual independence, diminished authority, and limited physical capability. Not least of all, such arguments were attractive both to the accused and to lawyers on all sides, who were imbued with traditional gender norms and a wish to reestablish order based on traditional gender roles. However, whether, as Trisko Darden concludes, this meant that “[w]omen perpetrators of Nazi-era crimes were seldom treated seriously as individuals, either by the courts or by their communities,” appears less clear from the evidence she presents.

The evidence is, indeed, both the book’s major strength and its principal handicap. The stories uncovered by Trisko Darden have rarely been told—although more has been published than her footnotes give away—and provide stark glimpses into the realities of daily life in the Third Reich. There is immense sadness in the fate of Amalie S., who was first denounced by her sister-in-law and then betrayed and divorced by her husband before being deported and murdered. And what Hannah Arendt said about the Nuremberg trial offering no punishment commensurate with the crimes at stake is proved just as right in this private setting: The six-month and eight-month prison terms respectively imposed on the man and his sister by a Hamburg court appear wholly inadequate. Yet guilty verdicts they were, and for this reason alone they were an unusual achievement at the time.

There are many such vignettes, recounted dispassionately by Trisko Darden, in the book’s central chapters. Nearly all of them are but short sketches, with little detail beyond the facts of the respective crimes and the judicial findings. What readers do not hear is the story as it continued in court: the accused women’s arguments, their rebuttals, their actions, reactions, or inaction. This is reflected in Trisko Darden’s frequent reliance on passive constructions (“was first detained,” “was later held … and prosecuted”) when describing the accused, as opposed to the active renderings (“the court found that,” “the court determined that,” “In the opinion of the court”) when the judges appear. That is hardly surprising, but it points to a methodological conundrum that results from Trisko Darden’s choice of sources. As Germany’s code of criminal procedure did not provide for verbatim transcripts of proceedings, more profound analyses of the trials would have required supplementing the limited judicial records with media coverage, letters, diaries, or memoirs by participants, interviews, and the like. Identifying and collecting materials of these sorts for the large number of cases Trisko Darden considers would probably have been unfeasible.

Thus, the book has more to say about the women’s deeds than it can contribute to understanding their trials. And what might be called a perverse rehabilitation goal—taking female perpetrators and their life choices seriously and accepting that they took these “with full awareness of their circumstances and options”—must stop at the entrance to the courtrooms they were tried in. To readers who mistake the titles of the book’s three parts—Investigation, Accusation, Judgement—for an indication that the analysis is following a trial’s stages, this might result in disappointment. It is also slightly confusing that the chapter on vigilante justice directed against women in 1944-1945—with the femmes tondues its most notorious visual trope—comes after those on the trials, rather than preceding them.

Readers picking up “The Accused” should thus be aware that they will learn more about the fact that women faced justice after the war, and why, than how they did. But readers will be rewarded with a multitude of windows into Nazi society, each opening but briefly and allowing only glimpses, yet enough to show the degree to which standard morals had been eroded, how easily lives were jeopardized, and how petty the motivations for doing so often were. It is difficult not to hear this disavowal of common decency echoing in the indifference or consent with which repugnant rhetoric and policies are met among supporters of the populist right, whether in Germany or the United States, today.