Original subtitles

(dramatic music) - (explosions)

NARRATOR: Nazi Germany, two words synonymous

with barbarity, terror, hate... and death.

A shock defeat in World War One sows

the seeds for discontent in a once prosperous nation.

Adolf Hitler, an unassuming,

uninspiring man seizes the opportunity to take control...

..promising to make Germany great again.

But he won't do it alone. Willing accomplices rally

from the most unlikely of places.

The female Fuhrers...

Nazi she-devils...

cougars...

fantasists...

and secret lovers.

These are the forgotten Nazis.

These are Hitler's Handmaidens.

- (speaks German) - (crowd cheers, chants)

NARRATOR: It was one of the greatest,

most seductive of the Nazi propaganda myths.

- (reporter speaks German)

NARRATOR: Motherhood, the one and only purpose

for women of the fatherland.

Kinder, Kuche, Kirche -

Children, Kitchen, Church.

The Nazis created a fantasy land of milk and honey,

sun-kissed pastures, and fresh-faced maidens.

A utopia for virtuous women...

and their racially pure "Kinder."

The incubator for a glorious thousand-year Reich.

In their millions, German women embraced that submissive vision.

But not all would.

A select few sought a more active role in the Nazi dream

of global domination and racial purity.

NARRATOR: They were Hitler's she-devils,

ready to follow any order,

no matter how horrific,

and it's something history has struggled to reconcile.

- I think there's a real social taboo around female violence

and the idea that women participated,

may even have actively chosen

to commit acts of brutality and sadism in World War Two.

It's fundamentally anathema to stereotypes

about womanhood, motherhood, femininity.

NARRATOR: From all walks of life they came,

to keep the Nazi death machine running at full speed.

Farm girls and factory hands to middle class professionals,

Teachers, nurses and doctors.

They flocked to the killing fields and camps

where cruelty knew no bounds.

Not only were they organisers,

these women were active participants.

Secretaries who typed the death lists,

who scrupulously recorded the gruesome details

of butchery on an unimaginable scale.

Medical professionals who betrayed their solemn oaths

to care for the sick and vulnerable, instead poisoning,

mutilating, and murdering without pity or remorse.

What makes female guards beat pregnant women

and whip prisoners to death?

Or a mother of three coldly execute a row of children

with pistol shots to the head?

These are the stories of Hitler's she-devils

and how only a few of them would ever be brought to justice.

When American soldiers liberated

the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women,

they saw evidence of unimaginable atrocities.

- Ravensbruck was exclusively for... for female prisoners,

and that's where most of them sort of had

their female overseers of the camp.

That's where most of them had their initiation.

That was seen as a kind of a starting block

for a career as a female camp guard.

And from there they could go to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen,

and any of the other camps around the Reich.

That was certainly, for most, a sort of a starting block.

NARRATOR: But it was not just the sadism and brutality

of the camp guards that haunted survivors.

They told of 'a beast masquerading as a human'...

..a beast who was a doctor and a woman

who betrayed every oath and tenet of medicine

in the most inhumane ways.

Her name was Herta Oberheuser.

- Herta got her medical degree in 1937,

and then, she becomes involved in these experiments at Ravensbruck

and is working in Ravensbruck inside.

She's been assigned to experiments to test

the effects of wounds on the human body.

If they can see how a wound that's inflicted by shrapnel

is going to affect an ordinary German soldier

and all the ways that could be treated.

She's putting sawdust in there,

putting glass shards...

putting various chemicals and rubbing that in.

Of course, these so-called kind of procedures are done

with no anaesthetic.

Um... There could... The prisoners are conscious.

It's torture. It's sadistic.

NARRATOR: Using a smuggled camera,

prisoners documented all they could.

Evidence that would later be used in war crime trials at Nuremberg.

Bones broken with hammers,

limbs cut off and transplanted onto other prisoners.

all performed without anaesthetic of any kind.

It was a butcher's shop,

and those that survived were routinely killed by Oberheuser...

with injections of petrol.

Murders she'd later try to pass off as humanitarian acts.

- One of the victims who testified said that,

when she was administering these lethal injections,

she had an expression on her face,

a kind of smug, self-satisfied expression on her face,

and you could see her contempt for humanity.

NARRATOR: Neither were children spared any of the horror.

Oberheuser killed them with injections

of oil and barbiturates and then cut off their limbs

and removed vital organs.

Oberheuser would even beat pregnant women

to cause miscarriages before killing the newborns.

Oberheuser insisted at her trial

that she tried to give her patients care.

But witnesses told how she denied

her mutilated victims medical help, even water.

Oberheuser was one of the few Nazi she-devils

who'd ever see a court room.

And there, she denied everything.

- Oberheuser was charged with crimes against humanity, was convicted.

She was actually given a... a pretty stiff sentence

relative to the other cases that were tried at this time.

She was given a ten-year sentence,

but she was released earlier,

around 1950, early '50s.

And she actually resumed her practice... her medical practice.

And a former prisoner from Ravensbruck identified her...

..and then, that was shut down.

So, by 1960s, she was... she was out of business,

and then, she kind of died in her eighties, peacefully.

NARRATOR: Oberheuser was a butcher and a murderer of the highest order.

She betrayed her Hippocratic oath...

,,and serves as perhaps the clearest example

of the power of Nazi indoctrination.

That a doctor could turn murderer speaks

to the collective brainwashing in Nazi Germany at the time.

It was all-pervasive,

and as Hitler shifted his focus to State-sanctioned torture,

eugenics and euthanasia in the pursuit of racial purity,

doctors like Herta Oberheuser wouldn't be the only converts.

(dramatic music)

- (people cheering)

NARRATOR: Forty miles from Stuttgart,

it still looks picture perfect.

But the fanatical Nazi obsession with the "imperfect"

continues to haunt the corridors and halls of Grafeneck Castle.

In late 1939, Hitler signed a euthanasia law,

the sinister and secret T4 programme.

- And this programme...

...was an opportunity for the Nazi party to murder

anybody who they thought of as disabled,

whether they were actually disabled or not.

And people would come there, and they would be murdered.

- It was brutal. It was absolutely brutal.

And that's where a lot of women were involved

because women were actually nurses, and they...

they had been involved with caring for less abled people,

people who had disabilities,

and it was an extension of that, and they just, you know,

we will use this, and we will execute.

NARRATOR: These nurses had trained to protect human life.

But, in these wards, they routinely slaughtered their patients

with morphine injections.

One nurse hand-picked to make Grafeneck Castle

an efficient killing site was Pauline Kneissler.

Her task?

To travel to nearby institutions with a list of patients,

bus them back to Grafeneck and murder them.

- Pauline Kneissler became a career killer.

She killed on average between 1939 and 1945

seventy people a day. Mostly children.

She moved around different facilities.

She was transferring her expertise to these different facilities,

including going to, um... the eastern territories.

NARRATOR: So what made Nurse Pauline Kneissler decide

to kill rather than care?

From a wealthy, ethnic German household

in the Odessa region of Ukraine,

she was born to privilege.

But her family was targeted

and stripped of their money in The Bolshevik Revolution.

So they fled to Germany where her father worked

in the German National Railway.

Kneissler studied nursing and qualified as a psychiatric nurse.

Perhaps it was her grievance against communists

or a need for belonging.

But like so many other woman,

Kneissler was easily seduced by Nazism.

- Any woman is likely to have had years of indoctrination.

You know, she may have been at school with textbooks.

She would have been a member of the BDM: the Bund Deutscher Madel.

She may have been a member of a different German youth movement.

Jewish people would have been completely dehumanised,

to the point where they were able to detach the situation,

and they saw the Jewish people not as people anymore,

and therefore were able to murder them.

NARRATOR: This detachment was so ingrained

that it remained evident in the trials of women

like Kniessler long after the war.

At her post-war trial, she confessed,

"We didn't feel very good about it,

but we had no moral reservations."

- I think that tells you everything you need to know.

That any feelings of "Should we question this?"

were quickly dismissed,

and any human instinct to protect or care for others was quelled.

And it shows us the mentality

of the Nazi soldiers and the efficacy

of the SS in... and Hitler himself,

in creating that absolute obedience and wish to serve.

NARRATOR: In one year at Grafeneck Castle,

the medical personnel murdered nearly 10,000 German people.

- And this programme made it look on the outside

like a nice place that you could send your family member

if they were disabled, mentally or physically disabled.

And it was here that gas was tested on these patients,

on these people,

before being taken to concentration camps.

NARRATOR: Kneissler found the gassings frightening

but said at her trial they were 'not really all that bad'...

..because, she reasoned, 'death by gas doesn't hurt'.

To their credit, some German families risked everything

to openly protest the T4 programme.

- And families started realising what was actually happening,

that these people were being murdered.

And in total, it's estimated

that a quarter of a million people were murdered this way.

Families started protesting, and the Nazi Party,

rather than stopping the T4 programme altogether,

just made it even more secretive,

even more undercover.

(sinister music)

- Initially, it was fairly easy to disguise, in some respects, the...

the Nazi euthanisation programme.

When, um... the children that were affected

with physical or mental disabilities...

when they were examined by a doctor, and the doctor says,

"Well, look, we... we may be able to help this... this child of yours,

but we need to have them sent to the correct establishment.

And the parents would get a letter some months later saying,

"We're sorry to inform you your child has...

has died of measles or chicken pox."

In effect, they've probably been given a lethal injection

and sort of euthanised under this programme.

NARRATOR: Unbelievably, at her trial in Frankfurt in 1948,

Pauline Kniessler was sentenced to only four years in prison.

She would continue to work as a nurse until retirement in 1963.

- (man speaks German)

NARRATOR: She was able to live out the full life

she denied the thousands she helped to murder

in the name of racial purity.

- I think, in the '40s and '50s, the gender of women,

including those concentration camp guards standing trial

was absolutely central in their receiving

lenient sentences or no sentences because,

again, the prevailing view that women can't be violent,

that women don't have agency,

that if they're cruel, it's only under the coercion of man,

it's a myth. But it's a pervasive one.

So the women's participation

in Nazi brutality was rendered invisible or...

really only focussed on just a few cases, when, in fact,

it was far more pervasive.

NARRATOR: There was, however, one woman

whose crimes were so prolific and terrible

that even the Nuremberg judges would have no choice

but to order her execution.

At the camps where she plied her evil trade,

she was known variously as The Hyena of Auschwitz,

The Beautiful Beast,

The Angel of Death.

REPORTER: No men or women have ever faced

charges of such a loathsome nature.

One of the most prominent amongst the women prisoners is Irma Grese.

Number nine.

- Irma Grese had a very notorious reputation

for being a sadistic guard.

Like, stomping on prisoners, and shouting,

and sending her guard dogs, attack dogs on prisoners.

She was attractive woman, but she also just fit

this kind of stereotype of... of a tough German woman,

and she looked, you know, the part.

- When she was at Auschwitz,

she seemed to... as if she had something to prove.

I mean, her violence knew no bounds.

She would... She would hit... beat a prisoner virtually to death

for no reason at all.

And certainly in Auschwitz, they... they nicknamed her the...

the Hyena of Auschwitz was one of her names.

NARRATOR: To this day, historians ponder how a woman could

commit such heinous crimes.

But there were forty million German women in 1939,

and thirteen million of them were

actively engaged in the Nazi Party,

whether directly or through youth groups

like the Bund Deutscher Madel,

the League of German Girls.

While not a BDM member herself,

Irma was fanatical from a young age,

and her penchant for violence would soon shock all around her.

- When women are violent,

it actually offends our whole set of social stereotypes

about womenkind, about femininity.

And it's anathema, it's taboo,

and it becomes much more disturbing, exciting, horrific.

So it does stick in our mind more.

- The BDM and other units like that were indoctrinated with Nazi ideals.

So that was a theoretical view of it, you know,

that, uh... the Aryan race, the superiority,

the position of women and all of that was indoctrinated.

Get them young, keep them old.

But that was what they did in these groups.

One, indoctrination, two, training.

NARRATOR: As a teenager,

Irma was infatuated by Hitler and the Nazis.

She wanted to join the BDM, but her father forbade it.

So Irma took matters into her own hands,

leaving home at fifteen.

- (explosions)

NARRATOR: The year the war began, 1939,

she joined an SS hospital.

Her mentor was Karl Gebhardt, the man who would go on

to facilitate Herta Oberheuser's horrific human experiments.

Nursing didn't suit Irma,

so, at the age of sixteen, she moved on to an SS female helpers

training base near Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Her Nazi zeal and devotion to duty

caught the eye of the SS hierarchy,

and at the tender age of nineteen,

Irma Grese was made a supervisor at Ravensbruck.

- Shortly after the training,

she entered the Ravensbruck camp,

where, straight away, she became pretty notorious.

And she was quite disliked at Ravensbruck,

obviously, because of a violence... violence she was prone to...

to violence without provocation.

NARRATOR: It was at Auschwitz, though,

that Grese really came into her own,

as the lover and accomplice

of the notorious Doctor Josef Mengele.

She helped with The Selections,

a process in which prisoners were chosen

for Mengele's monstrous medical experiments

or sent to the gas chambers.

Grese was highly sexualised,

both at the camp and in the media post-war.

Apart from Mengele,

she also had affairs with the camp commandant Josef Kramer

and male guards.

It was alleged she even raped female prisoners.

- There were others who were also

kind of sensationalised in the press.

Ilse Koch is probably the most famous.

She was the wife of a commandant at Buchenwald.

It kind of stirs up their sense of lurid fascination

and the kind of pornography of violence.

They're kind of these caricatures, eroticising evil,

as one scholar says, my colleague, Claudia Koonz says.

It's a kind of eroticisation of evil.

So Ilse Koch and Irma Grese are very good examples of that.

NARRATOR: When she was arrested after the war,

Grese was unrepentant.

When asked why she took part in the atrocities, she replied,

"It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements

so that Germany's future would be assured.

- They were xenophobic.

They were racists.

And they believe they're on the right side of history.

They were trying to restore Germany's place in the sun

and even expand it as an empire.

And they weren't remorseful.

- Irma Grese was one of the most

sadistic concentration camp guards...

..known to be sexually sadistic,

as well as just generally.

And yet, at her trial, she's rolling her eyes, smiling...

..acting as though this is a matter of great 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 disavowal of our own aggression?

NARRATOR: Despite Irma Grese ultimately facing the death penalty,

most of the female concentration guards escaped justice.

- Most of the guards, the camp guards,

who were pursued after the war and stood trial, um...

did so between 1945 and 1955.

So there were about 3,600 guards, according to this document

that we found in '45,

but in the post-war period only sixty actually stood trial.

And so, you know, as far as the pursuit of justice,

uh... we don't see as many women being tried

and even fewer who were actually, uh... given the death sentence.

NARRATOR: The failure to confront the crimes of some Nazi women is

something history will have to deal with.

Many got away with a slap on the wrist.

Many went on to live long and happy lives...

..like a woman known simply as The Stomping Mare.

NARRATOR: Perhaps a consequence of their gender...

..but many of the Nazi she-devils managed to escape justice.

And even when they were prosecuted,

the process could sometimes take decades.

One particularly strange case was that of the grey-haired woman

who finally stood trial in 1975.

Presenting herself as an innocent suburban housewife...

Hermine Braunsteiner was anything but.

She was in fact the ghastly camp guard of Majdanek Prison in Poland,

known by inmates as 'The Stomping Mare'.

- Hermine Braunsteiner was a camp guard at Majdanek...

..which was near Lublin, Poland,

another one of the big killing centres.

She was known for stomping on prisoners

and just for her excessive cruelty and sadism.

So she was given this, like, Mare of Majdanek,

uh... kind of label.

NARRATOR: Yet, for many years after the war

Hermine lived a life of comfort and safety in the USA.

After meeting an American on vacation in her native Austria,

she married him and moved to the USA in 1959.

Four years later, she was an American citizen.

- She made her way to Queens, New York.

And at some point, I know that Simon Wiesenthal

and others Nazi hunters were pursuing her.

Survivors were talking about her, and they couldn't find her.

But she was identified in Queens.

NARRATOR: Her husband would testify in her defence saying...

.."My wife wouldn't hurt a fly.

There's no more decent person on this Earth.

She told me this was a duty she had to perform."

How do these women, after all they've done,

re-enter society with such little remorse...

..that even their partners carry a sense of denial on their behalf?

- Women who took part in the Nazi machinery,

like Hermine Braunsteiner,

did re-enter society

and, in many ways, the kind of denial

of their perpetration and their roles...

helped them to feel that they could simply reintegrate.

However, my awareness of...

of how they would have functioned would be my...

my suggestion about how they would have managed is

that they would have gone into denial and dissociation.

They would have shut away the horrors that they had perpetrated.

NARRATOR: Braunsteiner was the first Nazi war criminal

to be extradited from the US.

She finally stood trial in Dusseldorf in 1975

alongside other Majdanek guards in what would become

the longest and most expensive trial in West Germany.

In 1981, nearly forty years after her crimes,

The Stomping Mare was convicted on three counts:

direct participation in the murders of eighty people;

abetting the murder of 102 children;

and collaborating in the murder of 1,000 people.

She was sentenced to life in prison

but released on health grounds in 1996.

She died three years later,

having lived more than half a century longer than her victims.

- These individuals like Hermine Braunsteiner,

those who lived on decades, right,

who were not executed by The Allies immediately after the war,

they didn't continue to be serial killers or career killers.

The violence that they demonstrated and committed during the war

they did not continue to behave violently after the war.

So when the Department of Justice came knocking

on Hermine Braunsteiner door in Queens

and identified her, and she opened the door in her nice...

you know, apron, or whatever she had on,

you know, people couldn't believe that she was that other person,

uh... forty years before.

- (explosions) - (rapid gunfire)

NARRATOR: It wasn't just the female camp

and prison guards that showed a taste for brutality.

In the occupied east, lawlessness would bring out

the worst in seemingly ordinary German women.

Just as America had its 'Wild West',

Germany saw its new frontiers like Poland,

Ukraine and Belarus, as the 'Wild East.'

Heinrich Himmler saw the expansion of Lebensraum

as the Nazi's great destiny.

More than half a million German women enthusiastically joined

this surging colonisation.

Though, few would ever pull the trigger on a Luger

or the levers in a gas chamber,

they'd work their evil through efficient administration.

They were the 10,000 secretaries

who carefully typed up orders and death lists...

..assisting with the paperwork and logistics of mass murder,

and forensically filing it all away.

In the east...

the devil was truly in the detail.

- Women relied, as part of the Holocaust, greatly,

just as much as the men really.

Their roles was as significant as the men certainly,

I mean, everybody who was a Nazi was... was a part of that.

They were tram drivers, telephonists, secretaries.

They were working in the munitions factories, as well as the camps.

They were doing a huge variety of roles,

literally more than what was ever envisaged by Hitler in fact.

- (speaks German)

- (applause and cheering)

- The truth is, for the Holocaust to happen,

the Nazi Party needed the support

of thousands of people in every role,

from the secretaries taking down the orders,

to the train drivers driving the trains to concentration camps,

to the concentration camp guards.

And an awful lot of the people in these roles were women.

The Nazi Party would not have been able

to commit the genocide that it did -

the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children -

without massive support from women.

NARRATOR: Shockingly, many of these willing participants would go on

to live full and happy lives...

..changing their identities

and hiding the horrors of national socialism,

in which they were complicit.

- One of the secretaries that I interviewed afterwards...

..said to me that she didn't see anything wrong with her job.

She wasn't directly involved

in the murder of any Jewish people or anybody else.

And she actually really enjoyed her time as a secretary for the Nazis

because she was very well looked after.

And when she was sick,

she got sent what was called a "Fuhrerpaket,"

a gift from the Fuhrer, to help her get better.

And she was made to feel appreciated.

NARRATOR: One such secretary went to the East in a support role,

with no direct orders to take part in killings.

But whether it was her lust for blood or twisted sense of duty,

she quickly became immersed in murder.

Her name was Johanna Altvater.

- Johanna Altvater grew up in this small town,

went through the League of German Girls.

Also about twenty years old when she was sent to the Eastern Front.

And she wanted to go to the Eastern Front.

She's someone who...

was described... as, um...

someone who had the toughness to go the Eastern Front.

NARRATOR: Like a cattle herder, a Frontier Girl,

that's how Altvater was described

during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1943.

She would roam the camp in her riding breeches,

cracking her whip and prodding prisoners into a truck.

Altvater started as an administrative aid,

but she couldn't help but get involved in the killing.

- So there was a machinery of that, and she helped organise that,

but she also participated.

When the Jews are being rounded up

and brought to the mass murder site -

the forests outside of Vladimir Volynsky -

she went into the infirmary

and grabbed the children and the patients in the infirmary.

And if some of them were too ill,

she just threw them over the balcony, and...

and they died; you know, it was several storeys.

She was seen going into this ghetto, one day,

and gesturing to a Jewish child and to come over to her.

And the father was standing nearby; he witnessed the whole thing.

And she picked the child up by the legs, um...

and bashed it against the ghetto wall until it... until it died.

NARRATOR: Killing Jewish children wasn't enough

for the Nazis of the occupied Eastern territories.

They also abducted children they classified as Aryan.

This was part of a program to stock the Reich

with what were seen as 'racially valuable' children.

- (babies crying) NARRATOR: The Lebensborn Program,

once a beacon of the regime's promise

to help German women become successful mothers,

became a state-sanctioned kidnapping program.

The kidnappers were called the 'Brown Sisters'.

Women in brown coats who trawled through the countryside,

searching for Aryan-looking children to steal...

and send to German nurseries and SS families.

- This Lebensborn... it didn't stay in Germany.

It moved it, particularly Poland, but other countries as well.

Even the extent of kidnapping children,

which I think is the most amazing thing,

The Brown Sisters, you know, in particular,

how they would move in, kidnap the children,

purely people who looked Aryan -

blonde hair, you know, pale skins.

- Many children that were encountered by the German forces...

..they were sort of viewed as, um...

being children who could be Aryanised.

And they, of course, would be taken from their parents forcibly.

Sometimes, if the parents protested, they'd be shot.

Sometimes, though, the parents would be shot anyway.

And these children would then be moved back to Germany

and placed with, um... German families

where they would be raised as Germans

with no former history whatsoever.

NARRATOR: Using candy and slices of bread as lures

to attract boys and girls,

the 'Brown Sisters' travelled

behind advancing German forces into the occupied East,

locating and interrogating youngsters about their family trees.

This horrific harvesting was grotesque in practice and scale.

It's estimated that up to 400,000 children

were abducted from their families in Eastern Europe.

Women stood at the forefront of this effort

as trustworthy and motherly figures.

- Women being used in this way makes me think

about some of the work I do now

with female sex offenders, for example,

who are using their status as trustworthy figures -

mothers, sisters, uh...

friends, teachers, nursery nurses, whatever -

and then, using that power and that respect

in order to access and damage children.

- (children crying)

NARRATOR: Nazi doctrine determined that Aryan-looking Polish children

were actually Nordic and could be taught to be German.

Birth documents were destroyed,

and many children never discovered their origins.

It is estimated that only 20% of the stolen children

were reunited with their families after the war.

NARRATOR: The Nazi occupied territories in the East

were a free-for-all.

Jews were murdered by the thousands in slums and ghettos...

..while Aryan children were snatched up

and taken back to pure German families.

Alongside the barbarity of the concentration camps,

the horrors of the Wild East were among the worst

of the Nazi crimes.

- Half of the victims of the Holocaust...

died in ghettos and in mass shootings.

One out of four victims of the Holocaust died in places like,

you know, Ukraine and these...

these ravines and these mass shootings.

So as we understand the history of the Holocaust

as this much bigger, uh... operation

that enters into all these realms of everyday life,

of professional work, of how you wage a war.

NARRATOR: In a forest near Lida, Belarus,

there are stark monuments to a massacre

of more than 6,000 Jews

on the 8th May, 1942.

One depicts two mournful female figures,

the personification of inconsolable grief.

The cruel irony is that the massacre was organised by a woman:

a Nazi secretary called Liselotte Meier.

Meier was the constant companion,

lover and secretary of the district commissar Hermann Hanweg.

They had an all-consuming passion for each other,

for the high life of their luxury villa

and for the sport of hunting and killing Jews.

- When I think about the psychology of the wives of soldiers

who then go on to perpetrate,

I mean, it's an exhilarating,

intoxicating, freeing experience

to remove your moral shackles.

And once it's happened once,

you see it just takes on a different meaning.

So having overcome that moral force, that boundary,

we know this in forensic psychotherapy that,

once you've broken the body boundary

it's so much easier to do it again and again.

- (machines whirring)

NARRATOR: Liselotte Meier was a woman who rejected factory work

as her contribution to the Reich.

Instead, she chose to join the exodus to the Nazi's Wild East

to ply her trade as a secretary.

Through her relationship with Hermann Hanweg,

Lisolette got caught up in what the Nazis called "Ostrausch"...

.."Eastern Rush."

An orgy of sex and violence in the occupied territories.

Lisolette and her lover were all powerful in their domain.

They had the authority to decide who lived and who died.

- Hanweg and Meier end up, um...

taking over a villa with a swimming pool.

And they're having their relationship there.

And these Jewish labourers are like serving them post coital delicacies.

And they're, you know, so there's the debauchery.

NARRATOR: And when the couple got bored, it was hunting time.

- And we hear stories after the war...

a survivor ended up testifying that he saw, um...

Hanweg and his female colleagues.

It was a... It was a Sunday afternoon.

You know, the... the office was close.

And there were Jews nearby who were shovelling the snow.

And when the Germans couldn't find any rabbits,

or any... any animals to... to shoot,

they told the Jewish labourers just... just run

into the direction of the forest,

and they were just going to take shots at them.

And they just started shooting them and killed some of them.

NARRATOR: When later questioned,

Liselotte denied ever killing anyone herself,

but she continued to refer to the Jews as 'Dreck',

which basically means 'scum'.

According to post-war trial statements,

all the logistics of the massacres carried out

in Lida were orchestrated by the Secretary from Saxony...

..Liselotte Meier.

- So she's never indicted.

But she's, you know, has life and death power

over that Jewish population.

She also was seen issuing orders to execute Jews.

She was handling those orders

and the distribution of the... the bullets

and the material to carry out those executions.

NARRATOR: In 2007,

a photo album was donated to the United States Holocaust Museum,

the scenes in and around Auschwitz reek

of symbolism, obscenity, cynicism.

But the photos are not of corpses.

They show Nazi men and women at play,

enjoying picnics with their families in the sun.

This is the true picture of Nazi female perpetrators.

Women who could live two lives

during one of history's most atrocious chapters.

- It's very common for people to cut off

or deny unacceptable aspects of themselves.

And the women who seem to be picnicking

and frolicking with their families by day -

or on the weekends - and are brutally sadistic in the camps,

on other days,

don't really see any contradiction in that behaviour.

So, on the one hand,

it's absolutely human to cut off

and compartmentalise unacceptable behaviour,

deny that it happens.

On the other hand,

even if the female prison guards were

to acknowledge what they were doing,

because the Jews weren't people anyway, it really doesn't matter.

- (speaks German)

NARRATOR: To suggest they didn't know what was going on,

or they were simply following orders,

isn't compatible with what we know today.

The story of women in Nazi Germany is

one of means, motive, and opportunity.

Not all were camp guards or torturers,

and yet, most played some role in propping up the Holocaust machine.

- And part of it was the actual day-to-day administration,

typing the orders, answering the telephone.

And part of it was creating an environment

that allowed the men to then go and physically be

the murderers behind the genocide.

And it's interesting that women were involved in every single role,

across the spectrum,

and very few of the women I researched

saw a problem with what they were doing,

saw any issues with what they were doing.

- (speaks German)

- (crowd chanting supportively in German)

- Lots of women afterwards pleaded that they were just young.

They didn't know what was going on.

But I don't think that's a great response

because there are examples of young women that did stand up to Hitler.

But I think it's fair to say

that ordinary German people knew what was happening.

It was in the newspapers. It was in the radio.

Concentration camps were in Germany. Jewish people were disappearing.

And so, if ordinary German people knew about the Holocaust,

the women who were the secretaries,

the woman who were the administrators

were even closer to the knowledge.

They had evidence in front of them.

They knew the names of concentration camps,

They knew what was happening there.

NARRATOR: In many ways, history let Hitler's she-devils off the hook.

A justice system which either failed to prosecute them,

or gave light sentences and early releases.

Traditional views of gender and violence played a part in this.

Perhaps they still do.

But history mocks the female cliches.

Given the right circumstances and environment,

women, too, will commit genocide,

as faithful enablers and bloody participants.

(dramatic music)

(intense, reflective music)

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