In the summer of 1943, German housewife Erna Petri was returning home from a shopping trip in Lviv when something caught her eye: six small, nearly naked boys were attempting to hide by the side of the country road. Petri instantly knew who they were, as she was married to Horst Petri, a senior SS officer - - they must be the escaped Jews she had heard about earlier. She took the starving, frightened children home, calmed them, and gave them food to eat. Once fed, she led them into the woods behind her house, lined them up in a row, and shot the children one at a time. Such brutality from a female, let alone a mother, is unsettling, yet not uncommon during the Nazi Regime. Not much thought has been given to German women during Adolf Hitler’s…show more content… Hitler believed that the mother was the most important citizen; he declared, “Every child she brings into the world is a battle, a battle she wages for the existence of her people…the mother of five, six or seven children who were all healthy and well raised accomplished more than a female lawyer.” Although many women had to fill in as teachers, secretaries, and nurses while the men went off to fight in the war, mothers were the most valued for their fertility. Proper German girls and women were not “supposed to paint their fingernails, pluck their eyebrows, wear lipstick, dye their hair, or be too thin. Nazi leaders condemned the entire cosmetics boom of the 1920s as Jewish commerce, as a cheapening of German femininity that turned women into prostitutes and led to racial degeneration.” German men were encouraged to mate with the “girl next door.” A young women’s “natural glow should radiate from physical exertion, from being outdoors, and, in its most celebrated form, from pregnancy.” In school, girls were taught that they can dance and by happy, but they should understand that they will remain a part of their community, and should “willingly approach their future destiny as mothers of the new generation.” Wives of German officials were among the top thieves of Jewish furs and jewelry…show more content… “This type of modern genocidaire assumes that the paper, like its administrator, remains clean and bloodless. The desk murderer does his official duty. He convinces himself as he orders the deaths of tens of thousands that he has remained decent, civilized and even innocent of the crime.” Not all secretaries sat behind their desks and issued orders; some joined their bosses in visiting the ghettos and got a thrill at the chance of personally ending someone’s life. Secretary Johanna Altvater, who specialized in killing children, was one of the worst imaginable female perpetrators. It is documented that, “On September 16, 1942, Altvater entered the ghetto and approached two Jewish children, a six-year-old and a toddler who lived near the ghetto wall. She beckoned to them, gesturing as if she were going to give them a treat. The toddler came over to her. She lifted the child into her arms and held it so tightly that the child screamed and wriggled. Altvater grabbed the child by the legs, held it upside down, and slammed its head against the ghetto wall as if she were banging the dust out of a small carpet. She threw the lifeless child at the feet of its father, who later testified, ‘Such sadism from a woman I have never seen, I will never forget this.’’’ Altvater also enjoyed going to the children’s ward at hospitals and picking children to throw off the balcony. One observer noted
