http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0810-03.htm
Diplomacy Sidelined as US Targets Iran: The US charge sheet against Iran is lengthening almost by the day, presaging destabilizing confrontations this autumn and maybe a pre-election October surprise. ------------- --> If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-08/08noll.cfm Bloody Brigitte By Andrea Noll "Honour women! They entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life." Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) The first thought that came to my mind when I first saw the torture pictures of Abu Ghraib and Lynndie England with her dog leash round the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner on the floor. 'Bloody Brigitte' (or 'Krwawa Brygida', as the Polish inmates called her) was Hildegard Lächert, an Austrian wardress at Majdanek KZ, one of those notorious death camps the German SS ran between 1941 and 1944. The camp was divided into a camp for men (Soviet prisoners of war, Jewish men and other male inmates from 28 nations with 54 nationalities) and the Majdanek 'Frauenlager' where women and children were guarded, "selected", killed by women. Of the 500 000 human beings imprisoned in Majdanek, 250,000 were eventually killed or selected for the gas chambers - in less than 3 years - among them 100,000 women. From May to September 1943, during the so-called 'Kinderaktionen', children were separated from their mothers. The children were killed, the mothers' destiny was forced labor. In cases were mother and child could not be separated, the mother was gassed together with her child. In the 'Frauenlager' several sadistic SS women were on duty. Two of the most notorious were Hilde Lächert ('Bloody Brigitte') and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, eventually hunted down in New York by Simon Wiesenthal in the 60s. In 1975 - thirty years after the war - these two women, together with several other former wardens of Majdanek, were put on trial in the so-called Majdanek Trial in Dusseldorf (1975-1981). The longest trial in German legal history. Bloody Brigitte The most disturbing fact about Hildegard Lächert is that she wasn't even a Nazi but simply a sadist. The young Austrian woman wasn't in the NSDAP when she joined the SS team in Majdanek's 'Frauenlager' at the age of 22. Janina Latowitcz, a witness in the Majdanek Trial: "she was like a beast, hungry for blood". At the time she became wardress in Majdanek Lächert had two small children. Nevertheless she treated the children in the camp with special hate. Lächert was the "sadistic scourge of the camp" as one witness put it. Her former victims describe her as a "very beautiful" girl. Henryka Ostrowska: "... when she talked to the men of the SS or her colleagues, she was very funny and charming. But when she talked to us and hit us, the (her) face was gruesome. The face was not the face of a woman". Her nickname 'Bloody Brigitte' resulted from her habit of whipping women till the flesh bled. The Stomping Mare The second woman on trial for her sadistic behaviour in Majdanek was Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan. In Majdanek she used to wear steel studded jackboots in which she gave blows to the inmates. Hermine Braunsteiner was born in 1919 to a well-off family in Vienna. In her youth she had dreamt of becoming a nurse. In the early 1940s she worked at the Heinkel aircraft plant in Berlin. She quit the job to become a KZ wardress - because of the better payment. She was trained at Ravensbruck concentration camp near Berlin. There she was well known for stomping old women to death. In October 1942, the blond hair, blue eyed 23 year old girl was transferred to Majdanek death and concentration camp outside Lublin, in German occupied Poland. There she was promoted to assistant wardress under Elsa Erich, along with five other women. She involved herself in "selections" of women and children to the gas chambers and beat to death several women with her whip. She even stomped women to death. In March 1944, Hermine was reordered back to Ravensbruck where she was promoted to supervising wardress at the Genthin subcamp of Ravensbruck. In May 1945, Hermine fled the camp on the heals of the Soviet Red Army. She was sentenced by an Austrian court for assassination, infanticide and manslaughter in Ravensbruck, but released in 1949. An American soldier, Russel Ryan, brought her as his "Kriegsbraut" first to Canada then to the US. They settled down in Queens (New York). In 1963 she was awarded American citizenship. Hermine Ryan would have lived happy ever after if it wasn't for Wiesenthal to discover her real identity which he reported to the US Immigration and Naturalization Department. In 1971, the Department began to strip Mrs. Ryan of her citizenship because she was an alien of "questionable quality". In 1981 she was sentenced in the Dusseldorf Majdanek Trial to two life terms in prison, but was released in 1990, due to "bad health". She died in 1999. Why did I bring back to mind those terrible atrocities? Not, to insinuate that Abu Ghraib was Majdanek or that the US occupation of Iraq was in any way comparable to what the Nazis did in Poland. And I by no means want to suggest that what Lynndie England or any other US soldier did at Abu Ghraib, or any other place in Iraq or Afghanistan - as horrible as these crimes may be - can be compared to the industrial genocide Lächert and Braunsteiner took part in during the early 40s. But, Lächert's and Braunsteiner's story may serve to illustrate that it is simply ridiculous, a mixture of naivity and male chauvinism, to think that women - "ladies" - are not capable of torture or abuse: that women are but gentle doves and that it must have been the fault of others - men - that Lynndie or Hildegard or Hermine could get involved in such horrible crimes. No, sir, we can be as cruel and merciless as any man. In fact, even many of Lächert's male colleagues at Majdanek were appalled at her excessive cruelty. But, for some psychological reasons men tend to find excuses for crimes committed by women: Perhaps, the female perpetrator was mentally ill (women and madness), any way she must have been naive, seduced, under pressure from her male co-defendants. That's a contraproductive approach. Female sadists do not necessarily need accomplices to be "terror babes". But what they certainly need are structures and superiors that allow, encourage and even reward such torture and abuse. War criminals need wartimes to (safely) live out their sadism, just as fascists need a fascist regime to be able to subdue and kill people of a different race, nationality or ideology. After the war Lächert and Braunsteiner both acted like ordinary, well adjusted housewives and were respected in their communities. Braunsteiner-Ryan lived a happy middleclass family life in Queens. Did she ever think of the little Jewish children she had "seized by their hair and thrown... on trucks heading to the gas chambers" when handing out Halloween sweets to the Jewish kids in the neighbourhood? Braunsteiner's line of defense in the Majdanek Trial was that she had been but "a small wheel in the machinery", a young girl without experience and that "...the whole impression and the whole atmosphere in the camp were very hard on me, I mean, as a woman". Sounds like Mrs. England. Lächert, Braunsteiner and the other guards at Majdanek may indeed have been small wheels - but in a machinery of death that killed millions of innocent people. They did it for pure sadism, to indulge in watching innocent, helpless people suffer and bleed, they did it for the money and a modest career. It took 23 year old Braunsteiner but four years to become supervising wardress at Genthin. In 1943 she was awarded the 'Kriegsverdienstkreuz Zweiter Klasse'. Wartimes and fascism bring out the worst in human beings and they sure bring the worst scum to the top. But terrible times and terrible regimes also bring out the best in some humans - courage, heroism, empathy. The "Red Orchestra" The Berlin based resistance group the German Gestapo named "Die rote Kapelle" (Red Orchestra) was one of the biggest, well-organised and effective resistance organisations within the borders of Nazi Germany. In late 1942 the group got caught in the nets of the Gestapo. Of its more than one hundred members nearly half were women: elderly women, young women, girls as young as 16. 49 members of the group were sentenced to death and very gruesomely executed at Plötzensee prison (the men hanged on cambrels, the women decapitated) in late 1942 / 1943. By the time of their arrests two of the women were pregnant: Hilde Coppi and 19 year old Liane Berkowitz. Both were spared execution till 6 weeks after they gave birth. Berkowitz' child died. But Hilde Coppi's son, whom she had named after his executed father Hans, survived. More than 50 members of the group were sentenced to prison terms or KZ. The names of these brave women and men who had fought fascism from early on went unremembered in postwar West Germany. The group's surviving members became victims of the Cold War - persecuted by the CIC (forerunner of the CIA) as "Soviet spies" because the resistance group had constituted predominantly of leftist members. It took decades until their names were finally cleared and the so-called "Red Orchestra" no longer regarded as a "Soviet spy networks". Here the names of the group's executed women: Libertas Schulze-Boysen, Cato Bontjes van Beek, Maria Terwiel, Liane Berkowitz, Elisabeth Schumacher, Eva-Maria Buch, Hilde Coppi and Mildred Harnack. Wisconsin born Mildred - wife of Arvid Harnack, one of the leading figures of the Red Orchestra - was the first and only American ever executed by the Nazi regime for High Treason. (Through Mildred the group had come in contact with Donald Heath, First Secretary of the American Embassy in Berlin.) And let's not forget the hundred thousands of women fighting fascism in partisan units all over Europe and the Soviet Union - "Flintenweiber" as the Nazis disrespectfully called those brave girls and women. Unlike Mrs. England they defended their motherland on their own soil. And there's f.e. Eva Klemperer (Schlemmer), a German whose strength and courage achieved the unthinkable: to safe her Jewish husband Victor from deportation. Victor Klemperer, a University professor (author of 'The Language of the Third Reich', 'I Shall Bear Witness: 1933-1941'), was among the very few Jews to survive within the borders of Nazi Germany. 9,436 Iraqi people have died since the invasion of Iraq, presumably 40,000 have been injured - mostly civilians, including many women and children - additional to 1000 dead soldiers of the Coalition Forces. Modern wars seem to take their toll disproportionately among non-combattants. In most nations few women serve in armies or militias - not because we're such delicate creatures, such angels of mercy, but simply because the few more windings of our brain, in comparison to men (according to newest scientific findings), tell us to do better.
