Wendy Lower's stunning account of the role of German women on the
World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving
that we have ignored the reality of women's participation in the
Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of
German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal
wives and cheerleaders for the Fuhrer, pales in comparison to
Lower's incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the
500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly
in the killing fields of the expanding Reich.
"Hitler's Furies" builds a fascinating and convincing picture of a
morally "lost generation" of young women, born into a defeated,
tumultuous post-World War I Germany, and then swept up in the
nationalistic fervor of the Nazi movement--a twisted political
awakening that turned to genocide. These young women--nurses,
teachers, secretaries, wives, and mistresses--saw the emerging Nazi
empire as a kind of "wild east" of career and matrimonial
opportunity, and yet could not have imagined what they would
witness and do there. Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival
and field work on the Holocaust, access to post-Soviet documents,
and interviews with German witnesses, presents overwhelming
evidence that these women were more than "desk murderers" or
comforters of murderous German men: that they went on "shopping
sprees" for Jewish-owned goods and also brutalized Jews in the
ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus; that they were present at
killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also
taking their turn at the mass shooting. And Lower uncovers the
stories, perhaps most horrific, of SS wives with children of their
own, whose female brutality is as chilling as any in history.
"Hitler's Furies" will challenge our deepest beliefs: genocide is
women's business too, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy
years.
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