Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower
Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower
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Wendy Lower's stunning account of the role of German women on the Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history: 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, as loyal wives and as cheerleaders for the Fuhrer, pales in comparison to Lower's incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young women she places, for the first time, 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 political awakening that turned genocidal. These 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: they went on plundering sprees and brutalized Jews in the ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus; they were present at killing field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also taking their turn at the mass shootings. And Lower uncovers the stories, perhaps most horrific, of SS wives, with children of their won, 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.
Houghton-Mifflin, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 2nd Printing, 2015
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