German women in the Nazi Killing Fields
Publication Date: October 8, 2013
Wendy LowerÂs 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 womenÂs 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 Führer, pales in comparison to LowerÂs 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.
HitlerÂs Furies builds a fascinating and convincing picture of a morally Âlost generation of young women, born into a defeated, tumultuous postÂWorld War I Germany, and then swept up in the nationalistic fervor of the Nazi movementÂa twisted political awakening that turned to genocide. These young womenÂnurses, teachers, secretaries, wives, and mistressesÂsaw the emerging Nazi empire as a kind of Âwild 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 Âdesk murderers or comforters of murderous German men: that they went on Âshopping 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.
HitlerÂs Furies will challenge our deepest beliefs: genocide is womenÂs business too, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.
More evidence that everyone here has lived through the perhaps-Ugliest ever, Century: the Twentieth.
(Maybe the Resurrection of Civil War abject polarization was inculcated-within, as tykes, those barely sentient at end of WW-II.)
aka We're All like Pavlov's Dogs, but especially those who live ... almost totally-within their Instinctive 'Center'.
(And, re. my experience with the twenty-something in Dachau in 1960--who cashed my Travel-cheque and asked The Question--post-war Germans also got bogus history lessons of that matter which had ended a mere 15 years before.)
Muricans, natch, would be even more ignorant.. that xenophobia/lazy-mind syndrome, again..
Carrion.