Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

by Wendy Lower

History has it that the role of women in Nazi Germany was to be the perfect Hausfrau, produce the next Aryan generation and be a loyal cheerleader for the Führer. Then they became the Trümmerfrauen, or Rubble Women, as they cleared and tidied their ruined country to get it back on its feet. They were Germany's heroines. The few women tried and convicted after the war were simply the evil aberrations - the camp guards, the female Nazi elite - that proved this rule.

However, Wendy Lower's research into the very ordinary women who went out to the Nazi Eastern Front reveals an altogether different story. For ambitious young women, the emerging Nazi empire represented a kind of Wild East of career and matrimonial opportunity. Over half a million of them set off for these new lands, where most of the worst crimes of the Reich would occur.

Through the interwoven biographies of thirteen women, the reader follows the transformation of young nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who start out in Weimar and Nazi Germany as ambitious idealists and end up as witnesses, accomplices and perpetrators of the genocide in Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. Hitler's Furies presents overwhelming evidence that the women in these territories actively participated in the mass murder - and some became killers. In the case of women like Erna Petri, who brought her family to her husband's impressive Polish SS estate, we find brutality as chilling as any in history.

Hitler's Furies is indelible proof that we have not known what we need to know about the role of women in the Nazi killing fields - or about how it could have been hidden for seventy years. It shows that genocide is women's business as well as men's and that, in ignoring women's culpability, we have ignored the reality of the Holocaust.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, War, Germany, Audiobook

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

WENDY LOWER, Ph.D. is the John K. Roth Chair of History at Claremont McKenna College and research associate of the Ludwig Maximillians Universität in Munich, Germany. A historical consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she has conducted archival research and field work on the Holocaust for twenty years.
She lives with her family in Los Angeles, CA, and Munich, Germany.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mention “Nazi women" and “Holocaust,” and minds will fixate—at least, my mind will fixate—on the image of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS: a buxom blonde camp guard sporting decolletage, high boots and improbable jodhpurs.

Wendy Lower wishes to replace that fantasy with a reality less titillating but more frightening: “Hitler's Furies” were teachers, nurses, and secretaries who dutifully carried out the day-to-day business of genocide—often with reluctance, occasionally with enthusiasm—conscious that they were pioneers, participants in a grand social experiment which would shape the German people for years to come. And then there were the wives of the SS, matching—and sometimes excelling—their husbands in callousness and viciousness.

Much of Lower's evidence comes from the Eastern Front—Ukraine, Belarus, Western Russia—and she told me much about the Nazi attitude toward the East that I did not know. I had always thought of Hitler's Ukraine as a proving ground for the “Final Solution,” but Lower has shown me that it was much more than that.

Harking back to the 14th century heyday of the Teutonic Knights and their influence beyond Poland and Lithuania, German nationalists looked upon Belarus, Ukraine and Russia as the “Wild East,” a land of faux-humans (Jews) and semi-humans (peasants of non-German stock) fated to be eliminated or dominated by the German people. They found in Karl May's novels of the taming of American West a fine example of racial and cultural domination, and thought May's hero Old Shatterhand an excellent inspiration for the new “cowboys” and “cowgirls” of the Third Reich whose mission was to transform a wilderness and fulfill Germany's “manifest destiny.” Out in the Eastern frontier of Aryan civilization, women could experiment more freely, forge a new revolutionary identity, and indulge themselves in the pettiest of vices, the greatest of crimes.

Lower structures her book well. First she introduces us to a dozen women in four categories—teachers, nurses, secretaries, and wives—and then, in a series of chapters, presents them to us again in ascending order of culpability, as “Witnesses,” “Accomplices,” and “Perpetrators.” The horrors accumulate as the book progresses, and the effect on the reader grows in power.

It is the details, though, that stick with me: the teacher who abandons her German-Ukrainian pupils to death and the Red Army; the nurse who euthanizes the blinded German soldier with morphine; the secretary who shouts a joyful “Heil Hitler!” when she sees the piles of the clothes of the dead from which she is allowed to choose; the SS wife who feeds the six Jewish children before she shoots them in the back of the head; the SS mistress, who, weary of shooting rabbits from her carriage, begins to fire upon the hunt's Jewish beaters instead.

Still, no matter how shocking the individual incidents—and some are more shocking than these—the most frightful part finally is the normality of it all, how crime settles so comfortably into human habit that it cannot be properly distinguished or confidently recalled. What did we do that Saturday? I can no longer remember. Was it rabbits or Jews that Hermann and I hunted that day in the snow?

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Hitler’s Furies were zealous administrators, robbers, tormentors, and murderers in the bloodlands. They melded into hundreds of thousands – at least half a million – women who went east. The sheer numbers alone establish the significance of German women in the Nazi system of genocidal warfare and imperial rule. The German Red Cross trained six hundred and forty thousand women during the Nazi era, and some four hundred thousand were placed in wartime service…The German army trained over five hundred thousand young women in support positions – as radio operators, file-card keepers, flight recorders, and wiretappers – and two hundred thousand of those served in the East. Secretaries organized, tracked, and distributed the massive supplies necessary to keep the war machine running. Myriad organizations sponsored by the Nazi Party…deployed German women and girls as social workers, racial examiners, resettlement advisors, educators, and teaching aides…As agents of Nazi empire-building, these women were assigned the constructive work of the German ‘civilizing’ process. Yet the destructive and constructive practices of Nazi conquest and occupation were inseparable…”
- Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Killing Fields


The participation of German women in the Holocaust is not a secret. To the contrary, some of the most infamous criminals to come out of the Nazi system of industrial murder happened to be female.

At least partly due to their gender, even casual students have probably heard of camp guards such as Irma Grese, Ilse Koch, and Maria Mandel, who oversaw the slaughter of thousands at places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. Belying stereotypes, they showed themselves to be just as ruthless, sadistic, and heartless as their male counterparts.

Yet the notoriety of these individuals – fueled by memorable nicknames such as the “Hyena of Auschwitz” and the “Beast of Buchenwald,” as well as postwar exploitation films such as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS – have obscured the overall role played by women in the Final Solution. It becomes too easy to think of Grese and Koch as outliers, forgetting thousands of others who were important pieces of a killing machine much larger than any one person.

In Hitler’s Furies, Wendy Lower tries to change the perception of female participation in the Nazi system. To do so, she stays well clear of the merciless camp guards mentioned above. Instead, she focuses her attention on the Eastern Front, where waves of liquidation teams and colonizers followed in the wake of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. She looks at a sampling of the young women who followed the Nazi thrust, who chose to work as secretaries, teachers, and nurses, and who sometimes picked up weapons and joined in the bloody work of racial and ethnic destruction.

Unfortunately, despite an evocative title, a great premise, and core-deep research, Hitler’s Furies is curiously flat and unmemorable. It is a book that insists upon its importance, but does not convince you of it.

***

While Hitler’s Furies generally unfolds chronologically, the chapters are thematic.

Lower begins before the war, introducing you to the women we will be following, providing them with basic background information. Frankly, she does not have the biographer’s touch when it comes to her characters, and I found that they all blended together. Thankfully, there is a short list of the main figures so that you can keep them straight.

After the introductions, Lower explores the reasons these women headed east, and they encompass the usual motivations you might expect from any relatively young person. Some sought adventure, others opportunity; some were true believers, others merely accompanying their husbands.

Once they get to the Eastern Front, Lower presents successive chapters dividing the women into “witnesses,” “accomplices,” and “perpetrators.”

This last – regarding the women who actually killed – is the chief selling point, and I found it a bit strange that despite the cover-copy, this topic comprised only a fraction of the whole. Indeed, despite the insinuation of the title (referring to vengeful deities of Greek mythology), many of the people she selects for Hitler’s Furies hardly seemed like “furies” at all. That is, some are only witnesses, reporting what they saw; others appear relatively tangential to the criminal aspects. For instance, a secretary obviously shares moral culpability for typing up an order that violates the law, whether that is international law, the laws of war, or natural law itself. At the same time, that culpability is far below that of the man who gave the order, or the men who carried it out.

In the penultimate chapter – probably the book’s best – Lower investigates why the women who killed acted as they did. While interesting, it felt like she only scratched the surface of a much deeper, darker subject. For instance, Lower raises the connection between sex and violence – there were romantic “dates” to the “ghetto” and picnics at the killing fields – but mostly refuses to explore the psychological implications of this line of inquiry. Perhaps this was a conscious choice on Lower’s part, to avoid the risk of being reductionist or oversimplifying genocide. If so, she might have been better off not raising it at all.

Hitler’s Furies closes with a summation of what happened to the various women who went east. In short, like many who participated in the Third Reich’s Generalplan Ost, they melted back into society, mostly unpunished, and often lived the very long lives they denied to others.

***

Lower – a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Academic Committee – obviously put a lot of work into this. The proof is there, in forty-eight pages of annotated endnotes.

Nevertheless, at 203 pages of text, this is an extremely short book, and it feels light. Lower has clearly pared everything down to reach a wider audience, meaning that a lot of information moved from the body to the endnotes. I am not saying that a book needs to be a doorstop to be taken seriously. I am saying that there has to be enough detail, enough evidence, and enough scene-setting to connect me with the material in a meaningful way.

By way of comparison, I recently finished Sarah Helm’s epic If This Is a Woman, about the female concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Helm poured her research onto the page, so that the characters leapt to life, becoming fully-realized human beings that you cared about. Meanwhile, she corroborated and cross-indexed the testimony and documentation so that it fit together like a legal brief. Nothing like that happens in Hitler’s Furies. This was so stripped down that it seemed almost like an outline for a better book.

Things are not helped by Lower’s oft-academic tone, using graduate level jargon and phrasing that served only to create sterility and distance from the events she narrated.

***

To be clear, this is a book I liked. More than that, I respected the intent behind it. One of Lower’s stated goals is to demonstrate that German women were not simply the victims of World War II – though many were, dodging Allied bombs and rapacious Soviet soldiers – but also willing participants. Like many men, they were mere cogs, but cogs are important. If you don’t believe me, remove a cog sometime, and see what happens.

As World War II recedes from living memory, this reality – of widespread support for German war aims among both men and women – becomes more important. It is a bulwark against a future time – perhaps not so far away – when somebody decides to convince you that it wasn’t that bad, or that it was just a few bad apples, or that it didn’t happen at all.

[Gil Rosenberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Based on the NYT's blog interview with Wendy it is clear that she, her agent and publisher sacrificed the integrity of a serious subject in rder to publish a commercial book that does not prove its marketing claims. After decades of research Wendy had a theory she sought to prove -that countless thousands of young German women participated in the the killing fields in the East.

The problem is that she only has little bits and fragments of information on twelve women in the book and one full forced confession by the Stasi. Based on her answers (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
you can plainly see that she cut the book down to size to appeal to the bottom line $$$. These days the book must be about 200 pages in order to sell well. 300+ kills sales. The book's chapters are fleshed out since she does not have enough material to support her thesis. The book really is about 100 pages- chapter 2-5. And what about her claim that she can place 500,000 German women in the East? I emailed her and her answer is that the you have to sift through the end notes to find out. Why not take a chapter and explain how she arrived at that figure? No charts no tables. How many in 1940,41 and 42? Good luck trying to figure that out from her end notes. In the back of her book Christopher R. Browning's blub states 1,500,000.

Chapter 6. Why did they kill? Wendy seems not to know the answer and wastes 22 pages. And Chapter 7. What Happened to Them another 22 wasted pages. One sentence on page 197 sums it up- "The short answer is that most got away with murder." Actually they all did. Another 22 pages wasted. The intro, Chapter 1,6,7 and epilogue are just empty fillers.

Can 13 women plus a few more in the end notes represent the hundreds of thousands of women who were in the East? In general society women rarely commit violence and the reality is that Nazism was a magnet for psychopaths, careerists, and profiteers.

Katrin Himmler explains it best here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oU3zl...

"Many were involved in crimes. Lots of men and women took part, not only in the SS and police force but in the gov't organizations, in administrative apparatus many other areas. That makes it hard to define who was a perpetrator because it was the Nazis intention to divide the responsibility among as many as possible so individuals involved could feel I'm not really responsible I was just following orders or performing menial tasks or I didn't know what was going on I was too far away that makes it difficult to define exactly what the term perpetrator involves. It is important to differentiate and look closely at each case. Perpetrators, collaborators, followers, or do we need further to differentiate to profiteers or passive supporters?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sun...

Wendy could have added the women in her end notes, other examples of women from other books and dealt more with how the state industrial apparatus of thousands of torture, labor and extermination camps within Germany's borders by 1940 were transferred to the East. Hey, but that would mean a serious 500+ page academic book. And you can't make much money from those products.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Look at Some Women in the Reich

Wendy Lower takes a look the role of women in the Third Reich and if and how they became embroiled in the mass murders of the eastern theatre of the war. It is a sobering fact that by 1945, 40% of the Gestapo was staffed by women. But this is not where most found work, it is the Bloodlands as Timothy Snyder has labelled it, the new eastern portion of the Reich, the so called lebensraum where most found opportunity. Here they could work as guards, secretaries, teachers and nurses and get on in life. Lower asks that with so many doing this, how involved were they is the genocides that took place there? Her evidence appears mixed.

Hitler’s Furies starts with a general overview of women’s traditional gender role in the Reich, to produce good German children and plenty of them, although as Lower points out the Nazi propaganda did not seem to work. A pregnant women was sacred in this era, but as more and more men went off to die, they found themselves having opportunity to work. She also takes us through the aftermath of the war and the view of women since then. The traditional perspective of the poor downtrodden German female, cleaning rubble from city centres, finally free of the totalitarianism of the Nazi regime. Lower rejects this archetype and takes the reader to the early 1940s where the holocaust is slowly beginning. Women nurses and teachers are not directly involved, but they know what’s going on behind the curtain. The whisperings and rumours. But as things go on, nurses start injecting lethal does to patients, and others acting as guards start to execute prisoners at will. Some may say this is the ‘wild east’ and others that they had to do it for duty or survival. In any case Lower states women did kill and did enjoy it.

Lower focuses on the lives of 13 women in this world. Who she has found evidence of being involved in the holocaust. The problem is, how representative of the wider population of women are they? Studies by US forces on prisoners of war have found that around 1/3 of captured Wehrmacht soldiers followed Nazi ideology. So how much of this is true of women? And even then, how many were fanatics willing to murder children? Lower claims that the women, who are ‘normal citizens’ took the opportunity when it was there to kill, due to the environment, proximity to power and normalisation of violence at that time. I feel there is nothing particularly new about Lower’s book, scholars have thought that women were capable of and did become involved in the killing, but not on the scale as men. Lower point is that women can abuse their power much like men, and some can turn out to be evil. This is a path already well trodden.

In summary, Hitler’s Furies was an entertaining read. The horrors and the violence, the shock of women doing it is an important lesson and Lower does write this well. The atrocities must never be forgotten. However, this is 13 snippet biographies of women embroiled in the SS and therefore I am sceptical about this of how representative they are overall. Lower presents them that way, but the reader should be wary of this. For me it would have been better to show that these women behaved as badly as any man did in their isolated stories. I accept Lower wanted to ask bigger questions, but this part just wasn’t convincing enough. An opportunity missed.

[NILTON TEIXEIRA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I seldom read non-fiction, but I have always been fascinated about WWII, probably the darkest age in the history of humanity.
This was a very informative book that made me interested in searching for other books of the same topic.
This book is very short, and although the narrative is a bit flat, it is very impactful.
It was not an easy read.
The author did a great job piecing together a few accounts based on the biographies of 13 women, and I liked the concept and how she structured this book.
The opening and the second last chapters (titled “Why Did They Kill?”), are the best part.

Too many got away with murder.

Ebook (Kobo): 350 pages (default), 95k words

Hardcover (Mariner Books): 270 pages

Audiobook narrated by Suzanne Toren: 8.4 hours

PS.: please note that if you decide to listen to the audiobook version, you will be missing 25 illustrations and the author’s notes (which contains a great number of references to other publications and sources of information).

[Sotiris Karaiskos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read a historical novel that amongst other things referred to the role of women in Nazi crimes in Eastern Europe, so I wanted to read a history book on the subject. This book, through the stories of some of these women and other sources, gives us an insight into this involvement, attempting to provide a psychological explanation for their actions and for the reasons that most were not punished after the war. It may not offer anything comprehensive but it certainly does provide a useful concise reference to this topic.

Διάβασα πρόσφατα ιστορικό μυθιστόρημα που μεταξύ άλλων αναφέρονταν στο ρόλο των γυναικών στα εγκλήματα των ναζί στην ανατολική Ευρώπη, όποτε ήθελα να διαβάσω ένα ιστορικό βιβλίο σχετικό με το θέμα. Αυτό το βιβλίο μέσα από τις ιστορίες κάποιων από αυτών των γυναικών και μέσα από άλλες πηγές μας δίνει μία εικόνα για αυτήν την συμμετοχή, επιχειρώντας να δώσει και μία ψυχολογική εξήγηση για τις πράξεις τους αλλά και για τους λόγους που οι περισσότερες δεν τιμωρήθηκαν μετά τον πόλεμο. Ίσως δεν προσφέρει κάτι ολοκληρωμένο αλλά σίγουρα προσφέρει μία χρήσιμη περιεκτική αναφορά σε αυτό το θέμα.

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have many issues with this book. Where is the research??

She focuses on a few (maybe a dozen) women and draws these overarching and unsubstantiated ideas.

For example, she'll say something like, "Terrible things happened in X city in Poland. How can we believe women weren't there? They were there and must have done terrible things." What?? This logic makes no sense.

She'll also say, "She claims that she had no part in any terrible things but she lied." Where is the proof she lied?? Maybe she did -- I believe nazi women did terrible things -- but there needs to be PROOF for me to understand.

I wanted to like this book. It seemed to take a new angle on WW2. However I prefer books with actually FACTS backed by actual research. If she did any of this, it should be in the book.

[Cate's Book Nut Hut · Rating 4 out of 5]

WARNING: THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR THOSE WITH A WEAK STOMACH, THE OVERLY PASSIONATE OR ANYONE UNDER THE AGE OF 18.

This book has taken me a tremendously long amount of time to finish; not because it is badly written or long-winded, but because it overwhelms the reader’s emotions to such a point that you need to put it down and walk away. This book is definitely not for the faint of heart, and can only be digested in small, not so easily swallowed mouthfuls.

In writing this book the Author pulls on her twenty years experience as an archival researcher and also things she learnt whilst out doing field work; it shows in the way the book is put together that she felt this was a part of history that needed to be told, warts and all, and covers a part of Nazi Germany that has remained untold.

Through a series of detailed biographies, the Author introduces the reader to each of the “Furies” in the title; we see their simple and ordinary backgrounds, which are all relatively diverse, but all had one reason to go to the Eastern front and this was also simple; money, duty to the Reich, keeping the family together and social or political connections. Once there, however, their stories take on lives of their own and, in some cases these are very chilling and hard to comprehend in today’s society. These women came from areas of their society as diverse as nurses, secretaries and teachers, but each of the women mentioned in this book all had one thing in common, they became a part of the “Final Solution”.

The Author carefully and skilfully separates the women in the book according to their level of participation in these events, whether it is as witnesses to events, indifference at what was happening or, as the reader finds in some cases, just acceptance. By direct or indirect participation, these women could, by no means, be all ‘lumped together’, as each had their own motivations for doing what they did, as chilling as they may have been. Also brought to light is the fact that while many of their male counterparts were the subject of aggressive manhunts that spanned the globe, these women were left untouched and allowed to escape any accountability for their actions by claiming ignorance. I’m not sure if they could be said to have gone on to lead ‘normal’ lives, but the latter part of this provocative and highly emotional read looks into theories that try to explain their participation in such atrocities. The banality of evil was a phrase that came to mind every time I picked up this book and read a little more of their actions. After reading this book, I felt that I am going to need some time away from my much-loved books, both fiction and non-fiction, that cover this period of our history it affected me so much.

I would cautiously recommend this book to all that are interested in this period of history, but if you are going to read it you need to be aware it will move you in ways you never imagined.

Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.com/2013/10/02...


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

[Jill H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sorry to say that this book did not resonate with me. The premise was to prove that German women were more involved in the Holocaust than history tells us. I don't feel that the author proved that at all. Certainly there were some women who actively participated in the atrocities of the death camps and several were brought to trial after the war. The author includes them in her narrative but does not provide conclusive information about other women that she mentions or German women in general. Her theory that women married to SS men immediately classified them as perpetrators of war crimes is baseless. That is not to say that because the "final solution" was a major tenet of Nazism that women were not aware of the "ethnic cleansing" activities that were happening around them.....but it was part of the upbringing of young people and they did not look at it in the same way that we or history does and for the most part just ignored it as unbelievable as that seems. I am not saying that many women were not guilty by association but to brand the majority of German women as perpetrators of the Holocaust is not proven in this book. We must never forget the Holocaust but this book did not deliver what I was expecting.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 I loved the beginning of this book, found it very informative, appalling but informative. The author asserts that over half a million women were either involved or consciously looked way, during the Holocaust. I must be extremely naive because I had no idea the figures were that high. Than I think, how would I have reacted during this situation, when not going along could get one killed. One thing I know for sure is that I would not have picnicked on the site of a mass burial.

The beginning explains the different roles women played under Hitler. Nurses, teachers, wives and yes guards. the following chapters, detailing the lives of particular women were not as fascinating. The author was often repetitive, information was related in a very academic fashion, or like a cut and paste job from a biography. Yes, the information was there but not presented in a way to draw in the reader.

So one does get a very clear understanding of this subject and in the last chapter the court cases and trials left most of the women free to go on with their lives. Yes, some of the women were hunted down and punished, but most were not. I am not sure if the author proved her claims on the extensiveness of women's roles but this could be due to the choppiness of the author's writing. A fascinating subject but the style of writing was a disappointment. Do not regret reading this as I did gain more knowledge of this subject and learned a few new items as well.

With all the different programs that the Third Reich was involved with, all these different components running effectively and efficiently at the same time, I often wonder what could have been accomplished if Hitler's motives had been for the good of his people, all his people.

[Ionia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been many books, case studies and articles about the Holocaust and many of them have had a special focus but this is the first time I recall seeing an in-depth look at the roles of German women in the Nazi regime. This was a rather ambitious project, with a specific focus and I thought it was compelling.

First of all, let me say that this is a tough book to read without feeling sick to your stomach. That has nothing to do with the abilities of the author of course; I didn't expect this book to be a happy walk in the park based on the subject matter--and it wasn't.

The author is very honest with her audience about what she uncovered digging through various archives and learning about the daily lives and roles of these women. The atrocities they not only witnessed but also participated in are not sugar coated. They are outlined in a detailed manner in just the way she uncovered them. If you are not familiar with the many failings of human empathy and compassion that arose during this period, prepare yourself before you read.

One thing that made me like this book, was that the author did not interject a lot of personal feeling into it. It's not that she was completely devoid of feeling for the period she described, but that she let the research tell the story without offering the sway of her own opinion. I appreciated this approach as it put the facts first.

I was particularly interested in the section of this book that dealt with Eugenics. I had never considered before that German women may have played a larger role and for that matter that more than just the famous few, may have been involved with the ideals of the Reich and the carry out of orders from Hitler himself.

I suppose, before reading this, I thought of these women as being martyrs as well. I would have said that they were forced in a situational way into taking actions to please the Nazi Regime and therefore protect their own lives and that of their families. This book was certainly eye opening to truths that I had not previously considered.

This book features bios of specific women involved in the Nazi movement and really highlights the differences amongst them and the diversity found in their personalities, status and professions very well.

A relatively short look into the lives of these women, this book can be digested in one sitting, yet contains a lot of information. The supportive roles of the women mentioned have been seen in other literature, but not exactly from this angle. Knowing that many of them were there by choice and shared the skewed view of the Nazi administrators was a bit of a shock.

The last chapter of the book, dealing with the court trials, international law mishaps and all of the women who effectively got away with their crimes was also of particular interest.

If you have a fascination with history, or simply want to learn more about a unique aspect of this important period, I would recommend reading this book.

This review is based on a digital ARC from the publisher and provided by Netgalley.

[Maine Colonial · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though I've read hundreds of novels and history books about the Holocaust, Wendy Lower's study was a revelation. In a way, it shouldn't have been. Having read a lot about the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads who murdered Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others in the east, to make room for Germany's intended rural paradise), euthanasia programs, Gestapo offices, occupation bureaucracies and other elements of the Nazi operations, I knew that there were many nurses, secretaries and wives who were part of or associated with those operations.

But this knowledge stayed in the back of my mind. I never really considered that this meant there were hundreds of thousands of German women who euthanized people on a regular basis, and who pushed the reams of paper dispossessing the Nazis' targets and ordering and reporting on mass murder.. What I really didn't know at all was the level of direct involvement in dispossessing Nazi targets and actually killing them by women sent to work in the east (or who accompanied men sent to the east).

You will not read much of anything in this book about sadistic Nazi prison guards in this book. Lower acknowledges that's what most people think of when the subject of women involved in the Nazi killing machine comes up. But her point is that there were many, many more women who were involved in the genocide. Middle-class and upper-class women felt it was their duty to work in the genocidal bureaucracy. What's more, many bought into the propaganda about the opportunities in the east and headed there with ambitions of achieving a better life.

How could this happen? Lower shows us that most of these women were young; in their twenties. They'd been indoctrinated into the Nazis' racial mindset since their early youth. Women were trained in shooting and had it drummed into their heads that the life of the Aryan nation absolutely depended on eradicating the eternal Jewish and Bolshevik enemies, and subjugating the Slavs. This is an eye-opening illustration of how training could turn significant numbers of people, including women, into uncaring "desk killers" at best, and cold-blooded murderers at worst.

The horror of what Germans did during the war never leaves us, but when Lower throws a light on how the deadly Nazi ideology was able to destroy the humanity of so many women, it intensifies our dismay. It's even more disheartening to learn that even after the war ended, so many of these women never came to terms with their wrongs. They continued to feel that the Jews were a threat and that any punishment the German perpetrators faced was simply revenge persecution. They even had the gall to claim that they were being treated worse than the Jews had been.

The narrative of this book is relatively short and readable for history, making it easily accessible, but it is supported by extensive notes for serious students of history.

[Γιώτα Παπαδημακοπούλου · Rating 5 out of 5]

Δεν συνηθίζω να διαβάζω τέτοιου είδους βιβλία και όσοι είστε τακτικοί αναγνώστες μου θα το γνωρίζετε πολύ καλά. Όμως, για κάποιο λόγο, "Οι Μαινάδες του Χίτλερ" είναι ένα από τα βιβλία εκείνα που η περίληψή μου μου κίνησε τόσο έντονα την περιέργεια και γέννησε μέσα μου μια πολύ ισχυρή επιθυμία να τις διαβάσω, που δεν προσπάθησα καν να αντισταθώ. Και πράγματι, δεν το μετάνιωσα ούτε για στιγμή, όχι απλά γιατί έλαβα γνώσεις που δεν είχα, ούτε επειδή είδα μια διαφορετική οπτική σκοπιά από αυτήν που συνηθίζει να μας διδάσκει η Ιστορία, αλλά γιατί έβαλα τον εαυτό μου σε μια διαδικασία περισυλλογής και -ίσως- αναθεώρησης ορισμένων πραγμάτων. Γιατί, το πόσο βάναυση και σκληρή υπήρξε η Ναζιστική Γερμανία, σπέρνοντας την καταστροφή, τον πόνο και τον θάνατο απ' όπου περνούσε, είναι κάτι που το γνωρίζουμε και δεν χωρά αμφισβήτηση, αλλά καλώς ή κακώς, ένα αντρικό προσωπείο συνοδεύει την βία αυτή. Κι όμως, όπως έχει αποδείξει η Ιστορία, μερικά από τα πιο ειδεχθή εγκλήματα τα έχουν πραγματοποιήσει γυναίκες.

Η Wendy Lower -καθηγήτρια Ιστορίας στο κολέγιο McKenna του Κλερμόν-, έπειτα από εξαντλητική έρευνα, προσφέρει ένα βιβλίο ιδιαίτερα ξεχωριστό και σημαντικό ως προς την αναθεώρηση της Ιστορίας, αλλά και τον ρόλο της γυναίκας στη Ναζιστική Γερμανία. Πλέον, οι γυναίκες δεν είναι απλές φιγούρες στο πλευρό των συζύγων τους και σύμβολα της οικογενειακής εστίας, αλλά τοποθετούνται στα στρατόπεδα του Τρίτου Ράιχ, αποκαλύπτοντας την ισχύ που είχαν, αλλά και τον τρόπο με τον οποίο την αξιοποίησα και την εκμεταλλεύτηκαν. Συγκεκριμένα, η Lower τοποθετεί στον πυρήνα του βιβλίου της 50.000 γυναίκες οι οποίες και συμμετείχαν στη γενοκτονία, έχοντας αρνηθεί κάθε ίχνος συναισθήματος, ηθικής, υπηρετώντας την διαστρεβλωμένη εικόνα που προάσπιζε το ναζιστικό κίνημα. Γυναίκες που παρασύρθηκαν και που το πάθος της μύησής τους τις οδήγησε σε συμπεριφορές φρικτές και ακραίες, με την υπογραφή τους να έχει μπει κάτω από μερικά από τα μεγαλύτερα σύγχρονα εγκλήματα.

Μέσα από ένα ιστορικό οδοιπορικό στα γκέτο της Πολωνίας, της Ουκρανίας και της Λευκορωσίας, η Lower καταδεικνύει τις γυναίκες αυτές ως ένοχες, όχι επειδή απλά έδιναν εντολές που έσπερναν τη βία και τον θάνατο, αλλά επειδή οι ίδιες τα ασκούσαν όλα αυτά, απομυζώντας μάλιστα από τις ακραίες αυτές συμπεριφορές ικανοποίηση του εγώ τους και της ανάγκης τους για υπεροχή έναντι άλλων ανθρώπινων ζωών, που πολύ λίγη σημασία είχαν για τις ίδιες. Ιστορίες γυναικών που αν και υπήρξαν οι ίδιες μάνες, οδηγήθηκαν σε κτηνώδεις πράξεις, από τις πιο ανατριχιαστικές που θα μπορούσαν να καταγραφούν ποτέ στην ιστορία του ανθρωπίνου είδους. Γυναίκες με αλλοιωμένες συνειδήσεις και διαστρεβλωμένες πραγματικότητες, εμμονικές και με πεποιθήσεις που φυτεύτηκαν βαθιά μέσα τους για να ανθίσουν και να κατασπαράξουν τα πάντα στο πέρασμά τους. Η γενοκτονία μέσα από μια διαφορετική ματιά, που δεν μπορεί να μην σε συγκλονίσει.

[Annensky · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's very unfortunate that this book is so badly organized and repetitive, because Lower's research into female German participation in the Holocaust on the Eastern Front is in many ways highly valuable. Reviewers here complain that Lower's research sample of some thirteen German women enablers/accomplices/perpetrators is too small to be statistically significant or even remotely representative, but as Lower points out (at the very end of the book, when such an observation would have been so much more helpful & informative in the introduction), most of our reports of Nazi women's acts of exploitation, much less violence against Jews are only known from eyewitness (i.e., Jewish survivors') accounts, and there were indeed very few Jewish eyewitnesses left on the ground in 1944-1945 in the formerly German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, since the overwhelming majority of Jews there, some 90 percent or more, had been murdered. This brings up a second point, which Lower stresses, that German female Holocaust perpetrators aside from camp guards or euthanasia nurses were generally outside the law even in the lawless society of the Third Reich, and as such, their crimes were rarely if ever documented by the Nazi bureaucracy. Most of these women had no significant official standing in the Third Reich, i.e, they were not officers or high-ranking bureaucrats, they were not men, they were "mere" secretaries or typists or, more often than not, wives or lovers of SS officers. In other words, these women had no "official" sanction to murder so-called enemies of the Reich. Put even more baldly, if such women acted murderously they were doing so of their OWN VOLITION, a significant point, which the accused women would later protest vociferously when a handful of such cases came to trial in post-war Germany. Their lawyers (and even the judges in West Germany) generally argued that these women had acted in such a horrific way only because of the undue influence of their murderous husbands or lovers! A handy sexist argument if ever there was one...

Two themes of this book most disturbed me. Firstly, the lack of justice given to Holocaust survivors in the postwar West German courts. West German judges throughout this period and well into the late 1970s generally disregarded eyewitness (i.e., Jewish survivor) testimony as unreliable, and in the absence of official (i.e., German, Nazi) documentation, found obviously guilty perpetrators not guilty and set them free. (Especially women, it seems.) I found myself sympathizing more and more with the German Holocaust survivor & diarist Victor Klemperer, who decided to remain in East Germany in part because he thought the communists (Soviet & East German alike) would be much more ruthless than the West Germans in handing out victors' justice to the perpetrators of the Final Solution. And indeed, one of the worst cases of female perpetrators, Erna Petri, in fact the only case of an alleged German female perpetrator in Lower's sample which actually ended in a life sentence for crimes against humanity, received that life sentence from an East German, not a West German court. An SS wife, Petri shot & killed in cold blood six Jewish boys (mere children between the ages of 6 and 12) who had escaped a train headed for the death camps. By way of contrast, Johanna Altvater, a German secretary on the eastern front, who according to the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses had sadistically murdered and mortally injured numerous Jewish children during her unauthorized visits to a ghetto on the borderlands of Poland & Ukraine -- was found not guilty by a West German court, because there was no official (Nazi) documentation to verify her presence at the scenes of the alleged crimes. Only and precisely because (to repeat) her visits had been unauthorized by the Nazi higher-ups, and had even shocked her (male) German compatriots & fellow murderers at the time.

The second theme of this book that also perturbed me, and which I believe is insufficiently addressed by the author, is precisely that of the Nazi female perpetrators' seemingly specifically directed violence against Jewish children. While Lower does stress the "revolutionary" situation in which these young German women found themselves (because the Third Reich was a real revolution, not only politically & culturally but also morally), she does not explore in any significant depth this violent uprooting of the traditional role of the nurturing mother ascribed to German females. Were these female Nazi murderers of Jewish children consciously or unconsciously revolting against their ascribed gender role? Were they trying to emulate Nazi men (more powerful, with more status)? There are other disturbing gender-relevant accounts in this book, such as the one about the pregnant Nazi woman who struck a Jewish girl with a whip during a pogrom, and another about a Nazi wife repeatedly slamming her (empty) baby carriage into ghetto Jews in order to injure them deliberately. But in my opinion, Lower never effectively engages with such images on anything more than the most superficial, even politically safe level. So, overall, while I learned a lot from this book and I am truly grateful that it was written, I have to say that I was disappointed by it. I can only hope that Lower continues with her research and writes more (and more thoughtful) books in the future.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book that (again) takes us back to the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s taking a look at "what happened". One of the most absorbing topics to come out of WW2 is the question of how entire populations could have bought into the genocide and terror of the period. The faulty science, history and religion/folklore preached by the Third Reich was accepted and indeed adopted by the majority of the population of Germany and the so called German states.

Here we look at the women who were involved in the "building" of the Third Reich. Told with some detail and with short bios of some of these women the book is readable. I drop it to 3 stars only because the info-dump heavy text can get very hard to stay with at times.

As I suppose must be expected the book is depressing. That said as we consider what came about to get almost an entire people to buy into the big lie(s) I think we may want to examine our own society.

[KOMET · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book goes a long way toward elucidating the role a number of German women played as "agents of death" in the Nazi Holocaust.

Before coming to this book, I had thought that the only German women who had willingly taken part in killing Jews and other peoples regarded as "undesirables" by the Nazis were the SS auxiliaries in the concentration camps like Ravensbruck and Bergen Belsen, who acquired a reputation for brutality. But in "Hitler's Furies", the reader learns that there were also German women working in areas as diverse as nursing, teaching, and secretarial work in the East following both the conquest of Poland and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union who were witnesses to the killings of Jews. Indeed, some, such as Erna Petri and Gertrude Segel, crossed the line and gladly engaged in murder on several occasions.

What is remarkable about this story is how the role of these murderous women in the service of the Third Reich was largely hidden or ignored for close to 70 years after the Second World War. The author explains why this was allowed to happen and endeavors to inform and educate the reader about the role of women in the Third Reich, the Nazis' attitudes about women, and the postwar lives of the women who had chosen to kill in support of the Hitler regime. I'm glad to have read this book, for it gives the reader an added insight into how the Holocaust made some women willing executioners of the Final Solution.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

The role of women in perpetrating the Holocaust has either been silenced or reduced to myth ("Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS".) Wendy Lower goes beyond the concentration camp commandant's wives and other sadists, such as Ilsa Koch, to illustrate how the Nazi killing machine employed thousands of women, both Germans and East European collaborators, to make the Judeocide a reality. Hunting Jews for sport, after torturing them, was a favorite avocation in German Occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. Lower confesses her subjects do not constitute a representative sample, since so few cases of women perpetrators ever reached the dockets after 1945. What there is of written evidence is enough to horrify. SPOILER: Only one of these female assassins served prison time, and that was in East Germany. The others were found "not guilty" by West German judges or never came to trial at all.

[Χριστίνα · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ξεκίνησα να το διαβάζω γιατί η αλήθεια είναι πως δεν υπάρχουν πολλά βιβλία για το ρόλο των γυναικών της Γερμανίας στο ναζισμό. Δεν μπορώ να πω ότι είναι ενα καλό ιστορικό βιβλιο, αφου το θεώρησα λίγο ελειπες και επιφανειακό στην ανάλυση των πηγών και των ερευνών του. Επίσης, η συγγραφέας αρκετές φορες εκφράζει την άποψη της (κάτι που δε μου άρεσε άσχετα αν συμφωνούσα η όχι μαζί της) και καταλήγει σε υποκειμενικά συμπερασματα. Γενικότερα, είχε ενδιαφέρουσες πληροφορίες για εγκλήματα που διαπράχθηκαν απο Γερμανίδες και τι συνέπειες υπέστησαν αυτές αργότερα, αλλά ήταν λίγες οι περιπτώσεις που συζητήθηκαν. Συμπερασματικά, το θεωρώ ενα ανεπαρκές βιβλίο για το εξαιρετικα σημαντικό και ενδιαφέρον θέμα που καταπιάνεται.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In many ways, this book is about how we fail to reckon with the past, not so much as a historical reconstruction or morality tale, but as evidence of a recurring problem in which we all share responsibility. What are the blind spots and taboos that persist in our retelling of events, in individual accounts, memoirs, and national histories? Why does this history continue to haunt us, several generations and many miles removed [...]?" (p. 200).

In Hitler's Furies, author Wendy Lower follows various nurses, secretaries, and wives into the killing fields of the Eastern Front during WWII. In doing so, she tries to dispel a persistent aura of naivete and victim-hood of women who may have been just as (and in some cases more) culpable of mass killings as their male counterparts. I found myself fascinated by her discussion and analysis of fluid gender roles and expectations, especially in situations where women who were brought up with skewed senses of duty and little education suddenly found themselves wielding massive amounts of power. It's an odd way to think about sexism, isn't it, to argue that female war criminals weren't persecuted after the war, not because they didn't commit similar crimes to their male counterparts, but because the general assumption is that the women who did were ineffectual, bullied by husbands/bosses, or freaks of nature?

The author introduced us to a dozen or so German women who served in the East (mostly Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine) in various positions and follows them through their careers and into the postwar period. She categorizes each woman as either a "witness", "accomplice", or "perpetrator" (photographs included), and I found it unnerving to at first identify with, say, the young secretary who wanted to escape her small-town life by volunteering for duty abroad, only to recoil at the blood she helped spill. This book brings up a lot of these uncomfortable "what would I have done?" type of questions, and that alone, I think, makes it a worthwhile read.

My main criticism of the book is that it didn't always delve as deep, or introduce as much specific details and evidence, as I would have liked. It felt to me like a piece of serious research that was dialed back to be more accessible to a wider audience--and maybe that's a good thing--but this is one of the rare times I'd argue that more can sometimes be more. There were a few times, especially in early pages, where an interesting idea would be introduced, but then no evidence or further detail would be introduced and suddenly it would swerve into another topic (signs of over-pruning by a nervous editor, perhaps?). I ended up reading through the extensive footnotes--and wish more of the footnoted information & sources had been integrated into the text. One other thing I didn't really buy was the the statistical approach. I'm no mathematician, but to me introducing a handful of possible war criminals and then using their existence as "evidence" that there must have been a greater concentration of crimes by women is useless because the sample size is far too small, and as such can't really be representative of anything. Perhaps social histories and statistics are just as mixable as oil and water; nevertheless, I highly recommend the social history aspect of this book.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book raises an interesting issue with regards women and history. Too often women have been written out of history altogether, or otherwise relegated to the category of 'women's history' as though the doings and deeds of women were somehow completely unrelated to the mainstream of 'regular' history. HIStory, indeed. But as Wendy Lower points out, in the case of women in Nazi Germany in particular, this patriarchal attitude has led to the whitewashing of women's roles in history and has allowed the negative aspects of women's actions to go as unrecorded as the positive.

When one thinks of the Holocaust, one thinks of the SS, the concentration camps, the camp commandants, the Einsatzgruppen. When one thinks of the Holocaust, one rarely thinks of it also being perpetrated by women. And yet thousands upon thousands of women played roles through the Nazi Party: secretaries managing paperwork that condemned Jews to the gas chambers; personal assistants who accompanied their bosses on Aktions and took part in the shooting; nurses who administered lethal injections to those deemed unworthy of life; teachers posted to the conquered East to instil Nazi doctrine in ethnic German children; welfare officers tasked with kidnapping children with Aryan features or blood; SS wives accompanying their husbands to Poland and Latvia, the Ukraine, Russia, shooting labourers from villa balconies. The standard response after the war was that these women knew nothing of the Holocaust, that they were just minor functionaries, paper-pushers, or they were manipulated and forced by their brutal husbands.

In this revealing and frequently shocking book, Lower exposes the hollowness of these claims through a number of named examples - many were indicted after the war but few were convicted of murder or war crimes. Gender stereotypes worked in these women's favour - few of the largely male investigators and judges could imagine women acting in such a way, and the judicial insistence on relying on documentary evidence over eyewitness testimony meant that there was little 'concrete' proof against these women, since most of their roles were outside of the political and military structure that generated much of this paperwork. There was little understanding at the time of how circumstances and culture can affect behaviour in both men and women (enlightening experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment were still decades in the future) and it was deemed unthinkable that women could act in such aggressive and brutal ways, therefore these claims could not be true.

As a women, I'd like to say I find it surprisingly that we have waited so long for such a study as this one, since every other aspect of the Holocaust and the Third Reich seems to have been investigated and analysed to death - but in many ways our society is just as patriarchal now as it was in the 1940s, and these issues are still sadly neglected. One hopes Wendy Lower's book opens to the door to more studies on the role of women in Nazi Germany - true sexual equality means taking the bad with the good, after all.

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lower könyve elsősorban néhány női portréból áll – ápolónők, feleségek, titkárnők pályafutásáról olvashatunk, akik a második világháború éveit a nácik által gyarmatosított keleti végeken töltötték. A tárgyalt események sajnálatosan ismerősek lehetnek azoknak, akik már érintették a témát, és hangja, ez a tényszerű, de kevéssé tárgyilagos hang sem újdonság. (Hiszen lehet-e egy népirtásról tárgyilagosan beszélni? Szabad-e?) Nézőpontja viszont újszerű. Amellett érvel ugyanis, hogy Hitler rezsimjének sikeressége sokkal többet köszönhetett a nőknek, mint ezt általában hajlandóak vagyunk elismerni. A háború utáni visszaemlékezésekben a német asszony többnyire mint áldozat jelent meg: a nemi erőszak elszenvedője, a széthulló családok összetartója, az „újjáépítő”. Természetesen joggal, ám Lower felhívja a figyelmet, hogy bár megnyugtató ennél a szemléletnél maradni (legalább ők mentek maradtak a bűntől!), de történelmileg tarthatatlan.

A kötet koronája, az utolsó pár fejezet, melyet konklúzióként is értelmezhetünk. Ebben Lower a történelmi adatok megvizsgálása után etikai és filozófiai értelemben is kibontja a témát, szembesít a nácitlanító bíróságok erkölcsi kompromisszumaival, azzal, hogy használták ki a női háborús bűnösök az apolitikus nőről kialakult előítéletet, hogy megmeneküljenek a büntetéstől… Csupa kellemetlen, megválaszolhatatlan morális kérdést tesz fel az olvasónak – finoman szólva is nyugtalanító. Fájdalmas olvasmány. Pont olyan, amilyennek lennie kell.

[Παύλος · Rating 3 out of 5]

Η αλήθεια είναι πως ξεκίνησα αυτό το βιβλίο με μεγάλη όρεξη ελπίζοντας να διαβάσω τον πραγματικό ρόλο που είχαν όσες γυναίκες ακολούθησαν πιστά το δόγμα του ναζισμού. Έχοντας διαβάσει και κάποια ακόμη βιβλία για τον β’ παγκόσμιο πόλεμο, περίμενα πως η δομή του βιβλίου θα ήταν πάνω κάτω η ίδια δηλαδή παρουσίαση του ατόμου και ανάλυση της δράσης του συνοδευόμενη από λεπτομέρειες που σοκάρουν αλλά παραμένουν αναγκαίες για την κατανόηση και ανάλυση. Λοιπόν εδώ δεν υπήρχε κάτι τέτοιο. Παρουσιάστηκαν κάποιες περιπτώσεις γυναικών που είτε εξαναγκάστηκαν να παρέχουν τις υπηρεσίες τους ως νοσοκόμες και προσωπικό γραφείο αλλά και κάποιες άλλες περιπτώσεις που ντύθηκαν στρατιώτες και εκτέλεσαν (κυριολεκτικά και μεταφορικά) το καθήκον τους. Δυστυχώς σε όλο αυτό έλειπε, θαρρείς και δεν ήθελε η συγγραφέας να σοκάρει, η ουσιαστική περιγραφή του τι έκαναν οι γυναίκες αυτές. Ενώ λοιπόν ξεκίνησα με μεγάλη αδημονία δυστυχώς δε διάβασα για τις πραγματικές μαινάδες αλλά για κάποιες γυναίκες που πήγαν εθελοντικά και κάποιες με το ζόρι. Επιπλέον απογοητευτικό το γεγονός πως υπήρχαν λάθη (ορθογραφικά και συντακτικά) στο κείμενο, δείχνει σαν πρόχειρη δουλειά...

[Dachokie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enlightening, but Incomplete …

This book was reviewed as part of Amazon's Vine program which included a free advance copy of the book.

Considering almost every facet of the Nazi era has been examined to some degree, there is a disappointing void in divulging female accountability when it comes to Nazi atrocities. With HITLER’S FURIES, Wendy Lower sheds the “hausfrau” persona so commonly associated with German women of the time and reveals the disturbing fact that many of these women actively contributed to the Nazi extermination programs in Eastern Europe.

Eva Braun, the female most-associated with Nazi Germany, wasn’t a member of the Nazi party and little is known of her knowledge, let alone approval or acceptance of German atrocities. Arguably, other than Braun, most would be hard-pressed to identify ANY German female of the time. Even the deeds of brutal female camp guards (Ilse Koch and Irma Grese) or Magda Goebbels’ infanticide don’t draw much attention these days. But, as Lowe points out in her book, several hundred thousand German women took advantage of the opportunities and adventures that work in German-occupied Eastern Europe presented. Answering the call were ordinary and unassuming secretaries, teachers, nurses and wives of officers/party officials. HITLER’S FURIES examines a dozen women who sought work in the “Wild East” and became cogs in the Nazi murder machine.

Lower introduces each of the “furies” with detailed biographies that reveal relatively diverse and innocent backgrounds. Photos of the women portray them as simple and ordinary. The reasons for going to the occupied East were simple as well: financial gain, a sense of national duty, adventure, social/political connections or, for those who were married to Nazi officials stationed in the occupied territories, an opportunity to keep the family together. The author is careful not to simply lump all these women together as murderers and separates them according to their level of participation (indirect and direct). Some of the women are witnesses to murder and develop a sense of indifference or even acceptance. Others are aware that their menial secretarial duties include typing orders of deportation and death squad assignments but justify their level of participation as simply doing their jobs. The worst of the bunch, however, are those women who willingly participated in the killing outside the realm of any job and Lower spares nothing in detailing their shockingly cold-blooded behavior which included the killing of children. Probably the most shocking aspect of the book is that most all of these women went on to live “normal” lives after the war. While decades of aggressive global manhunts sought to bring even the lowest-leveled of their male counterparts to justice; claims of ignorance and forgetfulness proved to be enough of a defense for these women to escape any accountability. The latter portion of the book delves into theories that try to explain the reasoning for their participation in such barbarism.

I found HITLER’S FURIES to be a provocative read, but I felt it was somewhat incomplete in that it merely scratches the surface of a much bigger picture. Expanded, the book has the potential to be a valuable resource/authority on the subject matter, but its brevity and scope allude to it being the published by-product of an academic assignment. Lost potential aside, the book highlights a fascinating, but forgotten/ignored aspect of the Second World War.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we look back to the atrocities committed by the Germans against the Jews and others during World War 2, the focus is generally on men. We know that there were women camp guards who were as sadistic and cruel as their male counterparts, but on the whole the role of women has remained hidden. In this ground-breaking and deeply chilling book, Wendy Lower demonstrates that ordinary women as well were often only too complicit in the Holocaust.
Lower’s extensive research reveals that half a million women volunteered to go to the Eastern front, where they were personally responsible for many crimes and acts of brutality. Secretaries, nurses, social workers, teachers and wives became not just witnesses but accomplices and active participants, from the secretaries who typed up the lists of victims to those who took part in the murder of innocent victims, very often children. These women, it must be stressed, were volunteers. They were genuine supporters of the regime, convinced by Nazi propaganda, and often saw joining the party as a route to social advancement and offering their services in the East a first step on the way. The Nazi regime offered ambitious young women opportunities undreamt of before the war. These were young women, on the whole. It is worth remembering that the average age of a concentration camp guard was 26 – the youngest was just 15. Few questioned what they were asked to do, and after the war few were brought to justice.
This is an important book, and Lower is to be congratulated on unearthing the biographies of some of these women. Her style is perhaps a little dry and pedestrian at times, but this in no way detracts from the sheer horror of the story she tells. Just when you think you can no longer be shocked at what happened, along comes another book to demonstrate that the sheer scale of the depravity has yet to be fully exposed. Essential reading.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read Gil Rosenberg's review for more detail. I have no doubt that Professor Lower is an expert in this area and this book definitely piqued my interest in reading more about the Eastern Front and the post-war trials. That said, either the book was much longer and was poorly edited (as Rosenberg suggests) or Professor Lower just did a lousy job of cutting and pasting her own research into a 200-page book that would be accessible to the lay reader.

There is a tremendous amount of repetition and lots of awkward transitions. In at least three spots, there were sentences added to the end of the paragraph that seemed like they belonged somewhere else. There is also a weird mix of writing tones -- the blandly professorial mixed with a more peppy inviting style.

I also felt the writer needed to spend a lot more time with the first chapter. This is a tricky chapter in a non-fiction book about a subject that a lot of people know at least a little bit about. And you can see the author struggles with this. At times she is providing very simple detail that virtually anyone picking up this kind of book would know before veering over to important (but not well-written) discussions of the source material and its weaknesses.

The book does one thing very well -- builds on the canon of non-fiction suggesting that the West was way too eager to sweep the Nazi thing under the rug after the war. If the book's small page count introduces more readers to this, it will have accomplished something.

[Mary Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chilling and deeply disturbing. I thought I'd read just about everything important about the Holocaust. I was wrong. I bought this after watching Lower give a lecture aired by C-Span a week ago on Book TV. The role of the culpability and complicity of women in the Nazi regime is a subject to which I had not given a great deal of thought. Like many, I suppose, my idea of women's crimes under the Reich was largely confined to those of female guards in the camps. Lower's book discusses crimes of women-wives, teachers, nurses, clerical workers- in the occupied territories in the east. Her examination of the psychology of these women and their voluntary participation in genocide is fascinating and illuminating.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptionally well written and researched document detailing how women were swept up into the Nazi propaganda machine; from ordinary housewives and mothers to professionals and skilled workers.

Initially I expected much of the book to focus on female camp guards, in reality the author only touched upon this and instead drew attention to the lesser known female perpetrators of war crimes and mass genocide. There are some truly horrific eyewitness accounts of cruelty towards the sick, mentally ill and young children which makes for difficult reading. But as the author graciously repeats, the German woman’s role in the Holocaust should not be underestimated.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hitler's Furies" is arguably more of 3-star read, but it's getting a bump for the somewhat novel take and the fact that I started reading the book the day after a visit to Auschwitz I & II–Birkenau. Reading this during a trip through the very killing fields it took place certainly added to the experience of the book.

In it, Lower postulates that a sexist read of history has allowed almost all female perpetrators and enablers of holocaust atrocities "get away with murder." I think she does so effectively, even if her argument depends on a lot of logical guesswork and general assumptions. Why? Because, she argues, 1) women generally weren't considered important enough to include in and on paperwork, 2) a lot of what they did was done in more administrative and unofficial roles, and 3) it was very convenient for the world to see women as victims instead of perpetrators (and to be fair, considering the epidemic of rapes and abuse that was part of the defeat of Nazi Germany, they were both).

So, the author used a number of women that she could find documentation about (including depositions, interrogations, and autobiographical works) and used them to illustrate different levels of culpability - from those who merely did a job that supported the regime knowing that what they were doing wasn't a good thing, to those who willingly and enthusiastically murdered children by the handful - that she then wants readers to draw the same conclusions from as she has. Namely, that while female perpetrated are generally near-invisible in the documentation that survived and post-war men had sexist blinders on when trying to account for the atrocities, circumstantial evidence speak to women's widespread culpability within the genocidal Nazi machine.

And to be clear, she's not talking about the few relatively well-documented women who were on par with men in similar roles - such as concentration camp guards - Lower explicitly stayed away from these cases since they are relatively well known.

In all, I think the book's argument is a sound one. Lower shows that especially women in Germany and Eastern Europe can not - at the very least - have missed that something truly exceptional was going in on with regards to the treatment and handling of Jews and other unwanted people. Nurses were not only health-workers but euthanizing angels of death, secretaries were intimately involved and sometimes main players in aggressive eradication policies and communications, and enabling wives who not infrequently partook in the "sport" of killing Jews (yes, "sport") of their own free will.

Again, to make her case, Lower illustrates the circumstances, the numbers of women present, and overlays it with the representative examples in the book. Add to that what we know about how we look at female perpetrators of crime today (they are more often seen as victims, are punished less -if at all - for the same crimes, and are frequently overlooked in statistics, reporting, and views and opinions on and about crimes), and it is not a difficult argument to buy.

However, the book does have a few weaknesses. Number one, of course, is the lack of direct evidence. Even if it is a shortcoming Lower often cites herself and her argument builds on this, it is nonetheless a weakness of the argument.

Which leads to the second weakness, I think she sacrificed building a stronger circumstantial case for her argument for brevity and more easily accessible read. I think it was an unfortunate choice, even if I get it. It takes some diving into the sources she cites (and supplementary ones) to back up her case, and the book would have been stronger if she instead had fleshed out a few things more. Such as, better explaining how she came up with the numbers she cites throughout the book, she only covers this briefly and it should have been a whole other chapter, in my opinion. I also think she could have done a better job explaining how the women in the book are illustrative and representative examples of hordes of women - clearly, reading some of the reviews, this was something that did not reach all readers.

The third weakness is the atrociously cited source-materials. I hate having to find highlighted passages by page number and phrase, and I hate how there's no way of telling what is supported by a source and what isn't when reading the text. What is wrong with proper and clearly marked side- or end notes!?! Especially in a book like this that builds a circumstantial case! It infuriated me to no end having to play detective to figure out what she could and couldn't support - and I can't help but to think that this weakens the book's argument in the eyes of a lot of readers.

These three weaknesses, or well, the latter two (the first one just kinda is what it is and Lower did a good job accounting for that one) took a pretty decent bite out of my enjoyment of the book. I absolutely think it's a book that should be ready though. It's very easy to forget that shit humans come in all shapes and sizes, and that's something else we should never forget. "Hitler's Furies" is a surprisingly enjoyable read (considering the subject matter) to help us remember (or, maybe even learn?).

Highly recommended!

[Netta · Rating 1 out of 5]

וונדי לוור מציגה בפני הקורא נושא מרתק ומזעזע שכמעט ולא זכה למחקר, אך למרבה התסכול והרוגז, "מטפלת" בו באופן שטחי וחובבני, בספר כאוטי ומבולגן, ברמה מעליבה ממש. לא ברור איזה מחקר ערכה לוור, מלבד קריאת כמה ספרים על הנושא, שכן היא אינה מספקת מידע בדבר אותו "מחקר". הקוראים משוועים לסטטיסטיקות ומספרים, אך גם הן אינן בנמצא. הסיפורים המרתקים והופכי הקרביים שלוור מספקת מתחילים ונקטעים, כאילו לוור התעייפה באמצע ופרשה לנוח, וגם הדוגמאות דלות ואינן מספקות. יאוש מוחלט.
הספר הקרוי בעברית "רוצחות בשירות היטלר" מציג כמה נאציות אשר בלטו בדרך זו או אחרת באכזריותן ובמוטיבציה האישית שפיעמה בהן לרצוח יהודים במלחמת העולם השניה. למעט אחת או שתיים מביניהן, לא מדובר בפושעות המלחמה הגדולות והידועות בתקופת השואה, ועל כן גם בחירותיה של לוור את הנשים הספורות שייצגו את ה"רוצחות בשם היטלר" שנויות במחלוקת.
החלק המוצלח יותר, אם כי לא מוצלח מספיק, הינו החלק האחרון המתייחס לאוזלת ידה של מערכת המשפט להעמיד לדין את אותן נאציות אכזריות. חלק זה עשוי טוב ומאורגן יותר, אולי בשל החומר המצומצם יותר, עליו הצליחה לוור להשתלט? לא ברור.
מכל מקום, הספר בהחלט לא ענה על הציפיות ורק עורר סקרנות גדולה יותר לשמוע ולקרוא על הנושא.

[ManOfLaBook.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hitler's Furies: Ger­man Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower is a non-fiction book depict­ing the hor­rific and stun­ning roles women played in the Third Reich. Ms. Lower is an Amer­i­can his­to­rian who wrote sev­eral books about the Holo­caust, she pre­sented this new infor­ma­tion in Yad Vashem , the Holo­caust Mar­tyrs’ and Heroes’ Remem­brance Author­ity in Jerusalem.

“"[T]he con­sen­sus in Holo­caust and geno­cide stud­ies is that the sys­tems that make mass mur­der pos­si­ble would not func­tion with­out the broad par­tic­i­pa­tion of soci­ety, and yet nearly all his­to­ries of the Holo­caust leave out half of those who pop­u­lated that soci­ety, as if women’s his­tory hap­pens some­where else."

I always find books about the col­lec­tive psy­chol­ogy of Ger­mans dur­ing World War II fas­ci­nat­ing. Why would any­one allow such geno­cide to hap­pen? What were they think­ing? How could they turn a blind eye to such cru­elty? How could peo­ple, oth­er­wise good and descent, can par­tic­i­pate in mass murder?

In her excel­lent book, Hitler's Furies: Ger­man Women in the Nazi Killing Fields author Wendy Lower brings new evi­dence about the Holo­caust as well as answer­ing some of the ques­tions above as well as shed­ding light on the role of women per­pe­tra­tors. Ms. Lower tells dis­turb­ing tales of pro­fes­sional women (nurses, sec­re­taries, etc.) who knew about, helped and or par­tic­i­pated in killings as well as those who were there as part .

The Nazi pro­pa­ganda machine not only con­di­tioned women to accept and tol­er­ate vio­lence, but also to par­tic­i­pate in it. The Third Reich not only insisted on women hon­or­ing the 3 Ks (Kinder, Küche, Kirche – chil­dren, kitchen, church), but also mobi­lized women to con­tribute to the ter­ror at home and in the occu­pied Ger­man ter­ri­to­ries either via admin­is­tra­tive work, moral sup­port (it’s hard work killing hun­dreds a day and the mur­der­ers needed snacks, rest and psy­cho­log­i­cal sup­port) or active participation.

The author tells the sto­ries of Nazi moth­ers who shot, point blank, at scared Jew­ish kids who hap­pen to escape the train tak­ing them to the gas cham­bers (but she fed them first) or a house­wife of an SS offi­cer who took plea­sure in ram­ming Jews with her baby cart and bash­ing the heads of chil­dren in front of their par­ents. Women who sim­ply using their slaves as tar­get prac­tice from bal­conies or ones who used to take plea­sure at walk­ing into a Jew­ish children’s hos­pi­tal in the Ghetto and throw­ing out sick kids from the third floor balcony.

The Reich's brain­wash­ing of racial purity was so suc­cess­ful many didn't ques­tion it. If you wanted a job or a pro­mo­tion you "did your duty" even if that meant mass mur­der. How­ever, this is not an excuse, in war time per­cep­tion of "right" and "wrong" get mud­died, but that usu­ally occurs on an indi­vid­ual scale, not when it comes to the assist and/or par­tic­i­pat­ing in geno­cide or a bas­tardized form of euthana­sia (killing your own sol­diers who were left men­tally or phys­i­cally injured in battle).

The author writes about the crimes and mur­ders these women com­mit­ted. Those crimes are insane, lur­ing hun­gry chil­dren over with the promise of candy only to shoot them in the mouth, bash­ing children's heads in the wall (in front of their fam­i­lies), gain­ing trust by serv­ing food and then a swift exe­cu­tion of scared, starv­ing and exhausted kids or rip­ping off limbs.
It's insane!

The author also asks impor­tant ques­tions which negates the women’s claim that they “knew noth­ing”. Ques­tions such as how did they miss the mass graves and smell of tens of thou­sands of corpses dur­ing their pic­nic out­ings? Who did they think the train­loads of clothes and jew­elry belong to?

The book also touches the fact that vio­lence is not a male dom­i­nated trait, we all have it but in women it comes out dif­fer­ently and the assump­tion that women won’t engage in mass mur­der is wrong. This is a dan­ger­ous assump­tion, as the author points out because “min­i­miz­ing the vio­lent behav­ior of women cre­ates a false shield” by assum­ing that one half of the human race won’t mur­der the other. But given the oppor­tu­nity, women par­tic­i­pate and engaged in geno­cide just like their male counterparts.

The book ends on a somber note, after World War II the role of the women (half a mil­lion, accord­ing to the author) has been min­i­mized and almost for­got­ten. Most of the women who assisted or par­tic­i­pated in the Holo­caust went on to live their lives, dying of old age with their fam­ily around.

Dis­claimer: I got this book for free.

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