Women as Nazis: Female Perpetrators of the Holocaust

by Wendy Adele-Marie

Wendy Adele-Marie’s study of Nazi women as guards, overseers, and others who worked in the concentration and death camps during the genocide and Holocaust of the Second World War is an invaluable addition to a growing body of scholarship on women as victims and—in this case—perpetrators of genocide and Holocaust. This book is based on years of wide-ranging research in archives, personal accounts, biographies, scholarly works, and trial records. It is one of the most comprehensive and perceptive analyses of why Nazism appealed to so many German women and why hundreds of these women turned into “killing machines” in the concentration and death camps during the Second World War. Her analysis of the motives of these perpetrators is superb. She offers compelling conclusions that many German women joined the killing enterprise willingly out of greed, opportunism, fanaticism, resentment, and a need to exert an “agency” of power that they lacked at home. The great irony is that they supported to the end a regime that at heart had an abiding contempt for the female gender. Wendy Adele-Marie explains this seeming contradiction with great clarity and much detail with conclusions not only from the historical record, but also from the insights of social psychology.

467 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2018