Hitlers Furies will be experienced and remembered as a turning point in both womens studies and Holocaust studies' Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands. 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 Fuhrer. Then they became the Trummerfrauen, or Rubble Women, as they cleared and tidied their ruined country to get it back on its feet. They were Germanys 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 Lowers 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. Hitlers 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 husbands impressive Polish SS estate, we find brutality as chilling as any in history.
Hitlers 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 womens business as well as mens and that, in ignoring womens culpability, we have ignored the reality of the Holocaust.
About Author
Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Chair of History at Claremont McKenna College and former research associate of the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitat in Munich. 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.
