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Wendy Lower’s 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 women’s 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 F�hrer, pales in comparison to Lower’s 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.
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 twisted political awakening that turned to genocide. These young 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: that they went on “shopping 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.
Hitler’s Furies will challenge our deepest beliefs: genocide is women’s business too, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.
- Sales Rank: #356030 in Books
- Published on: 2013-10-08
- Released on: 2013-10-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .99" w x 6.00" l, 1.04 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
From Booklist
Lower, a consultant for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., sheds some much-needed light on an aspect of WWII history that has remained in the shadows for decades. “The consensus in Holocaust and genocide studies,” the author writes, “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.” Based on two decades of research and interviews, the book looks at the role of women in Nazi Germany, in particular women who participated in the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Not merely subservient observers, some women—the author dubs them Hitler’s Furies, a reference to the mythological “goddesses of vengeance”—actively took part in the murders of Jews and in looting and stealing from Jewish homes. Lower writes about horribly violent female concentration-camp guards; of young girls trained in the use of firearms; of brutality that would rival anything perpetrated by their male counterparts. Surprising and deeply unsettling, the book is a welcome addition to the literature on the Holocaust. --David Pitt
Review
“Hitlers Furies will be experienced and remembered as a turning point in both women’s studies and Holocaust studies.”—Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands
“Hitler's Furies is the first book to follow the biographical trajectories of individual women whose youthful exuberance, loyalty to the F�hrer, ambition, and racism took them to the deadliest sites in German-occupied Europe.� Drawing on immensely rich source material, Wendy Lower integrates women perpetrators and accomplices into the social history of the Third Reich, and illuminates them indelibly as a part of post-war East and West German memory that has been, until this book, unmined.”—Claudia Koonz, author of Mothers in the Fatherland
“Hitler’s Furies is a long overdue and superb addition to the history of the Holocaust.�� The role of women perpetrators during the Final Solution has been too much glossed over.� Wendy Lower’s book provides an important and stunning corrective.�� It is a significant addition to our understanding of the role of ordinary Germans in the Reich’s genocide.”—Deborah Lipstadt, author of Eichmann on Trial
“Lower shifts away from the narrow focus on the few thousand female concentration camp guards who have been at the center of previous studies of female culpability in Nazi crimes and identifies the cluster of professions—nurses, social workers, teachers, office workers—that in addition to family connections brought nearly one-half million women to the German East and into close proximity with pervasive Nazi atrocities.� Through the lives of carefully-researched individuals, she captures a spectrum of career trajectories and behavior.� This is a book that artfully combines the study of gender with the illumination of individual experience.”—Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men
"A virtuosic feat of scholarship." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Lower sheds some much-needed light on an aspect of WWII history that has remained in the shadows for decades . . . Surprising and deeply unsettling, the book is a welcome addition to the literature on the Holocaust.” -- Booklist
"Intriguing and chilling . . . feminism run amok." -- Chicago Tribune
"Disquieting . . . Ms. Lower’s book is partly the study of a youthquake . . . Earlier books about the Holocaust have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity . . .[Lower’s] insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity." -- New York Times"Well-researched . . . as gripping and eye-opening as it is chilling." -- People"The triumph of Lower’s book is its meticulous biographical impulse. Nothing gets muffled in social science, and by tracing the lives of a dozen or so women, Lower brings out the uniqueness of their stories and the gray areas...This measured judgment gives Lower’s documentation its power. Hitler’s Furies is above all a brave book. It is brave in forcing from the archives a story that no one wanted to tell. It is brave as well in its willingness to imagine women lashing out with the same murderous will and rage as men." -- New Republic"Compelling . . . Lower brings to the forefront an unexplored aspect of the Holocaust." -- Washington Post"Hitler’s Furies is an unsettling but significant contribution to our understanding of how nationalism, and specifically conceptions of loyalty, are normalized, reinforced, and regulated. By asking important questions about the pervasive culpability of Nazi women, Lower has highlighted a historical blind spot." -- Los Angeles Review of Books
From the Inside Flap
Wendy Lower’s 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 women’s 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 F�hrer, pales in comparison to Lower’s 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.
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 twisted political awakening that turned to genocide. These young 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: that they went on “shopping 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.
Hitler’s Furies will challenge our deepest beliefs: genocide is women’s business too, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.
Most helpful customer reviews
131 of 149 people found the following review helpful.
Hard to Know
By Lita Perna
Notice:
National Book Awards Finalists Announced Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower was chosen as a a finalist in the National Book Awards.
'The National Book Foundation announced on Wednesday the 2013 National Book Award finalists, with five nominees in each of the four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people's literature. They were winnowed down from longlists of 10. The winners will be named at a gala dinner and ceremony in New York on Nov. 20.'
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In the introduction to Hitler's Furies, Author Wendy Lower writes that while traveling on bad 1992 Soviet roads doing research for this book she had to stop often. You will have to stop often too, just to digest the horrors in this book.
This fact filled, exhaustively researched and detailed book divides main topics into Witnesses, Accomplices and Killers and begins with eleven names of the Main Characters.
The book ends with the sentence, "The short answer is that most got away with murder."
The author asks if youth, naivet�, a sense of adventure, dedication to Nazi ideals ambition and curiosity explains how many women got swept up in `the moment and the movement.' But, she writes that as each of these women came closer to the reality of their nation's deeds, they had to make a personal choice. This book is about the choice made by at least half a million women who witnessed and contributed to genocide.
Half a million nurses, secretaries, teachers, wives, Nazi Party activists and resettlement advisors went east. Going east was the route to success for those with ambition; those wanting to realize their ideological goals or those looking for a husband or adventure. Many volunteered to go to Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine. It was a romantic notion; a frontier adventure, where anything was possible
The author discusses teachers who ran schools and kindergartens in the east that excluded non-German children, but accepted `racially valuable' children whose parents had been shot. The children were taught Hitler's maxims about the superiority of the German race...and German songs...and proper German behavior.
Nurses were primary witnesses of the Holocaust and direct killers. In Germany they administered lethal injections, starved patients, participated in selections and escorted selected victims to gas chambers.
Beside the nurses, secretaries and office aids were the largest group of workers in the day- to- day operation of genocide, but though they were accomplices (they took dictation, `typed up orders facilitating the robbery, deportation and mass murder of Jews') they were not likely to engage in direct violence.
The author states that some of the worst female perpetrators were wives who acted out their hatred.
The stories become horrifying when Lower talks about particular cruelties by women she names.
Accomplices
Liselotte Meir participated in the planning of massacres and was present at shootings from 1942-43. She was in charge of the life saving stamp that decided who should be saved or killed. (She once saved her hairdresser.) She went on Sunday outings to hunt and shoot Jews.
Erna Reichmann stood before 2,000 Jews being marched to their deaths.
Vera Wohlauf was present at the liquidation of 11,000 Jews from the Miedzyrzec Podlaski ghetto where the corpses of 960 men women and children were scattered on the streets.
She was also regularly present at the market place where Jews were assembled for deportation and she walked among them, humiliating them and brandishing a whip.
Perpetrators
Johanna Altyater's specialty was killing children, often luring them with candy. On September 16, 1942 she approached a six year old and a toddler in the Polish Volodymyr-Volynsky ghetto as if she was going to give them a treat. She lifted the toddler and slammed its head against the wall and threw the dead child at its father's feet.
Erna Petri brought terrified and hungry children into her home and fed them then lined them up in front of a ditch and shot them all.
Lisel Willhays shot Jews from her balcony.
Josefine Block held a whip and ordered Ukrainian militiamen to hurry up and kill 200 gypsies.
One time she ordered one of her husband's employees to shoot four weak Jewish girls
There were others.
There were women in elite ranks of the scientific and medical professions.
There were `desk murders'.
There were sadists.
The book explores different reasons these women participated and why they killed.
The book reveals the lies alibis and excuses of the accomplices and perpetrators.
The book tells about the trials, the sentences (few) and exonerations and follows up on these women's lives after the war.
Most of them went back to living normal lives.
You may find this book disturbing.
You may close the book and hope there is a hell for these women, a mere tip of the iceberg, and for all the thousands of others who got away with murder.
Top quality writing. Well researched. Divided into sections to make it easy to follow. Holds interest in a topic that may make you want to turn from. Worth reading.
32 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Feels more speculative than accurate
By snickersmum
I expected to read a very historical account of the German women highlighted in this book. Instead there were many instances of the author speculating actions the women took, whereby she used phrases such as "she probably," "perhaps she," and "she likely." I would rather read "it is unknown whether..." or "there is no information what occurred next..." than be fed scenarios that suit the author's purposes. It would've been helpful for footnotes or bibliography reference numbers to be interspersed in the pages to add authenticity. I frequently found myself asking "How does the author know that? Where did she get that information? Is that a fact or an inference?" And the Notes section in the back of the book was not always a help in determining that either.
The book structure is not efficient, in that it flows on a loose timeline beginning with the history of the Holocaust and ending with court proceedings well into the 80s. This does not work well, as the reader must recall names and stories from previous chapters. A better structure would have been to dedicate a separate chapter to each German woman's story.
Due to the large number of German words and phrases used in this book, a glossary would have been beneficial. Or better yet the English translation in parenthesis next to the phrase would give depth and understanding to the text.
Lastly, in a historical book I anticipate seeing many images, i.e., drawings, handwritten notes, photos. I was very disappointed in the number of photos provided. For any woman written about in depth, I would like to see either her photo or an image of something related to her, like her residence during the war or a transcript of a letter she wrote.
After reading Hitler's Furies I do not feel much more educated than I was previously about women's roles in the Holocaust. If anything, I was just provided with specific names and stories.
57 of 75 people found the following review helpful.
An unjustly neglected field of study
By Phelps Gates
A fascinating case study of a dozen women, detailing the roles they played before, during, and after the Nazi era. The women range over a broad spectrum of guilt: on one extreme are those who tried to thwart Nazi crimes (sometimes at danger to themselves), and on the other extreme are women who directly took part in cold-blooded murder. In between are those with varying degrees of guilt: secretaries who typed up lists of victims, nurses whose duty to their patients took second place to their allegiance to the regime, women who served refreshments on railway platforms to members of the Einsatzgruppen while trains of victims passed through. If the book has a weakness, it's that it concentrates on the vivid portrayal of these individuals, rather than determining what proportion of women fell into various categories of guilt: the extreme ends of the spectrum seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but it's hard to tell at this late date. One particularly interesting aspect of the book is how it contrasts the treatment of Nazis after the war in East and West Germany: the East was much more vigorous in prosecutions, for both ideological and political grounds that the author discusses in detail. Highly recommended for anyone interested in this grim period of human history.
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