Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
Wendy Lower
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0544334493
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In a surprising account that powerfully revises history, Wendy Lower uncovers the role of German women on the Nazi eastern front—not only as plunderers and direct witnesses, but as actual killers. Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research and fieldwork, presents startling evidence that these women were more than “desk murderers” or comforters of murderous German men: they went on “shopping sprees” and romantic outings to the Jewish ghettos; they were present at killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also shooting Jews. And Lower uncovers the stories of SS wives with children of their own whose brutality is as chilling as any in history.
Hitler’s Furies challenges our deepest beliefs: women can be as brutal as men, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.
“Disquieting . . . 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
“An unsettling but significant contribution to our understanding of how nationalism, and specifically conceptions of loyalty, are normalized, reinforced, and regulated.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
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Ulrike Gaida, Zwischen Pflegen und Töten: Krankenschwestern im Nationalsozialismus (Mabuse Verlag, 2006), p. 160. Kneissler killed as long as she could. In her last placement, at Kaufbeuren-Irsee, a four-year-old boy was killed on May 29, 1945, thirty-three days after U.S. troops had marched into Kaufbeuren. See Ernst T. Mader, Das erzwungene Sterben von Patienten der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren-Irsee zwischen 1940 und 1945 nach Dokumenten und Berichten von Augenzeugen (Blöcktach, 1992).
“packers” in the pits, [>] perpetrators, [>]–[>]. See also wives of Nazis commonalities of, [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] mentality of, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>] number of, [>]–[>], [>] nurses as, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] postwar silence of, [>]–[>] record of justice against, [>]–[>] Petri, Erna Kürbs, [>], [>], [>] background of, [>]–[>] photographs of, [>], [>], [>] prosecution of, [>]–[>], [>] shooting of six children by, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] testimony.
Obey or fulfill one’s duty. During the Nuremberg trials some male defendants underwent a series of psychological tests fashionable at the time, such as the Rorschach inkblot test. A psychologist who studied SS Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, the head of Einsatzgruppe D, who confessed to killing more than ninety thousand men, women, and children, concluded that Ohlendorf must be a “sadist, a pervert or a lunatic” because he spoke about his cruelties in such a matter-of-fact, unflinching manner.
Shootings and ghetto liquidations. A female Nazi trying to escape prosecution in Europe would have found Austria even safer than Germany. The largest number of German female Nazis tried for murder or accessory to murder was in East Germany, with 220 female defendants tried between 1945 and 1990. The Austrians have not tried and convicted a Nazi war criminal (male or female) since the 1970s, a sad irony given Simon Wiesenthal’s prominence as a Nazi hunter based in Vienna. What do the postwar.
Public sphere of war-related work—in factories, streetcars, and government offices—they had little experience in politics, and most were content to call themselves apolitical. With the implosion of the monarchy, the political arena, previously closed to them, suddenly opened. The Weimar Republic saw an explosion of ragtag movements, vigilante groups, and organized parties of all stripes. In Munich alone, the nascent Nazi Party was among forty such movements in the early 1920s. Most proudly.