UBC: Lower, Hitler's Furies

[truepenny]

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[donated to library]

Wow, this is an excellent book. It's about women's place in the genocidal machinery of Hitler's empire in eastern Europe, and how that place is almost impossible to recover, because it's the history of support staff, to whom--of course--nobody pays attention. (The audiobook reader is also excellent.)

Lower tracks individual nurses, secretaries, teachers, and wives, uncovering evidence of their roles as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators. Concentration camp guards are not the only women who participated in the Holocaust. Since I was just reading about Irma Grese in Vronsky's Women Serial Killers, it was easy to make the comparison and see that these women who killed Jews unofficially were every bit as horrendous as the Beast of Belsen. (Wikipedia tells me Grese was also known as the Hyena of Auschwitz.)

But because their crimes weren't documented, and because West German courts did not consider eyewitness testimony sufficiently credible to warrant conviction (eyewitness testimony of the caliber of "I saw her pick up a child and kill it by beating it against the wall of the ghetto" or "I saw her lure children to her with candy and then shoot them in the mouth")--and because "denazification" was so woefully incomplete in Germany and Austria--most of them simply slipped away, back into anonymity.

Lower's is a Herculean task, and she does it very very well.



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