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

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields is by Wendy Lower. Wendy has set out to document the German women who followed the soldiers into the various countries as the Germans took them over in World War II. She looks at their roles and how they helped the Nazis take over town by town. She looks at their roles in the killing of Jews. How could they do it? Although they are mentioned, she is not referring to the guards at the camps; she is looking at the secretaries, clerical workers, and yes, even the officer’s wivesThis book is daunting to read. I found it was so depressing that I had to read it in parts and then stop to digest what I had read. It is the same with many of the book on the Holocaust that I have read. What the Nazis and their followers did was too unbelievable to be believed. How could a woman be so evil and cruel to another human being and turn around and be the most loving wife and mother around. Yes, there were some women who were just innately evil and cruel and had no empathy for others. These usually ended up as guards or kapos in the camps. Wendy talks about the other women who turned.Wendy talks about how the Nazi party talked young women into heading into the eastern countries to work. These were young women, just out of school, who were yearning for adventure and who were lured by dreams. These were young nurses, just out of school, who idealized their nursing of the brave, young, beautiful young soldiers. Some were just out to find a man to marry. There were secretaries, clerical workers, teachers, nurses, etc.Wendy delves into the prosecution of some of these women and why they managed to be found not guilty. She explains the differences between the witnesses, the perpetrators and the accomplices. Then she goes into trying to figure out why they killed.Although it is depressing and has some gruesome details, she deals with the topic in a refreshing and manner. It is a book that is well worth reading and that a student of the Holocaust should read. It is a subject that relatively little has been written about.

This is not only a fine work of history, but a brave book. For more than 50 years, I have been studying these histories as they have been written and revised. I was inspired to learn about this time because both my parents (and my uncles) all served during World War II. My father served with the 44th Division in combat through half of 1944 and through May 1945. He rarely spoke about combat, but now and then reminded his children that being named "Schmidt" meant that Nazi officers thought he would answer their appeals for fraternization. They had been trained to believe that Americans with German names might sympathize with their cause. That was not true, of course, but understanding how they could believe such nonsense has been a lifelong interest -- and challenge -- to me and our family.Many books have been written about the histories of that awful time, but few give as clear an insight into the mind of Nazi Germany's "rank and file" as "Hitler's Furies." A friend of mine once said: "Ah, Nazi Germany and the Germans. You can't blame everybody for what the majority did..." It's only been since the end of Soviet communism that really good historians have been able to gain access to some of the relevant archives and master some of their contents. Wendy Lower has done a great job in that with "Hitler's Furies." Although each of the detailed biographies of the handful of women she profiles is interesting in and of itself, what's more important is that she reminds the reader that these women represented a large number of German women during those terrible years -- definitely the majority. Although a monster like Erna Petri went beyond the Nazi "call of duty," she was part of a generation (and movement) that supported what she did a bit more nastily.One of the thoughts that came to my mind in reading this book was how little justice was really served after World War II. While Judgment at Nuremberg did a fine job of depicting the tip of that iceberg (and Marlene Dietrich a signal performance as the Nazi widow who "didn't get it"), the fact was there were millions who helped bring the Nazis to power and sustain that power over time. The resistance to Nazism was there, but never representing a significant minority, let alone the majority. "You can't blame everyone for what the majority did..."Living in Chicago and being a Schmidt, I had the opportunity to see how vast the residue of those foul ideologies were. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, there were taverns in Chicago where you could meet veterans -- not of the U.S. Army like my Dad, but of the Wehrmacht. Most of those men were proud of it, and after a few beers, if you listened carefully, they would eventually tell you all about how "The Jews..." were behind it all. That generation is finally dying out, and it appears they haven't passed on the worst of their ideology to the younger generations. But such ideas as the women in "Hitler's Furies" believed are always lurking, waiting to spring upon the unwary in a new generation. And so it's important to have histories like "Hitlers' Furies" to remind us -- and our children -- of some of what it was like...

This is another example of the injustice that followed the defeat of Nazi Germany. With few exceptions, only the really big names in the Nazi party were tried and punished for their crimes. Most everyone else was exonerated. Some of the women Lower speaks about did horrible things, yet because they were women, they got away with it. Whether it was because they blamed their husbands, or used pregnancy as a scapegoat, or just outright lied, most courts did not want to believe that women could be so cruel and inhuman. And this book proves further that it wasn't just "Nazis" that committed the Holocaust. Ordinary people, and in this case, ordinary women, collaborated, in the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.There are a couple of little issues I have with the book. First, on page 20 she states the Hitler was not democratically elected. This, though, is not quite true. Although he was not elected to the Chancellorship directly (the Chancellor was appointed by the President, according to the Weimar Republic), the Nazi party was one of, if not the, largest party in the Reichstag. So German women did vote for the Nazi party, even if they didn't vote for Hitler himself. But given that he was clearly head of the party, it must be understood that when they voted for the Nazi party, they were voting for him.Secondly, there is some confusion in her book. Not all the ideas she presents are clearly spelled out. For example, on pages 160-161 when writing about male Nazi perpetrators, she quotes one psychologist as saying that the head of Einsatzgruppe D was "a sadist, a pervert, or a lunatic," yet she quotes another as saying that Nazi leaders were neither "sick or unusual, in fact they are like any other people we might encounter in other countries of the earth." Yet this is all that is said. Not attempt is made to clarify this discrepancy. She immediately goes on to say that women were not tested by psychologists at all and she continues on from there. I found that quite a bit of the "science" behind this book was lacking.That said, I think this book definitely begins to open up a new study in Holocaust research and as Lower quotes in her book, "Minimising women's culpability to a few thousand brainwashed and misguided camp guards does not accurately represent the reality of the Holocaust."

Without doubt the best available study on the complexities of women’s lives in the Third Reich. This is a phenomenal piece of research, dealing with complex and often horrific source materials in a cool, calm, yet committed way. The overarching questions: how and why did women undertake atrocities against Jews and other victim peoples? How, after the War, did they justify their actions and how did post-war German society regard them? None of these are easy questions to answer, and perhaps they can never be answered in full, but this forensic investigation of the sources does its best to understand woman’s inhumanity at times of chaos.

Hitler's Furies recounts women under the Nazis, and how they were involved in mass murder. Women's involvement in genocide has often been overlooked during this period, and this book aims to shed light on the brutality of women under the Nazi regime.I specifically focused on the Nazi nurses for my undergraduate dissertation, trying to find the answers as to why doctors, the saviours of life, were involved in criminal murder. For women, they often placed blame on the hierarchy - they were to follow orders of their superior male doctors. Yet this book reveals the dark horrors of Nazi medicine as well as other professions during the Third Reich, and their willingness to murder.This an important book to read in order to try to understand the complexity of the Holocaust and 'ordinary' people's involvement in genocide.

Really interesting, one of those books that changes your entire perception on a topic; in this case, of Nazi Germany.Lower covered a wide range of issues that affected women in this era, from traditional gender roles to their alleviation in some areas. If you are curious about what could possibly lead apparently normal women into roles - whether as nurses, doctors, secretaries, or simply as wives to Nazi Officers - where they witnessed and/or participated directly in acts of utter evil, then I would definitely recommend.

A very good bit of work, eloquently done. More testimonies needed to take it to the 5-star level. Two more words.