Hitler's Furies

The role of women in the Holocaust is the fascinating and unsettling topic that Wendy Lower investigates in her most recent book. The book details the involvement of women in the Nazi campaign in Eastern Europe by exploring the variety of professional and private positions they occupied within the Third Reich. Lower persuasively argues that German women who had ordinary occupations and not just those who worked as female camp guards played a part equal to that of men, in terms of contributing to and partaking in the acts of genocide which occurred in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Throughout seven chapters, Lower combines a general study of women during the Nazi regime with biographical case studies that describe thirteen women of different ages, origins and educational backgrounds who were teachers, nurses, secretaries and wives of SS men. Women were regarded as protectors of the Aryan race and therefore essential to the creation and racial health of the Nazi empire. Marriage and children were important factors for the Nazi idea of a woman’s role in society; the Hausfrau who upheld the principles of ‘children, kitchen, church’ ( Kinder, Küche, Kirche ) was deemed to be as essential to the Third Reich as the soldier on the battlefield. As more territory was conquered by the German army, positions in education, administration and medicine gradually began to be occupied by more female workers. Teachers, nurses, secretaries and wives were brought to Eastern Europe in order to help the smooth running of the Nazi war machinery and to travel with their husbands. The East, where the Jewish population increasingly became victims of Nazi-perpetrated violence, was the main area in which female occupations began to develop genocidal dimensions. Lower traces this development by examining the occupations individually and also by specifically focusing on the thirteen case studies. She illustrates how each occupation and each of the thirteen women contributed to the Holocaust in various ways, but also the possible motives behind their involvement. The book presents the reader with three levels of contribution, which Lower divides into three chapters: witnesses, accomplices and perpetrators. Chapter 3 follows the lives of the women who were responsible at a lower level. These women witnessed crimes being committed against the Jews but did not act in any way to prevent them. As Chapter 4 discusses the complicity of women working in administration roles, an increased level of responsibility for genocide can be observed. These women may never have directly committed a crime, but they typed and sent reports that ordered the murder of thousands of Jews. Lower describes how ‘desk murder’ was often viewed as being male, as in the case of Adolf Eichmann. However, women were equally involved and were also essential, as the war claimed more men, to this form of enabling genocide through administration systems (p. 98). Chapter 5 traces the transformation of women in ordinary occupations into active perpetrators of violence. Lower notes how the first female murderers of the Nazi regime were ‘not the concentration-camp guard, but the nurse’ (p. 120). The female perpetrators comprised those in a variety of positions. Some killed as part of their job, but others killed because they wanted to and the circumstances of the Nazi-occupied East enabled them to do so.

Aryan race · Empire · Genocide · German · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Sociology · The Holocaust · World War II · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German History and Society · History · Law

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