In Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower, a professor of history at California's Claremont McKenna College, highlights the roles that women played in Adolph Hitler's Third Reich and the Holocaust.
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To date, Lower contenders, these roles have been largely “suppressed, overlooked, and under-researched” (p.4). Nearly all the history of the Holocaust, Hitler's project to exterminate Europe's Jewish population, leaving out half the population of Germany during the Third Reich, “as if women's history happened somewhere else,” resulted in an “illogical approach and puzzling omission” (p. 14). But the Holocaust, he wrote, “could not have been accomplished if a sense of duty had not prevailed over the sense of morality.
Lower's exhaustively researched and lucidly written study revolves around thirteen women who participated actively in the Holocaust. She seeks to demonstrate that their experiences were typical of a vast number of women drawn into the Nazi regime. Lower provides short autobiographical sketches of the thirteen women and returns to their stories at different points throughout the book. But the full historical record of women's precise roles in Nazi atrocities is scant, consisting of original wartime documentation, such as marriage applications, personnel records, and Nazi party reports, “devoid of personality or motive,” supplemented by more revealing postwar “self- representations” of women contained in testimonies, letters, memoirs and interviews (p.12). This thin historical record precludes Lower from bringing her thirteen women to life in the way that Eric Lichtblau does in his study of Nazi activists who sought refuge in the United States, The Nazis Next Door, reviewed here in October 2015. Nonetheless, Lower makes a strong case that the experiences of the thirteen women should not be dismissed as anecdotal or aberrational.
In Lower's analysis, women were frequent witnesses and accomplices to Nazi atrocities. Less frequently, but not insignificantly, they were themselves perpetrators who “killed Jews and other ‘enemies’ of the Reich, more than had been documented during the war or prosecuted afterward” (p.4). The Nazi ideology did not encourage German women to be murderers; that function was, officially if nevertheless implicitly, reserved for German men. Women were above all expected to be fertile, the bearers of “racially pure” Aryan children to serve the Third Reich in the future. In Hitler’s Germany, the “female badge of honor was the pregnant belly” (p. 116). Although the Nazi regime “trained thousands of women to be accomplices, to be heartless in their dealings with the enemies of the Reich,” the regime “did not aim to develop a cadre of female killers . . . [I]t was not expected that women would be especially violent or would kill. Those who did kill exploited the 'opportunity' to do so within a fertile sociopolitical setting, with the expectation of rewards and affirmation, not ostracism" (p.52).
This opportunity arose most frequently on Germany's Eastern Front, Poland and the Western Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics. Lower describes the Eastern Front as a “European stage where Hitler and his supporters fulfilled their imperial fantasies,” a space for the Nazis to “carry out criminal policies with impunity” (p.125). She estimates that approximately 500,000 women were assigned to the Eastern Front or volunteered to go, seeking to “fulfill their ambitions and the regime's expectations, to experience something new, and to further the Nazi cause” (p.85). Of the thirteen women Lower studies, most did not begin their war experiences with the fierce hatred for Jews that underlay Nazi ideology. But their experiences on the Eastern Front “proved transformative.