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

After reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder earlier this year, my expectations may have been too high for this book. In it, Wendy Lower sets out to look at women who were involved in the atrocities that took place in Eastern Europe. She examines women who served as bystanders, women who assisted the ones who did the actual killing, usually as secretaries and in other desk jobs, and women who crossed the line and took part in the killing, sometimes to the discomfort of the men around them. Lower did a great deal of research, taking advantage of archives that were opened to westerners only in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. She combed through records, read diaries and published accounts, and show more interviewed those still living. The book follows the format of introducing the reader to several women with brief descriptions of their formative years and how they ended up in the east. Later chapters reintroduce the women and describe their experiences during the war, with a final chapter wrapping up with what they did after the war ended. Lower also looked briefly at why women might have participated in ways at loggerheads with how women are supposed to behave.

Lower looks at the career paths that suddenly opened up to women in the Third Reich. Despite the government's emphasis on women as mothers and housewives, the war opened up not only jobs in factories, but as nurses, teachers and secretaries. And as Germany sought to turn the countries it had invaded to the east into agricultural colonies, German women were needed as teachers to show ethnic Germans how to be properly German and to indoctrinate the children, nurses were needed to care for soldiers but also to continue the German program of euthanizing the handicapped and all the paperwork generated needed able secretaries. Ranking officers were also able to bring their families out to where they were stationed and where they were able to live a more luxurious lifestyle than had been available in Germany. With the exception of nurses, who were taught that euthanizing both injured soldiers and the handicapped relieved suffering, the women were not sent east to kill anyone, but teachers abandoned their charges to certain death when retreat was called, secretaries typed and passed on killing orders as well as determined who would be added in the lists of people to be killed or sent to camps, and the wives and girlfriends of officers not only witnessed the activities of the men around them, but they sometimes took part, either at the urging of their partners or on their own initiative.

The format of breaking up each woman's story and placing each fragment far from the others in the book, as well as the number of women she followed had the effect of lessening the impact of each biography, and in forcing the author, given the size of the book, into keeping each story brief. It didn't help that her views on the women shone through in the writing. Here are monsters, she says, come look at the monstrous women. Adjectives are inserted where the actions and attitudes of the women needed no modifiers, and descriptions seem to be cherry-picked so as to make a point. In the wake of recent work to understand how ordinary people could take part in wholesale murder, this book feels like a return to the idea of Nazis being special, extra-evil villains. Given that she is at pains to explain that the women she chose were ordinary women who went east mostly as a way to earn a little more money or because they had no choice, this emphasis feels misguided. Still, the enormous amount of research she did makes this an interesting book, even if it raised more questions than it answered. show less

The passage of time, the perpetrators' own unwillingness to discuss their wartime activities, and the Nazi's attempts to destroy the evidence of their own crimes has left a surprising amount of gaps in what is probably one of the most intensely researched subjects in human history, but Lower's "Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields" seems to fill an important space in this narrative. Lower carefully relates how whole professions that many historians and groups that both historians and participants in the the events described here -- teachers, wives, nurses, and auxiliaries -- either helped further Hitler's plans for a Final Solution or were made to stay silent while mass murder went on around them. Lower seems well show more aware that she's dealing with a subject that's ripe for exploitation, so the wide net she casts here, which doesn't just focus on the most shocking or notorious cases, seems appropriate. Lower chooses to focus on the experiences of a handful of women, and while she admits that it may never be known exactly how many women participated in the Third Reich, their experiences can easily be extrapolated. She takes care to show how much a person in each of these women's positions might have known, what they might have done, and what might have happened to them afterwards. She also reminds us how important much of the work they did was: the Nazis, for all their barbarity, were also creepily methodical and bureaucratic, and their project required the efforts of a small army of file clerks, secretaries, and what might be called wartime social workers. It's illuminating to see these sorts of people, who'd be barely perceptible in most standard historical accounts, at the center of a historical narrative. As always, perhaps, it's disquieting to realize that ordinary life can continue on more or less as usual for some as tragedies of world-historical proportions befall others.

From a more personal perspective, I was impressed by the way that Lower reminded her readers of the obviously colonial aspects of the Third Reich. It's purpose, in the final analysis, was to colonize a place that was already well-populated, to effect an explicitly colonial project in the heart of Europe. Individual Nazis' eagerness to set themselves up in manor houses, employ servants, and to be seen with items, such as whips, which are associated with colonial overseers was a reminder, for me, of their project's insane ambition and boundless greed. Lower's book, then, besides being a useful historical document, serves as another useful and necessary reminder of how political ideologies dangerously disconnected from reality can feed into humanity's worst impulses, and how this sort of evil can consume every constituent part of a society. show less

C'è tutto un immaginario relativo alle donne del nazismo, un immaginario che ne fa delle specie di oggetti erotici per feticisti, ma chi erano davvero queste donne?
Il saggio della Lower ne individua alcune, donne normali ben integrate nella società tedesca, diventate a poco a poco mostri, e, generalmente, non punite per i loro crimini in quanto considerate da chi le doveva giudicare meno importanti per il sistema nazismo degli uomini al cui fianco erano. Si tratta di segretarie, infermiere, maestre, ma anche normali donne di casa, mogli di SS o cose simili.
Alla fine niente spiega perché siano diventate così, forse solo una frase, pronunciata da una di loro: non volevamo essere da meno degli uomini.

Lower könyve elsősorban néhány női portréból áll – ápolónők, feleségek, titkárnők pályafutásáról olvashatunk, akik a második világháború éveit a nácik által gyarmatosított keleti végeken töltötték. A tárgyalt események sajnálatosan ismerősek lehetnek azoknak, akik már érintették a témát, és hangja, ez a tényszerű, de kevéssé tárgyilagos hang sem újdonság. (Hiszen lehet-e egy népirtásról tárgyilagosan beszélni? Szabad-e?) Nézőpontja viszont újszerű. Amellett érvel ugyanis, hogy Hitler rezsimjének sikeressége sokkal többet köszönhetett a nőknek, mint ezt általában hajlandóak vagyunk elismerni. A háború utáni visszaemlékezésekben a német asszony többnyire mint show more áldozat jelent meg: a nemi erőszak elszenvedője, a széthulló családok összetartója, az „újjáépítő”. Természetesen joggal, ám Lower felhívja a figyelmet, hogy bár megnyugtató ennél a szemléletnél maradni (legalább ők mentek maradtak a bűntől!), de történelmileg tarthatatlan.

A kötet koronája, az utolsó pár fejezet, melyet konklúzióként is értelmezhetünk. Ebben Lower a történelmi adatok megvizsgálása után etikai és filozófiai értelemben is kibontja a témát, szembesít a nácitlanító bíróságok erkölcsi kompromisszumaival, azzal, hogy használták ki a női háborús bűnösök az apolitikus nőről kialakult előítéletet, hogy megmeneküljenek a büntetéstől… Csupa kellemetlen, megválaszolhatatlan morális kérdést tesz fel az olvasónak – finoman szólva is nyugtalanító. Fájdalmas olvasmány. Pont olyan, amilyennek lennie kell. show less

Wendy Lower's book offers some superb insights, and not just the much overlooked role of women in Nazi genocide. It also provides a better understanding of the psychology of the perpetrators as well as the scope of German war crimes.

The first thing we learn is that female brutality was not limited to camp guards, who numbered no more than 3,500. There were potentially tens of thousands of women who had the opportunity to take part in the apparatus of looting, exploitation and killing. First and foremost were the nurses, who were heavily implicated in the Nazi "euthanasia" campaigns against the physically and mentally handicapped. These activities started in the late 1930s, prior to the Final Solution. It was a “dress rehearsal" which show more even included the gassing of victims on a small scale -- a harbinger of the systematic gassings of Auschwitz.

Later, during the war, thousands of women were employed as secretaries and administrators by the SS and Gestapo, both in Germany and in the occupied territories. Many staffed the bureaucracy of the concentration camps and einsatzengruppen (mobile death squads). At least some of these women were more than passive desk workers. They took an active part in the processing, maltreatment and even killing of Jews and other victims. This was especially true of women who ostensibly had no official role at all in the SS machinery -- the wives of Nazi officials and commanders. They frequently proved to be just as brutal (albeit on a smaller scale) than their husbands.

As for the psychology of Nazi women, Lower describes them as being young, ambitious, and callous: "I imagined a young female clerk in a powerful office in Berlin, satisfied not to be working in a factory or on a farm, routinely typing and stamping deportation lists... daydreaming about her social plans after work and those pretty shoes that she had seen in a shop window that morning. She was just 'doing her job' and eyeing its material rewards."

They were, in fact, the sort of amoral individuals who thrive under any totalitarian regime. Nor do I think it was merely the anti-Semitism and racism that motivated them, as depraved as that was. After all, Europe had experienced similar bigotry over the centuries, but never on this scale. From its earliest beginnings, the Nazi system was completely uninhibited in advocacy and use of violence. Nazi ideology was based on a ruthless utopianism: "Studies of perpetrator motivation explain that those who incite acts of hate are seeking to rid themselves and the world around them of its unsettling, messy ambiguities and complexity."

The final lesson of Lower’s book is the sheer ubiquity of Nazi brutality. In the immediate wake of World War II it was believed that genocide had been confined to a few dozen concentration camps. But as Hitler’s Furies make clear, murder and depredations in the eastern territories were commonplace (fostered by systemic opportunism, theft and corruption). Admittedly there was a paradox, which Lower touches on. Officially the regime did not publicize its killing activities. Individuals could be prosecuted for speaking too openly about it. By contrast, the official language of genocide was very euphemistic. That said, it seems that ordinary soldiers and civilians in many of the occupied areas of Poland, Ukraine and Russia would have been exposed to some aspect of Nazi atrocities. As Lower puts it, although only a minority (albeit a larger one that hitherto imagined) were active “perpetrators,” still more were “accomplices,” who were fully aware of their role as enablers and beneficiaries of the system.

The only debatable point is Lower's treatment of “witnesses.” These were the women who recognized what was happening and distanced themselves from the killing as much as they could. Lower's discussion is slightly ambiguous. At times she seems aware of the fear and repression which would preclude more active resistance by the majority of decent individuals; on the other, she appears judgmental of their inactivity. In the end, it is perhaps impossible for us to say what could and not have been done. After all, these sorts of moral patterns -- in terms of culpability and innocence -- were at work not just in the Third Reich. They existed in Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, and anywhere that top-down tyranny ensures widespread compliance. That said, one cannot but share Lower’s keen disappointment that so few of the women chronicled ever faced justice in this life and that the prosecution of less prominent Nazi criminals after the war was so deficient. show less

Much has been written about the actions of members of the Nazi party during the years leading to and during World II. The Nuremberg trials have received a great deal of attention. Even today, nearly seventy years after the end of the war, there are still men being exposed and, in some cases, brought to trial for their participation in the murders of civilians, primarily Jews.
In HITLER’S FURIES, Wendy Lower illuminates the actions of one group of perpetrators whose actions have generally been ignored: the German women who were actively involved in “The Nazi Killing Fields.”
The first German mass murderer of people who didn’t fit the Aryan mold were women: the nurses who killed those who were retarded, mentally ill, handicapped, show more or terminally ill. Children and newborn babies were the main targets. The nurses often gave their victims drugs, injected them with drugs or starved them alibiing that they were preventing the patients from further suffering.
Later on, German women went to the eastern areas as nurses, secretaries, office clerks, teachers, concentration camp guards and wives. They typed up the reports, taught children, provided or withheld medical care, supported the men, and produced Aryan babies. The average age of the women camp guards was twenty five. They knew what was happening.
HITLER’S FURIES primarily follows several of the women. It tells their reasons for going to the east and details what they did there. Most of the actions have been reported in other sources about other perpetrators and included slamming children and babies against walls and using Jews as shooting targets. One of the women spotted six boys who had escaped from a train. She brought them into her home, fed them, took them outside, and shot each of them The book is well-organized and differentiates among the various roles: Witness; Accomplice; Perpetrator. I found the final two chapters, Why Did They Kill and What Happened to Them” particularly enlightening. The reasons for the former were diverse but patriotism, sadism, greed, and a desire to impress men were primary. In the latter case, almost all did not receive any punishment because of the stereotypical vision of women, thus exposing the influence of preexisting ideas on viewing testimony.
The author cites numerous sources for her research, relying a great deal on memoirs and testimony. She analyzes the discrepancies in them. The fifty pages of end notes were not easy to read because they lacked direct links within the chapters themselves. She does include several pictures but some of them aren’t relevant or are difficult to see clearly because of extraneous material. More editing would have been very helpful.
It would be nice to be able to say that if certain conditions exist, certain people would participate in mass murders. HITLER’S FURIES shows it is not that simple. show less

Lower's study is a valuable addition to Holocaust studies. She examines the involvement of women on the eastern front in the depredations committed against Jews (and others) in the occupied territories in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. She suggests that two predominant images of German women during and after the war have clouded a fuller understanding of women's involvement in the Holocaust. One trope is the cruel and sadistic female camp guard often portrayed as having nearly pornographic sado-erotic drives underlying their hideous behavior, e.g. the "Ilsa Koch's". The second is German women as the suffering victims of the effects of the war, either through the physical destruction of home and hearth, or as innocent widows of their lost show more husbands or as ravaged by Soviet soldiers' sexual assaults. Lower's premise is that these depictions have diverted a look at the thousands of German women who took various roles in the east that contributed to the mass exterminations. She categorizes these women as witnesses, accomplices or participants.

The witnesses were nurses or clerical staff who had full knowledge of the mass killings, who could not have been unaware of what was transpiring, but nonetheless carried on with their duties. Accomplices were women whose jobs, mainly clerical, organized and supported the plans to carry out the execution of Jews. Through their mundane administrative tasks they developed lists of those chosen for extermination; in some cases these clerks ans secretaries were left to make the actual selections of those sent to the killing fields or death camps. Many of these women participated in the looting and expropriation of property stolen from the persecuted. Lower's clear point is that women in these roles could not claim (as many did later) that they were unaware that their roles had anything to do with the slaughter.

The perpetrators were women -- sometimes staff and other times wives or mistresses of officials -- who directly brutalized and/or killed Jews and others. There are many survivor testimonies of the heinous actions of these women, utterly shocking in brutality and debasement. Some nurses also killed mentally disabled persons in the murderous state-sanctioned program of ridding the Reich of hundreds of thousands of inferior persons whose existence supposedly threatened the purity of the Nordic races. Other child welfare case workers were charged with determining who was "unfit".

Lower tells this scarcely reported story through the experiences of actual women -- nurses, secretaries, wives and mistresses. Lower holds that the narrow depictions of sadistic female guards or of women struggling in the war's aftermath has severely limited the full story of women's involvement in the genocidal mania of the Third Reich. The thousands of women in the occupied lands were not innocent naifs unaware of the intentions, policies and actions of the German conquerors; they were aware of and zealously committed to the racial superiority views of the Nazis and the horrific actions that stemmed therefrom.

The author says that in many respects these women were not extraordinary exemplars of brutality and depravity , but rather were "ordinary" German women from diverse social and economic strata. As in studies of other "ordinary" Germans who participated in the Holocaust (many of whom settled into normal bourgeois lives after the war) , this raises the question of what would bring anyone to willingly engage in the degradation and destruction of fellow human beings? Lower finds no satisfactory answer here, suggesting that for these women the deeply ingrained and pervasive sense of Aryan racial superiority hammered ceaselessly through Nazi propaganda led to this moral vacuum or perhaps that the authoritarian ethos of German family life produced a compulsion to follow along with the dictates of the totalitarian state. Lower does conclude that economic gain, prestige and career ambition prompted women to seek positions with the glorious victors in the eastern lands.

Were these women brought to justice? Not very much. The relatively few prosecutions resulted in nearly complete exoneration, almost, it seems in part, through a judicial gender bias (alongside some legal tightrope walking) that could not reconcile historical facts with the notion of virtuous German women hood. To the limited extent that justice was delivered it was by the East German courts.

For anyone seeking a new perspective on the underpinnings of the Holocaust, this book is highly recommended. show less