Hitler's Furies

This is finalist for the US National Jewish book award. "Hitler's Furies will be experienced and remembered as a turning point in both women's studies and Holocaust studies". (Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands). History has it that the role of women in Nazi Germany was to be the perfect Hausfrau, produce the next Aryan generation and be a loyal cheerleader for the Fuhrer. The few women tried and convicted after the war were simply the evil aberrations. However, Wendy Lower's research into the very ordinary women who went out to the Nazi Eastern Front reveals an altogether different story. Over half a million of them set off for these new lands, where most of the worst crimes of the Reich would occur. Through the interwoven biographies of thirteen women, the reader follows the transformation of young nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who start out in Weimar and Nazi Germany as ambitious idealists and end up as witnesses, accomplices and perpetrators of genocide. Hitler's Furies is indelible proof that we have not known what we need to know about the role of women in the Nazi killing fields - or about how it could have been hidden for seventy years. It shows that genocide is women's business as well as men's and that, in ignoring women's culpability, we have ignored the reality of the Holocaust.