Valkyries

Racism, antisemitism, and cruelty are not strictly male traits. As Hitler's Furies makes abundantly clear, Nazi women could be as bad as the men.  The Nazi image of the hausfrau happily bearing as many Aryan children as she could for the glorious fuher is simply not correct. Many, many, young women went to the east for better paychecks, mates, and just plain excitement. In the process, they participated in one of the most violent episodes in European history.  They fatally injected the disabled, whipped Jews, and served refreshments to shooting parties when not shooting undisireables themselves. And for the most part, they got away with it.  When the Allies began their denazification program, they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of perpetrators, male and female. They also just couldn't believe that so many women would do such awful things. So, they limited their female prosecutions to a few thousand concentration camp guards.  German women after the war portrayed themselves as simple victims of war: widows, rape victims, ignorant of atrocities not visited upon them. A woman who liked to kill children became a youth advocate in the child welfare system, while most nurses went back to their profession in a more benign form. More just went back to being mothers and wives.

Wendy Lower interviewed former Nazi women, dug through memoirs, and mined court documents, and it shows: nearly a quarter of Hitler's Furies is taken up by annotations. By focusing on several women in particular, Lower brings the Holocaust in the East to chilling life. Some of her work has to be conjecture, because many of these women are no longer around and whitewashed their activities, but it is all very plausible. This is not comfortable reading, in particular if you like to believe that giving women agency ensures they will make good desicions.  It is however, necessary reading, especially if you want a full picture of Nazi Germany.

More books on women and World War II:

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich by Alison Owings. First-person narratives of life on the home front, including Jewish women.

Outwitting the Gestapo by Lucie Aubrac. A memoir of a witty French resistance fighter who gets her husband out of prison and later helps to prosecute the man who put him there.

Double Victory: How African-American Women Broke Race and Gender Barriers to Help Win World War II by Cheryl Mullenbach. For something more uplifting on this side of the Atlantic, try this singular book.