Hitler's Furies

Wendy Lower's stunning account of the role ofGerman women on the Eastern Front-not only as plunderers and directwitnesses but as actual killers-powerfully revises history. Many youngnurses, teachers, secretaries, and wives saw the emerging Nazi empire as a kindof "Wild East" of opportunity, yet they could not have imagined what theywould do there. Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research andfieldwork on the Holocaust, access to post-Soviet documents, and interviewswith...
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Wendy Lower's stunning account of the role ofGerman women on the Eastern Front-not only as plunderers and directwitnesses but as actual killers-powerfully revises history. Many youngnurses, teachers, secretaries, and wives saw the emerging Nazi empire as a kindof "Wild East" of opportunity, yet they could not have imagined what theywould do there. Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research andfieldwork on the Holocaust, access to post-Soviet documents, and interviewswith German witnesses, presents compelling evidence that these women wenton "shopping sprees" and romantic outings to the Jewish ghettos of Poland, Ukraine,and Belarus; that they were present at killing-field picnics, not onlyproviding refreshment but also taking part in the shooting of Jews. And Loweruncovers the stories of SS wives-with children of their own-whose brutality is as chilling as any in history.Hitler's Furies willchallenge our deepest beliefs using evidence hidden for seventy years: women can be just as brutal as men.