Showing results by author "Wendy Lower" in All Categories

Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the Führer, pales in comparison to Lower’s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly in the killing fields of the expanding Reich.

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators.

Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine, the "jewel" of the Nazi empire. In this unprecedented attempt at Nazi empire building, violence, racism, antisemitism, and militarism pervaded all aspects of everyday life. Lower argues that it was in the eastern outposts of the Reich, such as Ukraine, that the regime's core beliefs, aims, and practices were revealed.

Photographic images of the Holocaust are very rare. The perpetrators were careful to avoid leaving visual evidence of what they did in Poland and the Soviet Union during and after the summer of 1941. But Wendy Lower discovered an old print that captured the moment a woman and child were shot and pushed into a pit by two riflemen, while another uniformed figure looks complacently on. Through diligent research in archives and interviews with descendants and survivors, Wendy Lower was able to identify the place, the time and the identity of the killers and witnesses.

Det traditionelle billede af de tyske kvinder som trofaste hustruer, der passede hjemmefronten, blegner ved Wendy Lowers Hitlers furier, en rystende beretning om de 500.000 unge tyske kvinder, som befandt sig på Østfronten, hvor de bevidnede og deltog i nazisternes folkemord under Anden Verdenskrig.

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 Führer. Then they became the Trümmerfrauen, or Rubble Women, as they cleared and tidied their ruined country to get it back on its feet. They were Germany’s heroines. The few women tried and convicted after the war were simply the evil aberrations - the camp guards, the female Nazi elite - that proved this rule. However, Wendy Lower’s research into the very ordinary women who went out to the Nazi Eastern Front reveals an altogether different story.