Wendy Lower Hitler's Furies

Annotation

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, and 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.