May 15, 2013
History chair at Claremont McKenna College and a research associate of the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitat in Munich, Lower spent two decades conducting interviews and digging through archives (including key post-Soviet material) to show that during World War II German women were actively involved in killing Jews. A BEA Editors' Buzz book.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 15, 2013
A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler's murderers. Doing "women's work" included participating in the entire Nazi edifice, from filling the government's genocide offices to running the concentration camps, Holocaust Memorial Museum historical consultant Lower (History/Claremont McKenna Coll.) proves ably in this fascinating history. With a third of the female German population engaged in the Nazi Party, and increasing as the war went on, the author estimates that at least 500,000 of them were sent east from 1939 onward to help administer the newly occupied territories in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. They were also enlisted to run Heinrich Himmler's Race and Resettlement Office, work in military support positions, and serve as teachers and nurses in the field hospitals and on train platforms. As key "agents of the Nazi empire-building, tasked with the constructive work in the German civilizing process," why were so few brought to a reckoning after the war? Sifting through testimonies, letters, memoirs and interviews and pursuing the stories of a dozen key players, the author exposes a historical blind spot in this perverse neglect of women's role in history. She finds that, similar to American women being allowed new freedoms during the war years, young German women often seized the chance to flee stifling domestic situations and join up or were actively conscripted and fully indoctrinated into anti-Semitic, genocidal policies. Many were trained in the eastern territories, and some of their select tasks included euthanizing the disabled, "resettling" abducted children and plundering Jewish property. The women's newfound sense of power next to men proved deadly, writes Lower. That their agency in these and other crucial tasks was largely ignored remains a haunting irony of history. A virtuosic feat of scholarship, signaling a need for even more research.
COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
October 15, 2013
Lower (history, Claremont McKenna Coll.) undertook extensive archival research in European, U.S., and Israeli archives to address the "puzzling omission" of German women in Holocaust history. In introducing readers to SS wives, Red Cross nurses, clerical workers, etc., who volunteered to head east to newly Nazi-occupied territories, she illustrates the significant role of women in perpetrating the Holocaust. Some may have found what they witnessed abhorrent but felt little power to stop it (one nurse kept detailed notes but encountered little later interest in prosecuting the crimes), while others ignored the horrors. Some, like one Liselotte Meier, participated with zeal, following her SS love interest to the east to engage both in office work and in murdering Jews. Johanna Altvater Zelle delighted in killing Jewish children, then blended back into the fabric of society in postwar Germany as a social worker responsible for children. These women made use of the maternal stereotype to gain the trust of children who became victims. VERDICT Lower shows that the Nazi killing fields were not merely the isolated concentration camps but the occupied territories as well and that women played a large role, one that was neither punished nor subsequently studied. Perhaps that will now change.--PM
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.