Title: Women and Nazis
Description: War atrocities cannot be segregated by gender and gender cannot be ignored when analyzing the crimes that culminated in the Third Reich's attempt to eradicate European Jewry and other suspect nationalities. Despite the Nazis' masculine-oriented policies towards women many women sought ways to become involved in Hitler's party and government. This remarkable research discusses the women who not only agreed with the Hitler's Weltanschauung but took an active part in mass genocide. Scholarship has tended to fundamentally overlook or dismiss the actions of this group; the author brings them to the fore of her remarkable investigation into their numbers and their influence. Further, the book examines the broad narrative of women as perpetrators (not as unwilling accomplices) of brutal genocidal acts. A number of individuals are studied, such as some of the nineteen in the Belsen trial of 1945 and others brought to trial by the Allies and also German authorities in postwar West Germany. In reality far fewer women were even processed for trial than men and this in the face of research that points to a much higher number of women guards and supervisors than the Allied forces acknowledged. This work, based on primary sources, is sure to be of great interest to students of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and genocide as a modern phenomena as well as scholars involved in women and gender studies.
Subjects: SS, Nazism, Holocaust, genocide, Women and World War Two, Aufseherin, Politics and government, Women Nazis, National socialism and women, Political activity, World War, 1939-1945, Women, Atrocities, Nazis, History
Places: Germany, Austria, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, Dachau
People: Irma Grese, Juana Bormann, Maria Mandl, Herta Oberheuser, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Ilse Koch, Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), Herta Bothe, Dorothea Binz
Time periods: 20th century, 1933-1945