Epilogue

Summary

“WIR KENNEN DIE FLEISSIGE TRÜMMERFRAU und die von Rotarmisten vergewaltigte Frau. Wir kennen die Opferfrau. Die Täterfrau kennen wir kaum” (We know all about the woman of the rubble and the woman raped by a Red Army soldier. We know the woman as victim. We barely know the woman as perpetrator). This sentiment was repeated frequently in newspaper reviews of Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013; Hitlers Helferinnen: Deutsche Frauen im Holocaust, 2014), a historical study seeking to challenge the stereotypes about women's moral innocence and political passivity that I examine in this book. Using material that has become accessible to Western scholars since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lower unfolds the biographies of thirteen German women who became witnesses, accomplices, or perpetrators of genocide in the Nazi East. Lower's gripping narrative style succeeded in opening up this history to a nonacademic audience. Hitler's Furies was a bestseller in the United States in 2013, a finalist for the National Book Foundation Award for Nonfiction, and extensively reviewed in Anglo-American and German newspapers.

These feats are remarkable for a study of women and National Socialism. Claudia Koonz's study Mothers in the Fatherland (1986) was admittedly nominated for a Book Award in 1987 and reviewed in English- Language publications such as The Guardian and the New York Times. In Germany, however, it garnered little attention in the media. Even the so-called Historikerinnenstreit (female historians’ dispute) between Koonz and Gisela Bock in 1992 caused “barely a ripple” on the surface of mainstream cultural memory. While the male historian's dispute between scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Ernst Nolte, and Andreas Hillgruber unfolded in major newspapers, the debate between Bock and Koonz played out in an academic journal. Until Lower's book, no academic study of women and National Socialism received more than sporadic media coverage in Germany, unlike widely discussed studies of male perpetrators such as Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992), Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), or the Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (Crimes of the Wehrmacht) exhibition that originally ran from 1995 until 2001. As Christine Richard speculated in her review of Lower's book, “mag sein, dass die massgeblichen Medienmänner nur ungern am edlen Frauenbild kratzen” (it may well be that the leading men of the media are reluctant to chip away at the noble image of woman).