Hitler's Furies

Hitler’s Furies is a long overdue and superb addition to the history of the Holocaust. The role of women perpetrators during the Final Solution has been too much glossed over. Wendy Lower’s book provides an important and stunning corrective. It is a significant addition to our understanding of the role of ordinary Germans in the Reich’s genocide.

Deborah Lipstadt, author of The Eichmann Trial

Lower shifts away from the narrow focus on the few thousand female concentration camp guards who have been at the center of previous studies of female culpability in Nazi crimes and identifies the cluster of professions—nurses, social workers, teachers, office workers—that in addition to family connections brought nearly one-half million women to the German East and into close proximity with pervasive Nazi atrocities. Through the lives of carefully researched individuals, she captures a spectrum of career trajectories and behavior. This is a book that artfully combines the study of gender with the illumination of individual experience.

Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Hitler’s Furies will be experienced and remembered as a turning point in both women’s studies and Holocaust studies

Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands

Hitler's Furies is the first book to follow the biographical trajectories of individual women whose youthful exuberance, loyalty to the Führer, ambition, and racism took them to the deadliest sites in German-occupied Europe. Drawing on immensely rich source material, Wendy Lower integrates women perpetrators and accomplices into the social history of the Third Reich, and illuminates them indelibly as a part of post-war East and West German memory that has been, until this book, unmined

Claudia Koonz, author of Mothers in the Fatherland

A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler’s murderers... A virtuosic feat of scholarship

Kirkus

Wendy Lower's book interweaves the experiences of 13 ordinary women who went to work in the East... for some of these women, violence and murder became part of a rich brew of new-found power... Lower argues, they collectively show the role of women in the Holocaust has been underplayed; obscured by their later stereotypes as heroic 'rubble women' clearing up the mess of Germany's past, victims of Red Army rapists, or flirtatious dolls who entertaned American GIs

Ben Shephard, Observer (New Review)

Hitler's Furies turns on its head the idea that women are innately more nurturing, kind and moral than men... While the accepted wisdom on female participation in the Holocaust singles out the sadistic behaviour of a few women guards in the concentration camps, such behaviour is usually contrasted with the myth of German female ignorance of the horrors. A veil has largely been drawn over the actions of the rest. Not any more

Eleanor Mills, Sunday Times (News Review)

Disquieting... Earlier books about the Holocaust have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity... Ms Lower's revisionist insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity

Dwight Garner, New York Times

Until now it has been imagined that the Holocaust was perpetrated mainly by men and that female involvement was marginal. However, Ms Lower's research contradicts this.

Jewish Chronicle

The Nazi regime is synonymous with men. The horrors of the Holocaust were, in the main, perpetrated by males. But there were tens of thousands of German women who took part in the Nazis' monstrous and murderous activities on the Eastern Front. The stories are told in Wendy Lower's new book

Jewish Telegraph

builds a picture of a morally lost generation of young women, born into a defeated, post-WW1 Germany, and swept up in the fervour of the Nazi movement

Sunday Telegraph

Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women – many more than previously imagined in the sort of mass, monstrous, murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler sex were incapable of

Tony Rennell, Daily Mail Ireland

As gripping and eye-opening as it is chilling

Andrea Walker, People

Through a combination of archive material and interviews, the historian Wendy Lower has unearthed evidence of women who witnessed and even perpetrated atrocities in the Third Reich's eastern-most territories, where most of the murders took place... her stark, often harrowing book is a valuable addition to Holocaust studies

Ian Critchley, Sunday Times

Stomach-churning

Illtyd Harrington, West End Extra

Compelling... Lower's careful research proves that the capacity for indifferent cruelty is not reserved for men – it exists in all of us

Renae Merle, Washington Post

As pioneering as it is readable

Literary Review

She writes engagingly, wears her considerable erudition lightly…never allowing her analysis to outweigh the fundamental humanity of the stories

New Statesman

Lower’s impressive analysis is a painful but transfixing read

Christopher Hirst, Independent

A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler’s murderers... A virtuosic feat of scholarship

Kirkus