Hitler's Furies by Wendy Lower

Hitler's Furies by Wendy Lower covers the role of women on the Eastern Front during World War II.  The daily lives of women serving various roles from horrified bystanders to active participants in the Holocaust.  

Wide discretion was given to local field offices when it came to sending Jews to concentration camps, mass shootings and the gas chambers.  Often female clerical workers in branch offices made the final choice.  One woman was saved because she hadn't finished sewing an item for one of the secretaries.

The book is filled with specific details providing a forensic analysis of German women's life in occupied territories.  For example: one of the women noted that the well water at a location had a foul taste which she attributed to the run off from the decaying corpses in the large number of mass graves nearby.  

Indoctrination of students was very systematic.  Adults and children read books highlighting the need for Germans to have more room to expand and the need for more land to provide breathing space.  This set up the necessity to occupy territory to the east of Germany.  The dehumanization of Jews was also as systematic.  

The book highlights the big and small roles women had in maintaining the Nazi power structure.  Nurses providing lethal injections, secretaries passing along war correspondence, female prison guards having discretion to be professional or brutal, and wives of Gestapo officers shooting Jews while hunting the woods when no other wildlife was to be found.  

The capacity of humans to be kind or unkind is not limited to gender, race or religious affiliation.  The capacity for good and evil is present in all along with the free will to act on that capacity. 

Wendy Lower reads from Hitler's Furies - 6 min.