Women in Nazi Germany, Part 1
The treatment and status of women under Hitler and the Nazis is fascinating, in all the wrong ways. If the Nazi reputation wasn’t bad enough, the detail presented in this episode shows that there’s no bottom to their depravity. Professor Philip Nash explains all in the first part of a major two-part series. These are among our best shows ever! Episode 560.
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Buzzkill Bookshelf
Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics
by Claudia Koonz
National Book Award Nominee
American Library Association Notable Book
An Outstanding Book in Women’s History at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
From the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime to the destruction of Hitler in his bunker, Germany has been studied, explicated, and psychoanalyzed time and again. Yet there have been few detailed investigations into the historical and cultural roles played by German women in modern times. This important book, which Kirkus called “original and intriguing,” corrects this imbalance.
Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research and fieldwork, presents startling evidence that these women were more than “desk murderers” or comforters of murderous German men: they went on “shopping sprees” and romantic outings to the Jewish ghettos; they were present at killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also shooting Jews. And Lower uncovers the stories of SS wives with children of their own whose brutality is as chilling as any in history.
Hitler’s Furies challenges our deepest beliefs: women can be as brutal as men, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.
“Disquieting . . . Earlier books about the Holocaust have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity . . . [Lower’s] insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity.” — New York Times
“An unsettling but significant contribution to our understanding of how nationalism, and specifically conceptions of loyalty, are normalized, reinforced, and regulated.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
“Compelling . . . Lower brings to the forefront an unexplored aspect of the Holocaust.” — Washington Post
