Hitler's Furies

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, January 2014; written by Kelly Johnson.

Usually when I write Ad Libs I type about new cookbooks (there are always at least one or two great new cookbooks – and there are a few right now that I’m really loving) or graphic novels (‘You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack’ is too funny!) or series (there is a new Anita Blake by Laurell K Hamilton and TWO new Alien books by Gini Koch) or best of all the Teen Advisory Group. But on very rare occasions I run across a book I just fall into and can’t seem to escape so I share them to help myself climb out.

‘Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields’ by Wendy Lower is a fascinating work – a thorough insight into the women of Nazi Germany and their actions and inaction in what is considered the ‘killing fields’ or the Nazi East. Ms. Lower states that “The varied experiences of German women and men in the eastern occupied territories as they became direct witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators of the Holocaust broadened and deepened their anti-Semitic behavior. Anti-Semitism there took on many forms, more elaborate and extreme than in the Reich, where sustained, visible violence was not tolerated and the “Bolshevik” threat was not directly encountered… The eastern experience proved transformative. It was in the eastern territories that Nazi anti-Semitism found its fullest expression and most profound development, and for some the anti-Semitic ideas absorbed there were not discredited by the defeat of Hitler’s Germany.”

Male and female came to the Nazi party from a variety of backgrounds, from the poor and uneducated to the working classes to the elite of society. They were ambitious, anti-Semitic, patriotic and many shared Hitler’s “imperialistic arrogance”, they were also, on the majority, quite young. Ms. Lower notes that “The Nazi regime mobilized a generation of young female revolutionaries who were conditioned to accept violence, to incite it, to commit it, in defense of or as an acceleration of Germany’s superiority. This fact has been suppressed and denied by the very women who were swept up in the regime and of course by those who perpetrated the violence with impunity. Genocide is also women’s business. When given the ‘opportunity,’ women too will engage in it, even the bloodiest aspects of it. Minimizing women’s culpability to a few thousand brainwashed and misguided camp guards does not accurately represent the reality of the Holocaust.”

Himmler himself realized that women had to be an active, involved part of the labor force of the Nazis in order to make the organization work well. He instituted the SS-Frauenkorps and created an elite training program to get the women into the workplace from administrators, secretaries, and receptionists to guards, nurses and more. Their organization skills and individual abilities helped keep the Nazi war machine going and the mass murder of any and all types moving forward as Hitler wanted.

In fact, according to Ms. Lower, the first mass killers of the Nazi regime were not concentration camp guards or the mass shooters in the Ukraine, but the nurses of the Reich who administered death to the deformed, disabled, dysfunctional and aged. It was done not in the name of war, but in the name of progress and the ‘health of the nation’. Even before the Nazis invaded Poland they were recruiting for and implementing a program of “euthanasia” to end the problem of ‘racial degeneration’. These medical personnel eventually murdered “more than two hundred thousand people in Germany, Austria and the annexed Reich borderlands of Poland, and the Czech lands. Close to four hundred medical institutions would become stationary murder operations of racial screening, and selection, cruel experimentation, mass sterilization, starvation, and poisoning.”

Ms. Lower tells of Pauline Kneissler – one of the more infamous ‘nurse-killers’ who began her work in Germany and then was sent to the east to train other nurses to do her style of ‘cleansing’. She also traveled to a variety of institutions to collect patients to be brought to Grafeneck Castle where her grisly tasks were carried out. As with many of Hitler’s Furies she did not see her work as evil or even wrong. She felt that ‘death by gas doesn’t hurt’ and that the she “Never understood mercy killing as murder.”

Indeed Ms. Lower shows that the horrors of the Holocaust became such a part of everyday life in the killing fields that honeymoons and shopping expeditions were held in the Jewish ghettos, coffee and cake were served at executions to the executors and their wives, and shooting parties often added the Jews who were sent into the woods to stir up game to the list of ‘varmints’ to shoot.

‘Hitler’s Furies’ is a disturbing read to be sure, but it is also a fascinating look at what has been generally ignored – that women also participated in the atrocities that occurred in and around Germany before and during World War II, not only in the camps, but in the streets, fields, woods, hospitals, and everyday life of a horrific time. If you have any interest in the time period or women’s history I would seriously recommend this work.