Hitler's Furies Quotes

“The consensus in Holocaust and genocide studies is that the systems that make mass murder possible would not function without the broad participation of society, and yet nearly all histories of the Holocaust leave out half of those who populated that society, as if women’s history happens somewhere else. It is an illogical approach and puzzling omission. The dramatic stories of these women reveal the darkest side of female activism. They show what can happen when women of varied backgrounds and professions are mobilized for war and acquiesce in genocide.”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“Goebbels famously remarked that “men organize life: women are their support and implement their decisions.”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“As we have seen, at least half a million women witnessed and contributed to the operations and terror of a genocidal war in the eastern territories. The Nazi regime mobilized a generation of young female revolutionaries who were conditioned to accept violence, to incite it, and to commit it, in defense of or as an assertion of German'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, eve 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.”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“half the population of a genocidal society is, in the historian Ann Taylor Allen’s words, “endowed with innocence of the crimes of the modern state,” and they are placed “outside of history itself.”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“Genocide as an idea and an act is a human”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“Like their male counterparts, Hitler's Furies came from several backgrounds: working class and well-to-do, educated and uneducated, Catholic and Protestant, urban and provincial. They were all ambitious and patriotic; to varying degrees they also shared the qualities of greed, anti-Semitism, racism, and imperialistic arrogance. And they were all young.”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“We will never know all there is to know about Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. No single story can relate it all, and the pieces that we uncover may not fit together to our satisfaction. But the collage of stories and memories, of cruelty and courage, while continuing to test our comprehension of history and humanity, helps us see what human beings - not only men, but women as well - are capable of believing and doing.”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“In many ways this book is about how we fail to reckon with the past, not so much as a historical reconstruction or morality tale, but as evidence of a recurring problem in which we all share responsibility. What are the blind spots and taboos that persist in our retelling of events, in individual accounts, memoirs, and national histories? Why does this history continue to haunt us, several generations and many miles removed, in places such as Grzenda?”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“Argonne Forest”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

“Dinaric”
― Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields