In her interdisciplinary study, combining literature, history, and memory, Elisabeth Krimmer explores if and how German women reflected in their life writing on their own entanglement—as supporters and bystanders—with the National Socialist regime. Based on written memoirs, diaries, docunovels, and autobiographically inspired fiction, Krimmer presents an in-depth picture of the motivations and later reflections of women on forms of complicity and support with and of a murderous regime during World War II. While arguing that these questions have not been adressed by the historical research until now, it seems a little strange that Krimmer is ignoring some recent studies on the widespread specific involvement of women acting in the “NS-Volksgemeinschaft” (e.g., Nicole Kramer, Volksgenossinnen an der Heimatfront. Mobilisierung, Verhalten, Erinnerung [2011]; Klaus Latzel, Elissa Mailänder, and Franka Maubach, ed., Geschlechterbeziehungen und “Volksgemeinschaft” [2018]).

In the center of Krimmer's study lies the analysis of a corpus of largely unknown texts by women, which display a “grammar of complicity” characterized by narrative ruptures, conceptual and visual blind spots, and silences (3). This “grammar of complicity” may display the more or less silent commitment of women to the crimes and cruelties of the Nazi regime mixed with notions of self-victimization, especially when German women suffered during World War II. Interestingly enough, Krimmer juxtaposes texts by army auxiliaries and nurses, female refugees and rape victims, with those by Holocaust survivors, who clearly articulate the complicity of the majority of German women.

After her methodological and theoretically rich introduction, Krimmer analyzes in chapter 2 the narratives of five army auxiliaries, the famous pilot Hanna Reitsch among them. The texts were written in the period spanning from the end of World War II until the 2000s. Krimmer is able to show in these women's writings attitudes ranging “from blanket denial” of the Holocaust to “remorseful reflection” (60). But in all cases, the texts include fragmented thoughts, abrupt shifts, and narrative blank spots. Even Hanna Reitsch, who was in very close contact with the Nazi elite and who contributed as a test pilot significantly to the improvement of the German air force, stated that flying was a completely apolitical activity, thereby arguing that she was completely unaware of the Holocaust.

In her third chapter, Krimmer focuses on nurses, who in postwar literature were described as innocent “angels in white,” healing the body and soul of the wounded soldiers. Instead, Krimmer's reading of memoirs such as those by army nurses Erika Summ and Inge Ochsenknecht shows “how these women learned to turn a blind eye to any and all experiences that were likely to disturb their emotional and cognitive equilibrum, including their own conformity with a genocidal regime” (19). In contrast, inmate nurses in Nazi concentration camps had to refocus their gaze and redefine the meaning of care—issues that they broadly discussed in their life writings.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with narratives by and about women whose complicity was offset by their victimization. Chapter 4 engages with the complicity of rape victims in the National Socialist regime of terror. Stories of wartime rape present a dual challenge because it is important not to silence the victims of rape but also not to hesitate to point out the ideological blind spots regarding the legacy of racism that the written memories may imply. Furthermore, Krimmer argues that “complicity is at the heart of the silence that attends narratives of rape” (145). In Chapter 5, the author analyzes autobiographically inspired texts about the refugee treks. The stories are highly gendered and display the great difficulty of creating narratives that can do justice to individual suffering while acknowledging one's own role in stabilizing and supporting the Nazi regime.

“A View from Outside” is the title of chapter 6—an important counterpart to the narratives of complicity. The life writings of Jewish women highlight their constant exposure to daily antisemitism and thereby the structure of complicity of the “Aryan” German population. In memoirs by female Holocaust survivors, German women are portrayed as “indifferent onlookers at best and devoted Nazis as worst” (201). Especially see Marie Jalowicz Simon's Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival at the Heart of Nazi Germany (2015), which shows that the motivations of helpers were comlex. Some were driven by friendship or spontaneous kindness; others took advantage of the Jews’ plight, demanding huge sums of money in exchange for shelter and food, or forced Jews to work as domestic slaves, eventually even exploiting them sexually.

In her book, Elisabeth Krimmer studies the forms of complicity from very different angles and perspectives. She shows a way of reading and analyzing texts that at first sight seem to resist contextualization. One of the book's strengths is that Krimmer also includes texts by Holocaust survivors who openly illustrate the complicity, which especially many female supporters and bystanders of the Nazi regime tried to hide for several decades. Only two critical points are worth mentioning. Krimmer analyzes a whole range of different texts, which makes it sometimes difficult to keep track of the central argument. Secondly, the author neglects the question of reception of texts in terms of both quantity and quality. But despite this, Krimmer succeeds in exploring the intersection of literary and historical approaches.