Wendy Lower's book is a deeply researched and clearly written study of female witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators in German-occupied Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. It focuses on four categories of German women who were present in the East as the Nazi movement intensified: three are occupational (teachers, nurses, and secretaries) and the fourth is legal: wives (of SS camp commanders or district commissars). Lower's sources allow her to reconstruct the activities of thirteen women: one teacher, three nurses, four secretaries, and five wives. She divides them into four witnesses, three accomplices, and six killers—the latter being a nurse, a secretary, and four of the wives. Her chapters on accomplices and perpetrators are especially accomplished, using vivid details from wartime documentation, postwar trials, eyewitness and victim testimony, as well as the women themselves to paint a damning portrait of women who helped men commit terrible crimes or, in some cases, committed them on their own—including the calculated murder of children. A final chapter on what happened to the thirteen women after 1945 discusses individual histories in the context of the (lack of) prosecution of women perpetrators in East and, especially, West Germany.

Lower presents her study, which is aimed at a general audience, as a corrective to the historiographical neglect of German women's participation in the Holocaust. Women's agency has not only been ignored but also denied, she argues. Women are seen as victims of the Third Reich, a sexist regime that ruled over them and relegated them to the private sphere. In the immediate postwar period, when the Allies interrogated witnesses and tried perpetrators, they focused on crimes committed by SS and Nazi leaders, on the one hand, and crimes that occurred in institutionalized settings, especially camps, on the other. The postwar press presented the women involved in these atrocities as “monsters”—not as normal women. As scholarship on the Holocaust has shifted to the “Holocaust by bullets” and to exposing the wide participation of German society in the persecution, expropriation, and extermination of European Jewry, women have been left out because they were assumed not to be present in the killing fields.

These assumptions are challenged by Lower. Young German women had a considerable presence in the towns and villages of the “frontier” areas in the occupied East. A generational cohort, as she calls them, roughly seventeen to thirty years old, was enmeshed in institutions, including the police and army, and in marriages that provided them with many “opportunities” to witness and/or commit the crimes discussed in the book: expropriation of Jewish movable assets; desk work that contributed to the implementation of the Holocaust; exploitation and terrorization of Jewish slave laborers; and even the murder of Jews. The crimes that can be found in the historical record involving German women in the killing fields, Lower argues, are just the tip of the iceberg of offenses committed by German women in occupied East Europe and the Soviet Union.

Lower's arguments are plausible but less original than she sometimes implies. She writes, for example: “Minimizing women's culpability to a few thousand brainwashed and misguided camp guards does not accurately represent the reality of the Holocaust” (166). It is unclear who has done the minimizing. As the book's notes show, over the past twenty years, scholars have, in fact, produced a number of monographs that examine the roles of nurses, SS wives, female Eastern settlers, and other women who lived and worked inside the Reich or in the Eastern occupied areas. More problematic is her repeated claim that German women are all viewed sympathetically and seen as victims. She states, for instance, that “the entire population of German women (almost forty million in 1939) cannot be considered a victim group” (11). Again, it is unclear who currently considers them as such. Certainly, after World War II, Germans separated women into a few evil guards, many rape victims, and even more numerous “rubble women.” It is also true that in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of feminist historians and writers presented women as victims of the Third Reich and its war. Yet, it was also feminist scholars such as Claudia Koonz and Gisela Bock, among others, who engaged almost thirty years ago in a contentious debate about women's roles under National Socialism. Since then, feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Harvey, Gudrun Schwarz, and Franka Maubach have moved beyond the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, as well as the private/public divide, contributing significantly to research that has exposed women's participation in euthanasia actions, colonialist exploitation, and the Holocaust.

This book “focuses on the transformations of individual women in the inner workings and outer landscapes of the Holocaust” (9), but does not offer a gendered analysis of the case studies. As a result, Lower's understanding of gender relations under National Socialism remains unclear. She asserts, “These women filled positions in the Nazi hierarchy from the very bottom to the very top” (5). This statement sounds almost as if Lower believes women shared power with men in the Third Reich. Other statements indicate, however, that she sees a gendered hierarchy of power. She writes, for example, that “some of the worst female perpetrators were women without an official role in assisting with crimes—women who acted out their hatred and expressed their power in informal settings. These were wives who joined their husbands—high-ranking officials in the Nazi party, SS and police, and the occupation administration—in the East” (62). She insightfully points to “partnerships in crime” (62), but does not analyze them as part of a gendered system that may have structured male and female participation in this violent frontier society.

Lower includes an interesting chapter on what motivated female accomplices and perpetrators, but does not take a position on the relative significance of belief, as opposed to situation. The title Hitler's Furies recalls Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), a phrase coined by Daniel Goldhagen. Lower writes, “Hitler's Furies were not marginal sociopaths. They believed that their violent deeds were justified acts of revenge meted out to enemies of the Reich; such deeds were, in their minds, expressions of loyalty” (4). She seems to follow Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men, 1992), however, when she states, “Ordinary young women with a typical prewar biography, not just a small group of Nazi fanatics, went East and became involved in the crimes of the Holocaust, including killing” (144). Her discussion of motives draws on social psychological explanations, as does Browning in Ordinary Men, although she incorporates cultural interpretations as well.

This book offers an important contribution to the literature on women under National Socialism, the motivations of perpetrators, and the German occupation of the East. One wishes, however, that Lower had provided her readers with at least some orientation toward existing historiographical debates about these issues.