Posted on 10/15/2013 2:49:04 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In Hitlers Furies, recently placed on the long list for the National Book Award, Wendy Lower presents the harrowing evidence of crimes committed by German women during the Holocaust. Dwight Garner wrote that previous books have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity and Ms. Lowers revisionist insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Lower discussed the changing view of womens role in the Nazi regime, the challenges of writing for a non-academic audience, what she found most shocking in her research and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q. What did you discover that most surprised you while researching and writing the book?
A.
I had read about the cruelties of male perpetrators in militarized killing units, such as the ordinary men Christopher Browning wrote about, but the settings and forms of violence perpetrated by German women surprised and puzzled me. Of course we know that women can be violent, but how does one explain someone like Liesel Willhaus, who killed Jews for sport from her balcony with her child at her side?
(Excerpt) Read more at artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Alfred Hitchcock tried to educate us regarding the “banality of evil” but we didn’t learn our lessons like we should of. Now we’re seeing it live and in person in our daily lives and interestingly going back in history and learning about it from an historical perspective. I don’t think Hitch would be surprised to read this.
Check out Erma Griese,a female SS guard at Buchenwald.
It all started with the children in the schools.
how does one explain someone like Liesel Willhaus, who killed Jews for sport from her balcony with her child at her side?
Ask Cher, she seems to be thrilled with the prospect of killing conservatives.
Every society has their share, Cher?, of sick individuals. Not condoning, excusing or dismissing, but seems to me that the Japanese were just as horrible as the Germans in the mistreatment of conquered peoples(nothing like the mass murder of the Jews)and probably surpassed the Germans in their “medical” experimentation on prisoners and innocents.
I agree ‘’cripplecreek’’. The truth is though The Holocaust began the moment Adolph Hitler opened his mouth and the German people shut theirs.
The Holocaust could not be possible without significant involvement of the ordinary German folk. It’s foolish to imagine that 6+ million people could be snuffed out without the participation of the common ‘myriad small creatures’ that populated Germany.
It’s a hard lesson in there for the rest of us, that if such a thing could happen in a culture “blessed” by an enlightenment of sorts, it can happen anywhere else, too. You don’t always need to be primitive to become barbarian.
6 million? Wasn’t it 13 million? Only some of them count?
We have a winner!! 13 Million people killed. Why the extra 7 million are left out by some is a mystery to me.
So much for the myths that there would be no war if women or gheys ruled the world.
Stalin’s 20 million killed get overlooked as well.
Then again, the Hollywood Reds were big on carrying about Mao’s Little Red Book.
So clearly dead bodies alone don’t generate headlines or writeups in the history books.
over 50 million kids have been killed by their mothers in America since 1973.
If you want to write a best seller, you only need 3 subjects. 1. Anything on SEX.
2. How to make a Million without working.
3. Put Hitler in the title.
1) Elect the same people that led them into WW1 and the economic crisis that followed.(Yes I know German had a Kaiser)
2) Communists and the slaughter that the Reds committed in Russia.
3)Elect the Nazis that promised to protect them from the horrors of an Russian led communist revolution and they also offered reforms that the conservative parties were reluctant to follow through.
It's damned easy to condemn those without the benefit of hindsight.
Germans could just as easily point the finger of blame to Americans for four hundred years of genocide, rape and slavery....
Nobody's hands are so clean...
>> Its foolish to imagine that 6+ million people could be snuffed out without the participation of the common myriad small creatures that populated Germany.
My ex mother-in-law (now 15 years in her grave) was an Austrian; born in Vienna, and a teenager in WWII. She married a Hungarian, and later escaped from Budapest during the 1957 revolution, came to the USA, and became naturalized American citizen.
On one occasion we were visiting Vienna, and we passed a side street named Judengasse (the “little street of the Jews”). I asked “did you know what was going on then with the deportations?” Her answer: “What do you think we were - stupid? Of course we knew. Jews on Friday; Nazis on Monday.”
You mean like killing children and mothers...
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