Hitler's Furies

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) is a work of historical nonfiction by Wendy Lower. A 2013 National Book Award Nonfiction Finalist, Hitler’s Furies sets out to show that many German women played an active role in supporting Hitler and Nazi Germany during World War II. Critics note that it’s one of the few history books that portray women as active rather than passive participants in Hitler’s brutality. Lower is an American writer best known for her books on the Holocaust and World War II. She served as a consultant for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and taught history at Claremont McKenna College.

In Hitler’s Furies, Lower argues that we deny the realities of the Holocaust if we refuse to accept the roles played by women during the Second World War. Although many women stayed home, raising children and supporting the German war effort, many others committed atrocities in Hitler’s name. Lower’s main premise is that, if we choose to ignore the violent acts perpetrated by women in Nazi Germany, we’re ignoring the facts and censoring history.

Lower examines the stories of 13 very different German women and considers the roles they played in the German war effort. The women have two things in common. First, they are all ambitious women who saw war as an opportunity to further their own careers and aspirations. Second, they are idealistic. They never imagined they would end up committing some of the worst crimes of World War II. Lower doesn’t intend to villainize these women. Instead, she shows how corrupting rampant idealism and ambition can be.



The first woman introduced by Lower is Ingelene Ivens. Ingelene is a schoolteacher sent to Poland to spread Nazi ideology. Although she accepts that children have a right to think for themselves, she can’t work as a teacher unless she is prepared to support the Nazis and teach the prescribed curriculum. Even if they don’t commit violent acts themselves, teachers like Ingelene are instrumental in indoctrinating children, inciting violence, and furthering the Nazi regime.

Other women, however, committed murderous acts. One such woman is Erna Petri, a middle-class woman married to SS Second Lieutenant Horst Petri. Together, they live on an immaculate, wealthy estate in the Ukrainian countryside. Though she has two children of her own, she is still capable of murdering six Jewish children in her own garden.

Erna found the children in the forest near her home. She knows that they have escaped a nearby concentration camp, and according to the Nazi regime, it is her duty to either hand them over or kill them herself. She lures them back to her home and feeds them before shooting them in the back of the head. She doesn’t feel remorse because these children, in her eyes, are the enemy. Erna is just one example of an ordinary middle-class woman who turned murderous in support of the Nazi regime.



Lower also looks at women who passively orchestrated mass murder. These women served SS officers and worked in the concentration camps. They worked as secretaries, typists, and personal assistants, and they ran gas chamber operations and sent out orders for soldiers to arrest and murder Jewish people. Lower notes that it’s impossible to know for sure how many women served Nazi Germany in this way, but the figure is likely higher than we can imagine.

Hitler’s Furies also shows the uneasy way that violence and normality coexisted in Nazi territories. For example, families ate picnics in full view of concentration camps and active crematoriums, and women walked with friends beside mass graves. Lower argues that, if these women felt remorse for their actions, they didn’t show it.

Women undertook some of the cruelest crimes and acts of violence against Jewish people in the entire Second World War, Lower argues. To support her argument, she tells the story of a German secretary living in Belarus with her commissioner lover. They lived together in a countryside mansion, and they hunted Jewish people for sport rather than hunting animals.



Another example is a Nazi chief’s daughter living in Poland after voluntarily signing up to support the war effort. One day, she writes a letter to her fiancé back in Germany. In the letter, she describes the cruelty against the Jewish people and how amusing it is. She believes that Jewish people are less than human and that they deserve death. This is a commonly held belief by Nazi supporters at the time, but, as Lower explains, we often forget that women are as much to blame for this as men.

Hitler’s Furies demonstrates that, during the Second World War, perfectly ordinary women turned monstrous in their support for a violent regime. These women aren’t sociopaths, psychopaths, or serial killers. They are normal people who were indoctrinated and corrupted to see Jewish people as the enemy, and they truly believed they were fighting for a better future.