A shocking new history of the role of German women in the Holocaust, not only as plunderers and direct witnesses, but as actual killers on the Eastern Front

"Hitler's Furies will be experienced and remembered as a turning point in both women's studies and Holocaust studies" Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands "Lower shifts away from the narrow focus on the few thousand female concentration camp guards who have been at the center of previous studies of female culpability in Nazi crimes and identifies the cluster of professions-nurses, social workers, teachers, office workers-that in addition to family connections brought nearly one-half million women to the German East and into close proximity with pervasive Nazi atrocities. Through the lives of carefully researched individuals, she captures a spectrum of career trajectories and behavior. This is a book that artfully combines the study of gender with the illumination of individual experience." Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland "A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler's murderers... A virtuosic feat of scholarship" Kirkus "Hitler's Furies is a long overdue and superb addition to the history of the Holocaust. The role of women perpetrators during the Final Solution has been too much glossed over. Wendy Lower's book provides an important and stunning corrective. It is a significant addition to our understanding of the role of ordinary Germans in the Reich's genocide." Deborah Lipstadt, author of The Eichmann Trial "Hitler's Furies is the first book to follow the biographical trajectories of individual women whose youthful exuberance, loyalty to the Fuhrer, ambition, and racism took them to the deadliest sites in German-occupied Europe. Drawing on immensely rich source material, Wendy Lower integrates women perpetrators and accomplices into the social history of the Third Reich, and illuminates them indelibly as a part of post-war East and West German memory that has been, until this book, unmined" Claudia Koonz, author of Mothers in the Fatherland

Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Chair of History at Claremont McKenna College and former research associate of the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitat in Munich. A historical consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she has conducted archival research and field work on the Holocaust for twenty years. She lives with her family in Los Angeles, CA, and Munich, Germany.