The Telegraph reports:
"In Nazi art, films and magazines, women were always portrayed as the fairer sex, fighting on the home-front as their menfolk fought on the battlefields.
Adolf Hitler awarded them gold crosses for rearing children and honoured their role as wives and mothers - a soft image that was rarely questioned after the war.
But a new book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very different reality.
'Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective conscious of the Germans for a long time,' she wrote in the book, Female Perpetrators: Women under National Socialism.
Many women were in fact used as assistants to the doctors who sterilised and murdered disabled people and as guards in the concentration camps - like the character played by Kate Winslet in her Oscar nominated role in the film The Reader.
'The history of National Socialism has long been reduced to one that blamed men for everything,' said Ms Kompisch. 'This was and is the popular picture.' The true picture was very different.
'Women typed the statistics of the murdered victims of the SS Action Squads in the east, operated the radios which called up for more bullets, were invariably the secretaries - and sometimes much more - in all the Gestapo posts,' she said.
'And at the end of the war they tried to diminish their responsibility by saying they were just cogs in the all-male machine which gave the orders.'
Analysing pre and post-war statistics, Ms Kompisch found there were more government, private sector and military jobs to be had for women under Hitler than in peacetime.
The high-testosterone, all-male hierarchy of the Nazi state blocked out women from leadership positions from the very start, but the regime actively encouraged female participation in enforcing the Nazi terror at grassroots levels.
Most 'Blockwaerts'- apartment house snoops who reported on un-Nazi activities to the party - were women, who denounced their neighbours to the Gestapo if they suspected them of being ideologically unsound or Jewish.
The surviving files of the Gestapo in the city of Duesseldorf noted that women 'try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis.' 'Lower-middle or working-class urban women tended to be the ones who filed reports with the Gestapo, and such reports were most likely to lead to the persecution of the denounced party if he was a member of a group considered racially inferior, like the Poles,' said Ms Kompisch.
Some 3,200 women served in the concentration camps. Female guards were generally low-to-middle class and had little or no work experience, although SS records show that some were matrons, hairdressers, tram conductors or retired teachers."
In a New York Times article titled, "Nazism’s Feminine Side, Brutal and Murderous ‘Hitler’s Furies,’ by Wendy Lower, Examines German Women", the author the book discusses how many infamous women who rose to high positions due to their brutality, specially in concentration camps:
"Earlier books about the Holocaust have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity, figures like Ilse Koch, the so-called Bitch of Buchenwald, and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the highest-ranking woman in the Nazi Party.
Ms. Lower’s revisionist insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity. She follows more than a dozen German women — nurses, secretaries, schoolteachers, wives of SS officers — who stand in for an estimated 500,000 German women who went into the occupied East and thus undeniably stood, the author argues, in the killing fields.
'The role of German women in Hitler’s war can no longer be understood as their mobilization and victimization on the home front,' Ms. Lower says. 'Instead, Hitler’s Germany produced another kind of female character at war, an expression of female activism and patriotism of the most violent and perverse kind.'
Or, as she puts it more memorably, about SS wives who became perpetrators: 'These women displayed a capacity to kill while also acting out a combination of roles: plantation mistress; prairie Madonna in apron-covered dress lording over slave laborers; infant-carrying, gun-wielding hausfrau.'
Ms. Lower is a history professor at Claremont McKenna College, a consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author or co-author of several previous books about Nazi activities in places like Ukraine. 'Hitler’s Furies' has been placed on the long list for this year’s National Book Award in nonfiction.
Some of the women she follows were aides to so-called desk murderers, eagerly assisting their bosses. Others took part in the humiliation of Jews, or plundered their goods. Still others shot them from balconies or in forests. One smashed in a Jewish toddler’s head. Even those who did not directly take part in the killing of Jews, she says, could not claim ignorance about was going on. They were passive bystanders.
The last chapters of 'Hitler’s Furies' are infuriating and sickening for different reasons. Ms. Lower explores these women’s experiences after the war. Most simply slipped back into civilian life. Few of these hundreds of thousands of German women were prosecuted, and even fewer were punished.
“What happened to them?” Ms. Lower asks. “The short answer is that most got away with murder.'"Seems to me that Nazi women were in some ways more fanatical about their bigotry than men. They loved the Nazi regime so much that they were snitching on anyone who sounded like they had a different accent or even their own husbands for holding opposing political views as ways to control their own men. Women played vital roles in carrying out genocidal orders and some became some of the highest ranking women during World War 2.
This is the history that has been purposefully left out of your history books. That's the power of gynocentric historical whitewashing.
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