Women’s Role in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions

By ISABEL KERSHNER

From The New York Times

JERUSALEM — Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.

There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.

The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.

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Comments

Paramjit Ramana said…
Forget about camps in Germany. That was more than sixty-five years ago. you need not conduct any research to know what Jews and Israil are doing to religious and ethnic minorities today. Raise you voice for those persecuted women, children and men. No UNO or any other organisation is doing anything. today the worst crimes against humanity are comitted by Israil, America and their henchmen. we just need to go into the history of inception of Taliban and the raising of Saddam Hussain to know the real face of imperialist America. where are weapons of mass destruction that were said to be stored in Iraq? those were never found, but oil was.
Rajesh Sharma said…
I disagree. The Nazis' death camps have yet to be assimilated into our consciousness. American imperialist violence cannot be pushed out of sight, but there is something about Fascist violence that remains a real threat in several societies today.

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