"Revealed: Women's Role in Nazi Crimes" German historian Kathrin Kompisch released a book in February called
Female Perpetrators: Women Under National Socialism with the purpose of revealing the secret history of the role of German women in perpetrating violence against targeted groups during the Holocaust. Kompisch explains in this article with the
Telegraph that the history of Nazism in Germany largely focused on placing the blame on men as the sole perpetrators because they were the ones who held leadership positions. With her book, though, she wanted to break down the “popular picture” depicted in propaganda that the only responsibility of non-Jewish German women was motherhood. In the article Kompisch said that many women active in the Nazi party during the war attempted to downplay their roles as perpetrators afterward by stating that they had been caught up in the male-dominated “machine” that gave them the orders they followed.
The book points out that many women instead performed significant active roles for the Nazi regime by filling positions including assistants to doctors who performed sterilization procedures, radio operators, and Gestapo secretaries who recorded statistics on victims murdered by the SS. It was also common that women, specifically in Dusseldorf, would denounce their husbands as Communists or anti-Nazi spies to the authorities, leading to arrests that would change the family power structure and make women the heads of their households.
This sounded like it fit with the topic of our class because it examines the role of women in the Holocaust, but women active
specifically on the perpetrators’ side who carried out orders and violence against the many groups marginalized by the Nazis. The book has only been published in German in Germany so far but it sounds as if it would be a fascinating and informative read when it’s released here.