A virtuosic feat of scholarship, signaling a need for even more research.
A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler’s murderers.
Doing “women’s work” included participating in the entire Nazi edifice, from filling the government’s genocide offices to running the concentration camps, Holocaust Memorial Museum historical consultant Lower (History/Claremont McKenna Coll.) proves ably in this fascinating history. With a third of the female German population engaged in the Nazi Party, and increasing as the war went on, the author estimates that at least 500,000 of them were sent east from 1939 onward to help administer the newly occupied territories in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. They were also enlisted to run Heinrich Himmler’s Race and Resettlement Office, work in military support positions, and serve as teachers and nurses in the field hospitals and on train platforms. As key “agents of the Nazi empire-building, tasked with the constructive work in the German civilizing process,” why were so few brought to a reckoning after the war? Sifting through testimonies, letters, memoirs and interviews and pursuing the stories of a dozen key players, the author exposes a historical blind spot in this perverse neglect of women’s role in history. She finds that, similar to American women being allowed new freedoms during the war years, young German women often seized the chance to flee stifling domestic situations and join up or were actively conscripted and fully indoctrinated into anti-Semitic, genocidal policies. Many were trained in the eastern territories, and some of their select tasks included euthanizing the disabled, “resettling” abducted children and plundering Jewish property. The women’s newfound sense of power next to men proved deadly, writes Lower. That their agency in these and other crucial tasks was largely ignored remains a haunting irony of history.
A virtuosic feat of scholarship, signaling a need for even more research.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-86338-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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