An enduring, informed contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.
This scholarly biography of the most notorious female SS concentration camp guard pursues a fuller portrait than the caricature shaped during her 1945 war crimes trial.
Brown (The Camp Women: 2002, etc.) scours documentary evidence and interviews with surviving witnesses for clues to explain why Irma Grese, only 22 when she was hanged three months after her trial, became part of the SS killing machinery. She grew up 50 miles north of Berlin in a rural community where her father was a dairyman. When Grese was 12, her mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. At 14, Grese left school, worked menial jobs, apprenticed as a nursing aide and joined Nazi youth groups. After an incident with a pistol, her father banished her. Brown surveys the environment in which Nazism and Grese came of age together and concludes: “After serious conflict with her father and following the futility of attempting to find her niche in business, medicine, and farming, she sensed a genuine feeling of accomplishment as an SS Aufseherin.” Nazi ideology filled a void. Less clear is why she so thoroughly embraced the sadistic brutality that marked her tenures at Ravensbruck, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Brown’s scholarship is solid and exhaustive. A six-page glossary, historical photos, appendix of supporting documents, extensive source list, and index supplement the text. Footnotes often fill one-fourth of the page, creating an almost parallel narrative. The writing is clear and fluid, but the text, riddled with German terms, and the research the author crams into footnotes will challenge casual readers. The notes should be read and perhaps should have been incorporated into the narrative. First published in 1996, Brown updated this second edition in 2004, six years before retiring as a dean at Moorpark College. Given the growth of women’s studies programs, it’s easy to imagine new sources informing another update, but this work holds up well and remains relevant.
An enduring, informed contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2004
ISBN: 978-0-930860-15-8
Page Count: 143
Publisher: Albrecht
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An authoritative account from Civil War historian Davis (Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour, 1991) of the would-be Founding Fathers of the Confederacy. In February 1861, delegates from six states in the Deep South met in Montgomery, Ala., to form their own nation. Despite constant invocations of the spirit of 1776, their movement, in their own view, aimed at reform rather than revolution. Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) traces how the delegates hammered out a constitution that protected slavery, selected Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens as provisional president and vice president, and erected the jerry-built governmental apparatus that would turn their dreams of secession into reality. They were a varied lot, from ``fire-eaters'' who expected a swift, comparatively bloodless separation from the Union, to reluctant secessionists who correctly feared a slaughter. By May 1861, when the capital was moved to Richmond, Va., the seeds of the new government's destruction had already been planted. Davis disputes the often-suggested epitaph for the Confederacy, ``Died of States Rights,'' but his own account demonstrates that the correct label might better read, ``Died of States Rights and Swollen Egos.'' However idealistic the delegates might have been initially, by the time they moved to Richmond they were already beginning to regard Jefferson Davis with suspicion, arrogance, and frustrated ambition. Believing that ``the finest statesmen the South had to offer composed that Provisional Congress,'' William Davis is more charitable than the group deserves, and his narrative moves slowly. But he makes fine use of hundreds of often previously unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs, and he deftly captures the capital's climate as officeholders, office seekers, lobbyists, businessmen, and transients joined the mosquitoes in infesting Montgomery. Despite its flaws, a useful history of a relatively undercovered aspect of the Civil War. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-907735-4
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
The grand sweep of American history is writ small in this family history/memoir by humorist Frazier (Great Plains, 1989, etc.). Frazier undertook this effort after his parents died in the late 1980s, to ``find a meaning that would defeat death.'' But his project seems more complicated and self-conscious, if not pretentious: an attempt to somehow reclaim American history for himself, a white Protestant. His preoccupation with his own religious doubt, contrasted with the firm faith of his ancestors- -whether German Reformed, Old School Presbyterian, or, like his great-great-grandfather Simeon Frazier, a member of the antiauthoritarian Disciples of Christ—culminates in a strange, reductionist review of American history as an expression of the decline of Protestant faith. More broadly, Frazier shares indiscriminately with us every detail he has been able to root out: from the momentous (the arrival of Thomas Benedict on these shores in 1638 and his descendant Platt Benedict's founding of Norwalk, Ohio) to the trivial (his great-great-uncle Charles's first attempt at fly-fishing and his grandmother's showing family pictures to Tennessee Williams in Key West). The quantity of information that could have rendered full-blooded portraits of long-ago generations is lacking; the lengthy catalogs often offered (trite entries from a great-grandfather's school diary, quotations from his parents' rather ordinary love letters) seem like fillers. The histories of the Fraziers, Wickhams, Benedicts, and Hurshes do follow the outlines of American history: the push west (all his relatives ended up in Ohio); the Civil War (Norwalk was a stop on the underground railroad); industrialization (his father became a chemist for Sohio). But Frazier's prose is flat as a prairie and his humor dry as stone. Only at the end, in interviews with two colorful relatives, and with the description of the deaths of his teenage brother Fritz from leukemia and of his parents, does the tale reach emotional heights. An object lesson in the pitfalls of writing a family history for anyone other than your family. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15319-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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