Posted on 10/15/2013 2:49:04 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In “Hitler’s Furies,” recently placed on the long list for the National Book Award, Wendy Lower presents the harrowing evidence of crimes committed by German women during the Holocaust. Dwight Garner wrote that previous books “have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity” and “Ms. Lower’s revisionist insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity.” In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Lower discussed the changing view of women’s role in the Nazi regime, the challenges of writing for a non-academic audience, what she found most shocking in her research and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q. What did you discover that most surprised you while researching and writing the book?
A.
I had read about the cruelties of male perpetrators in militarized killing units, such as the “ordinary men” Christopher Browning wrote about, but the settings and forms of violence perpetrated by German women surprised and puzzled me. Of course we know that women can be violent, but how does one explain someone like Liesel Willhaus, who killed Jews for sport from her balcony with her child at her side?
(Excerpt) Read more at artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Alfred Hitchcock tried to educate us regarding the “banality of evil” but we didn’t learn our lessons like we should of. Now we’re seeing it live and in person in our daily lives and interestingly going back in history and learning about it from an historical perspective. I don’t think Hitch would be surprised to read this.
Check out Erma Griese,a female SS guard at Buchenwald.
It all started with the children in the schools.
how does one explain someone like Liesel Willhaus, who killed Jews for sport from her balcony with her child at her side?
Ask Cher, she seems to be thrilled with the prospect of killing conservatives.
Every society has their share, Cher?, of sick individuals. Not condoning, excusing or dismissing, but seems to me that the Japanese were just as horrible as the Germans in the mistreatment of conquered peoples(nothing like the mass murder of the Jews)and probably surpassed the Germans in their “medical” experimentation on prisoners and innocents.
I agree ‘’cripplecreek’’. The truth is though The Holocaust began the moment Adolph Hitler opened his mouth and the German people shut theirs.
The Holocaust could not be possible without significant involvement of the ordinary German folk. It’s foolish to imagine that 6+ million people could be snuffed out without the participation of the common ‘myriad small creatures’ that populated Germany.
It’s a hard lesson in there for the rest of us, that if such a thing could happen in a culture “blessed” by an enlightenment of sorts, it can happen anywhere else, too. You don’t always need to be primitive to become barbarian.
6 million? Wasn’t it 13 million? Only some of them count?
We have a winner!! 13 Million people killed. Why the extra 7 million are left out by some is a mystery to me.
So much for the myths that there would be no war if women or gheys ruled the world.
Stalin’s 20 million killed get overlooked as well.
Then again, the Hollywood Reds were big on carrying about Mao’s Little Red Book.
So clearly dead bodies alone don’t generate headlines or writeups in the history books.
over 50 million kids have been killed by their mothers in America since 1973.
If you want to write a best seller, you only need 3 subjects. 1. Anything on SEX.
2. How to make a Million without working.
3. Put Hitler in the title.
1) Elect the same people that led them into WW1 and the economic crisis that followed.(Yes I know German had a Kaiser)
2) Communists and the slaughter that the Reds committed in Russia.
3)Elect the Nazis that promised to protect them from the horrors of an Russian led communist revolution and they also offered reforms that the conservative parties were reluctant to follow through.
It's damned easy to condemn those without the benefit of hindsight.
Germans could just as easily point the finger of blame to Americans for four hundred years of genocide, rape and slavery....
Nobody's hands are so clean...
>> It’s foolish to imagine that 6+ million people could be snuffed out without the participation of the common ‘myriad small creatures’ that populated Germany.
My ex mother-in-law (now 15 years in her grave) was an Austrian; born in Vienna, and a teenager in WWII. She married a Hungarian, and later escaped from Budapest during the 1957 revolution, came to the USA, and became naturalized American citizen.
On one occasion we were visiting Vienna, and we passed a side street named Judengasse (the “little street of the Jews”). I asked “did you know what was going on then with the deportations?” Her answer: “What do you think we were - stupid? Of course we knew. Jews on Friday; Nazis on Monday.”
You mean like killing children and mothers...
6+
Actually they were worse.
Some people have a deep seated need to believe themselves superior. To be a superior you must have inferiors. When that kind of madness grips a whole nation then you have hell on earth.
Answer: because the six million Jews killed was a unique attempt at extermination of a people and their culture. It pretty much succeeded in Poland, Hungary and Germany.
Ask the folks in Nanking.
I guess you kind of a bigot. 6 Million is the number of Jews who were killed. 13 million was the total number. Some people think all the deaths were a crime.
I really don't understand people.
Women can, and have been, many of the most horrible “true believers”. And even when victims, cling to false hopes...
Eugenia Ginzburg documented her 18 years in the Stalinist Gulags in “Journey Into the Whirlwind”, and supposed it would not be published until the 80’s. But when she knew it would be in the late 60’s she concluded in it... “How wonderful that I was mistaken and that the great Leninist truths have again come into their own in our country and party!”
Our government has done some horrible things but to try and equate that to what was done by the Nazis and Japanese, let alone the Russians, Turks and so many others is insulting! Go fling your feces where it belongs.
Our government has done some horrible things but to try and equate that to what was done by the Nazis and Japanese, let alone the Russians, Turks and so many others is insulting! Go fling your feces where it belongs.
All those horrible thing started with Government power and the dehumanization of others in fringe groups..
Nobody’s hands are so clean...
Andrew Jackson, The Progressives of the early 20th century with their family eugenics courts, not to mention the atrocity of Abortion by the modern progressives.
We are Nation stained with blood as well, and usually the crime was done as “for the good of the many, we must sacrifice a few”...
That never ends well..
Ever.
Not to be confused with Ernst Roehm and Hitler’s Fairies.
Unique in the begginging maybe as the first Target. However every one would have had thier turn in the barrel,as in Any State Goverment is God.
Amen. Genocide is a human endevor. Sadly.
No, you quite miss the point.
“Germans could just as easily point the finger of blame to Americans for four hundred years of genocide, rape and slavery.”
So could liberals in this country.
Is that the doc that uses all the home movie footage and stuff like that? We watched one like that and it was excellent, fascinating really.
One part that really struck me was a diary entry from a 14 year old Austrian girl about the day the Germans “invaded” Austria. She wrote about how the day before the Austria flag had been on the various buildings, etc. but immediately it was replaced by the Nazi flag and also the people had the nazi flag on their houses and they were waving little one in the streets.
Where did they get all those flags so quickly, she wondered. They must have had them prepared for the purpose.
Of course she was right, but I wonder how many adults thought about that.
I’m still sending that video out to “confused and frightened” liberals at least once per week.
There are too many similarities for them to deny.
bump
One other detail I’d like to add to the thread is Golda Meir’s statement on peace: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
That statement clearly applies to the mothers of suicide bombers as much as anyone else in “the community”.
Too few adults ask that question today when they seek multistory banners/billboards printed for Palestinian "martyrs" within 2 hours of a death.
Others don't question who prints the signs for "spontneous amnesty rallies" or even the "unexpected government shutdown" (which had signage for parks the day it began).
Another thing that seems un-PC to bring up (I was reading the “Here Come The Muslims” movie kerfluffle)...
Muslims say “I don’t need to condemn Islamic terrorism, modern slavery, honor killings, genocide, religious apartheid in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and elsewhere, etc.... ‘that’s not real Islam’”.
Germans still denounce the sins of the (20th century) past. Americans took it upon themselves in 2004 to post “I’m sorry for Bush being re-elected” memes to the world.
The only genuine reform in Islam is going to come when muslims give a damn about the Islamic supremacists who are killing others (that they see a lesser beings, kufir) rebuke them publicly, repeatedly, loudly, and often.
President Obama believed Osama Bin Laden to be “genuine muslim” enough that he had Osama given muslim funeral rites before disposing of the body. We were told that other muslims might become radicalized if his corpse was mistreated. For a “not really muslim” terrorist?
Puh-lease.
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