“Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Field” is a difficult book to rate because it was well researched and well written but covers such a heinous topic nobody should really “like” this book. 

Wendy Lower did an excellent job of showing that Nazi women who participated in the atrocities of World War II were not just concentration camp guards or the odd statistical outlier. There were hundreds of thousands of women—teachers, nurses, wives, secretaries, and more—who willingly assisted with the deliberate extermination of Jews and any other group the Third Reich deemed undesirable. 

Some women were undoubtably just cogs in Hitler’s war machine, but other women took pleasure in assisting in the genocides—whether in an official capacity or not. Many of the specific stories, especially in Chapter Five: Perpetrators, got very intense and deeply unsettling (as they should). But, Lower presented the facts and her take on them in a way that was extremely respectful of the victims and did not glorify the perpetrators intentionally or unintentionally. 

Certainly not an enjoyable read; presents a very dark topic in a scholarly and comprehensive fashion. The author profiles women with varying degrees of complicity in the Holocaust, presenting individual cases alongside archetypes. In addition to my understanding of German women’s complicity in the Holocaust, my understanding of the Eastern front of Nazi expansion was edified by this book.