“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. 

 The culmination of an extensive research on the roles and participation of Nazi women in the genocide, the author explains the many factors that brought women to positions of relative power as it tries to make sense of the  violent acts they committed.

 Each chapter explains the involvement of women from different socio-economical sectors. So, we learn about how nurses often assisted on asylums designated to purge the population; or, about the immense extrajudicial power held by the secretaries of Nazi officials.  Alongside the hard-facts, the lives of women who held these positions are traced from their youth days, though the war, its resolution and everything that came after. 

 The writing is easy to follow, it is not technical nor completely academic; all the research is backed up with its proper citation. Lastly, you don't need to have an extensive knowledge on WII as every moment is contextualized adequately.