Book Description

War atrocities cannot be segregated by gender and gender cannot be ignored when analyzing the crimes that culminated in the Third Reich's attempt to eradicate European Jewry and other ¿suspect¿ nationalities and ethnic groups such as the Roma. Despite the Nazis masculine-oriented policies towards Aryan German women many women sought ways to become involved in Hitler's party and government. Professor Sarti's remarkable research discusses the women who not only agreed with the Nazi Weltanschauung but took an active part in mass genocide. Scholarship has tended to fundementally overlook or dismiss the actions of this group; Sarti brings then to the fore of her remarkable investigation into their numbers and their influence. Professor Sarti discusses the broad narrative of women as perpetrators (no as unwilling accomplices) of brutal genocidal acts. She also studies a number of individuals such as the nineteen in the Belsen trial of 1945 and others brought to book by the German authorities in postwar West Germany. In reality far fewer women were even processed for trial then men and this in the face of research that points to a much higher number of women guards and supervisors than the Allied forces acknowledged. This work, based on primary sources, is sure to be of great interest to students of the Holocaust, genocide as a modern phenomena as well as scholars involved in women and gender studies.