Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the Eastern Front–not only as plunderers and direct witnesses but as actual killers–powerfully revises history. Many young nurses, teachers, secretaries, and wives saw the emerging Nazi empire as a kind of “Wild East” of opportunity, yet they could not have imagined what they would do there. Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research and fieldwork on the Holocaust, access to post-Soviet documents, and interviews with German witnesses, presents compelling evidence that these women went on “shopping sprees” and romantic outings to the Jewish ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, and that they were present at killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also taking part in the shooting of Jews. And Lower uncovers the stories of SS wives–with children of their own–whose brutality is as chilling as any in history.

Hitler’s Furies will challenge our deepest beliefs using evidence hidden for seventy years: women can be just as brutal as men.

A single photograph—an exceptionally rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler‚Äôs Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter‚Äôs rifle is inches from a woman’s head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And‚Äîonly one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower‚Äôs brilliant ten-year investigation of this image‚Äîthe shins of another child, slipping from the woman‚Äôs lap.
 
Wendy Lower’s forensic and archival detective work—in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States—recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance—are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide.