Ordinary Women: Wendy Lower Talks About 'Hitler's Furies' 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. What did you discover that most surprised you while researching and writing the book? 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? What has been the consensus about German women's role in the Holocaust until now? Have they been seen as mostly innocent? Certain female types have emerged in the popular literature, and they are polar extremes. One depicts German women as victims, as "baby-machines" in Hitler's misogynist, racial state, and the other depicts them as demonic, often sexually deviant camp guards. Both of these distortions are based on the assumption that German women remained in confined spaces, either at home in Germany or within the closed universe of the camp system. Claudia Koonz's now classic study "Mothers in the Fatherland" moved the field toward more nuanced analyses of women's agency. And several case studies of SS wives, camp guards, and nurses revealed that ordinary women were direct accomplices and perpetrators. But because violent women were portrayed as marginal figures, these studies failed to debunk the popular myth of female martyrdom. How do you think your book most directly alters that previous view of things? It brings German women's history eastward into the Nazi empire and warfare, in the open-air landscape of the Holocaust, at mass shootings, ghetto liquidations, death marches, and deportations of Jews and Soviet POWs. Thousands of German women were not camp guards, not trained to be cruel, and yet they participated in the regime's worst crimes in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and other parts of eastern Europe. In many ways, "Hitler's Furies" is about the dark side of female activism and the Nazi perversion of traditional female roles, which turned women into bystanders, accomplices and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Did you focus on a few women because it was difficult to get specifics about many more than that, or just to keep the size of the cast from overwhelming readers? I selected these 13 women because they best represent the diverse ambitions and convictions of the nurses, secretaries and spouses who circulated in the eastern territories. Many more women appear in the corroborating examples and in the endnotes. I would have liked to develop fuller, intimate biographies of more women, but lack of documentation prevented that, and yes, too many women in the main narrative would have overwhelmed readers. How do we know about some of the more gruesome things that these women did, like the killing of children? Did any of them admit it later? Is it mostly from eyewitness testimony at the time? These descriptions of the female killers are in the postwar investigation files and in the official testimony given by German men and women also stationed in the East, Jewish survivors who saw them at the crime scenes, and other local witnesses, such as Ukrainian and Polish laborers. I found only one confession, which had been extracted by Stasi interrogators. Most denied their wrongdoings. And some even went so far as to cast blame on the Jewish victims themselves. In one outrageous case, Josefine Block, an Austrian defendant who was seen during the war ramming Jewish laborers with her baby carriage on the streets of Drohobych, Ukraine, and ordering the shooting of Jewish girls at the marketplace, later accused her former seamstress, a Jewish survivor, of murder. After the war, Block argued to prosecutors that the seamstress had abandoned her own 1-year-old child in the ghetto so that she could save herself. Block was acquitted and the survivor emigrated from Austria. You write that some women were "punished and even executed for stealing from the Reich." Did the Reich generally treat women as strictly as it treated men? It depended on the judges in the special courts. In Dortmund, an 18-year-old girl was arrested and later executed for looting undergarments from a bombed-out building. Men vastly outnumbered women in the prison system, but the proportion of women inmates jumped from 9 percent to 23 percent during the war, according to the work of Nikolaus Wachsmann and Richard Evans. When it came to certain Nazi racial crimes, such as sexual relations with non-Germans, German women were ostracized and punished more severely than German men. Are there any memoirs or other books written by these women that are available to general readers now? And if so, are any worth reading? Nearly all of the personal accounts that I used for the book were in German, but there are some good English-language memoirs - notably, Ursula Mahlendorf's "The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood" and Melita Maschmann's "Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self." Alison Owings" "Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich" offers excerpts from interviews that she conducted. And Elizabeth Harvey's "Women and the Nazi East: Witnesses and Agents of Germanization" provides an in-depth history of German teachers in Poland based on firsthand accounts from women. As an academic, did you feel an urge to make this book as accessible to general readers as possible, and how conscious of that were you while writing? While writing the book, my editor and I made certain decisions about how to present the material to a general audience - for example, I ended up cutting about 100 pages of historiographical analysis, extended footnotes and examples from the original manuscript, and inserted a list of main characters to help readers remember the basic profiles of the 13 featured women. You spoke to family members of some of these women. How did they react to your project? Were most of them cooperative or did you get strong resistance from some? I developed direct or indirect contact with seven of 13 women featured in "Hitler's Furies" and conducted about 40 interviews with other witnesses. Each interviewee responded differently to my questions, depending on how much he or she was implicated by the regime and feared prosecution or the consternation of family and neighbors. In general women do not have a tradition of telling gruesome war stories, and most preferred to avoid recounting unpleasant details. Yet some were surprisingly callous when they described the plight of the Jews, leading me to believe that they were either ashamed or in denial about their own complicity.