German Women's Role in Holocaust
New research is emerging about the role German women played in the Holocaust, and it indicates their role in the genocide may have been greater than previously thought.
"We know in the camp system there were probably about four or five thousand guards, but thousands more were mobilized to do their duty in the Eastern front," says researcher Wendy Lower, a visiting professor at the University of Munich.
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She tells one story of a wife who accompanied her SS Officer husband to a plantation-like set up in western Ukraine. While riding in her carriage one day, she came across a number of naked children who'd escaped from a boxcar bound for a concentration camp. She took the children back to the plantation, where she fed them, then led them into the woods and shot them to death.
Lower says women like this were not following orders.
"They were working outside the system," Lower says. "They had, as some would see it the opportunity to actually act out their ideological commitment, their virulent anti-Semitism, and their hatred."
