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How Are Women Portrayed In The Holocaust?

873 Words4 Pages

Thesis: Women throughout most genocidal research and history are written as victims to the patriarchal society, victims to the men who waged in war, murder, and the cohered planed killings in genocide. In the Holocaust specifically, women are portrayed in history as the victims of Soviet rape, reconstructing the destroyed Germany and the revivers in the shadows of the Nazi regime. Wendy Lower, in Hitler’s Furies, attempts to debunk this “sympathetic” idea that “rubble” women were only victims to the Nazi society and genocide, and shows that in fact many women from various backgrounds, and job titles were perpetrators of genocide as well. Her thesis is to show that women can be as vindictive, malice and cruel as their men counterparts, and often times used their femininity to escape blame, retributions, to get away with their crimes without punishment. From nurse Annettte Schücking who heard the desperate tales of soldiers mass killings, to wives like Vera Wohlauf who played their role alongside their powerful SS husbands, to secretaries like Liesel Willhaus that typed the orders to kill thousand, the mobilization of women to Ukraine and Poland in pursue of Leiblingraum left few blameless. The thirteen women Lower analysis, each came in direct or indirect contact with the Nazi ideology of a superior race, and their routine contributions to the system. …show more content…

Lower challenges us to see these women, to understand the blame they share, and to not only reconstruct our idea and memory of women’s role in the Holocaust, but to see that it takes an entire society contribution to create

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