Nearly 400 guests attended the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s conversation event “Some Were Wives, Some Were Mothers: Female Perpetrators during the Holocaust” on Tuesday.
The event was part of the Museum’s national conversation exploring the ongoing relevance of the Holocaust. The event was held at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Campus, in Los Angeles.
Museum historian Edna Friedberg, Ph.D., (pictured left on stage) interviewed Wendy Lower, Ph.D., author and the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College.
Lower, a former Museum fellow, challenged the traditional picture of Germany’s women holding down the home front as loyal wives and mothers during World War II.
In her compelling book, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” she reveals new evidence that places them directly in the maelstrom of war: looting, plundering, and even killing.
Guests participated in riveting conversation about a generation of young women born into ravaged post-World War I Germany and swept up in the feverish nationalism of the Nazi party.
Seeing the emerging empire as full of career and marriage opportunity,many of these women traveled east with the expanding “frontier”—where they witnessed and participated in the exploitation, persecution, and murder of Jews and other victims.
The event was presented in association with Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Through its national campaign Never Again: What You Do Matters, led by honorary chair Elie Wiesel, the Museum seeks to make critical investments to keep Holocaust memory alive as a relevant, transformative force in the 21st century.
