Wendy Lower (2013) Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields.

Most of  in the Aktions took place in the Wild East of Ukraine, Poland and the Ukraine and were perpetrated by men. Lower looks at women’s role in the genocidial killing of undesireables. Over half a million women were sent to these new lands as nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives. Most suffered the collective amnesia of that time. Most followed orders.

Case studies of women who administered lethal injections, gassed and starved the sick, the elderly and children are common place. Women who smash children’s heads off brick walls for fun, fling sick children from third storey balconies, take pot-shots at their servants and teach their dogs to attack malnourished children and rip them apart as a form of entertainment are less so. Imagine one thousand or more Myra Hindley’s and ask,  as Lower does, ‘What happened to them?’ Her answer is perhaps the most shocking of all. ‘The short answer is that most got away with murder.’  

The bureaucrats and administrators that make all of these things possible were the oil that lubricated the system, but I ask myself a different question— how can we spend tens of thousands of pounds and over twenty years educating and  giving doctors medical degress and allow they to work for companies like Atos that penalise the poorest of our society? Is this a problem of the individual or the collective responsibility of our more modern society?  History and morality are not problems of the past. They live in the present.