Revealed: women's role in Nazi crimes
In Nazi art, films and magazines, women were always portrayed as the fairer sex, fighting on the home-front as their menfolk fought on the battlefields.
Adolf Hitler awarded them gold crosses for rearing children and honoured their role as wives and mothers - a soft image that was rarely questioned after the war.
But a new book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very different reality.
"Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective conscious of the Germans for a long time," she wrote in the book, Female Perpetrators: Women under National Socialism.
Many women were in fact used as assistants to the doctors who sterilised and murdered disabled people and as guards in the concentration camps - like the character played by Kate Winslet in her Oscar nominated role in the film The Reader.
Some 3,200 women served in the concentration camps. Female guards were generally low-to-middle class and had little or no work experience, although SS records show that some were matrons, hairdressers, tram conductors or retired teachers.
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Adolf Hitler awarded them gold crosses for rearing children and honoured their role as wives and mothers - a soft image that was rarely questioned after the war.
But a new book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very different reality.
"Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective conscious of the Germans for a long time," she wrote in the book, Female Perpetrators: Women under National Socialism.
Many women were in fact used as assistants to the doctors who sterilised and murdered disabled people and as guards in the concentration camps - like the character played by Kate Winslet in her Oscar nominated role in the film The Reader.
Some 3,200 women served in the concentration camps. Female guards were generally low-to-middle class and had little or no work experience, although SS records show that some were matrons, hairdressers, tram conductors or retired teachers.