Wendy Lower
| Wendy Lower PhD | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1965 (age 52) U.S. |
| Residence | United States |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | American University |
| Academic work | |
| Era | 20th century |
| Institutions |
Claremont McKenna College United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich |
| Main interests | Modern European history: World War II; The Holocaust |
Wendy Lower (b. 1965 ) is an American historian and a widely published author on the Holocaust and World War II. Since 2012, she holds the John K. Roth Chair of History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Since 2014, she is also the interim director at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Lower's research areas include the history of Germany and Ukraine in World War II, the Holocaust, women's history, the history of human rights and comparative genocide studies. Her 2013 book Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields was translated into 21 languages and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in the nonfiction category and for the National Jewish Book Award.
Education and career
Wendy Lower earned her Ph.D. In European History in 1999 from the American University in Washington, DC. From 2000 to 2004, Lower was a research associate at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from 2004 to 2007 assistant professor at Towson University in Maryland. From 2007 to 2012 research associate at the Historical Seminar of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and from 2011 to 2012 Associate Professor at the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester.[1][2]
Research on World War II
For her research on the history of Germany, Poland and Ukraine Lower received numerous awards and honors, including 2007 award from Choice and the Baker-Burton Award of the Southern Historical Association for the best first work in European history, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. The work traces the history of Ukraine in World War II after that drive to establish German colonies under SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and the complex role of German bureaucrats and military and the local population in the implementation of the Holocaust. Arrogance, fear, jealousy, Slavic and Communist hatred are for Lower the central declarations for the imperial policy of the Nazis in Eastern Europe. The research in the archives of Zhytomyr, which was part of the German Reichskommissariat Ukraine from 1941 to 1944, also led Lower to the next project: exploring the role of the German women in the Nazi genocidal policies in the occupied Poland and Soviet Union. Isabel Kershner in The New York Times finds that Lower's research "sheds new light on the Holocaust from a gender perspective, according to experts, and have further underlined the importance of the role of the lower echelons in the Nazi killing apparatus".[3]
Lower's resulting work, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, was published in English in 2013 and then translated into 21 languages. In the book, Lower looks at nearly 500,000 women in World War II to Poland, to Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. She examines their attempts to carry out their designs and addresses the question of why perpetrators were not brought to justice after the war.[4] In the US, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in the nonfiction category and for the National Jewish Book Award.[5] The magazine and newspaper reviews were almost unanimously positive. The Guardian called the book "truly chilling" but was ambivalent on the presentation: on the one hand the reviewer finds that Lower has astutely communicated the physical and moral landscape of the time, on the other hand, her study did not include professional killers inside the Reich Security Main Office and in the SS.[6]
The historians Ruth Bettina Birn and Volker Riess expressed "opposition" to the attempts to use "the Holocaust as a projection for gender studies". They provide numerous examples where the text in the book is not supported by sources provided or have no sources at all, leading them to conclude that some of the assertions cannot be substantiated, such as that "the violence and the horrors of the Holocaust" were not just a backdrop, but a "central drama" in these women's existence.[7]
Selected works
- Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2005 ISBN 0-8078-2960-9 .
- The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia. Altamira Press, Lanham 2011.
- Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2013, ISBN 978-0-547-86338-2 .
References
- ↑ Profile at the Claremont McKenna College web site
- ↑ Mandel Center at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum web site
- ↑ Kershner 2010.
- ↑ Fischel 2013.
- ↑ 2013 Winners, National Jewish Book Award
- ↑ "Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower – review"
- ↑ "Frauen im Nationalsozialismus Sex, Crime und Frauen im Völkermord", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 July 2016
Sources
- Möller, Barbara (August 30, 2014). "They were murderers of opportunity". Die Welt.
- Smiljanic, Mirko (August 18, 2014). "Hitler's helpers - German women in the Holocaust". deutschlandfunk.de. Retrieved August 31, 2014.
- Fischel, Jack (2013). "Review: Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields".
- Kershner, Isabel (2010). "Women's Role in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions". The New York Times.
External links
- Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine: official web page at the University of North Carolina Press web page.
- Hitler's Furies: official book page at the National Book Foundation web site, including a recording of the reading by Lower from the book