Looking for Good sources on women in the Holocaust

by Jonesywaffles

My professor gave us this prompt and I'm looking for some solid sources that will help me out with this paper. Thanks in advance.

In Neighbors, Jan Gross presents a range of individuals whose actions contributed to the murder of Jedwabne’s Jews by Poles, individually and collectively. Some perpetrators were men and some were women. How did women’s participation differ from that of men (did they play the role of accomplice for example rather than of direct perpetrator; did they participate in fewer numbers)? Keeping in mind whether motivations varied by gender (and whether women were more likely to be accessories to murder than the murderers themselves), Identify the three or four motivations that explain the murder of Jews by their neighbors in Jedwabne.

commiespaceinvader

Some of the standard literature on this topic (and I am only including English literature because I assume you can't read German) is as follows:

  • Wendy Lower: Hitler’s Furies. German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Boston 2013.

  • Kimberly Partee: Evil or Ordinary Women: the Female Auxiliaries of the Holocaust.

  • Wendy Adele-Mari Sarti, Women and Nazis : perpetrators of genocide and other crimes during Hitler’s regime, 1933-1945. (Palo Alto, CA : Academica Press 2011).

  • Brown, Daniel Patrick. The Camp Women: the Female Auxiliaries who assisted the SS in running the Nazi Concentration Camp System. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2002).

Not however, that most of this literature focuses on the participation of German women in Nazi crimes and especially on the female auxiliaries of the SS that served as camp guards in Ravensbrück and other concentration camps or in the case of Wendy Lower on the broader participation of German women in the various crimes of the German state during the Second World War. They might give you an interesting point of comparison though.

Since this is about Jedwabne, I'd also recommend checking out the 2004 book The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, especially the discussion between Bogdan Musial and Gross in the book.

Lastly, I'd also recommend checking out the work of Jan Grabowski since he does a lot of work on Polish collaboration where you might be able to find more on the subject of women's motivation.

Best of luck.