I share Patrick's lukewarm assessment of this book. Lower's research expands the examination into the role of German women in the murder of Jews and others in WWII. She moves beyond the crimes of female camp guards to include those of teachers, nurses, social workers and wives. Her analysis, which breaks these women into categories of witnesses, accomplices and perpetrators, is heavily influenced by feminist theory, and was largely interesting. But the writing style is unsatisfactory; I found myself repeatedly wondering, "Where's the topic sentence?" as though I were grading a high school essay.
I was also troubled by the latter portion of the book's seeming praise of the East German justice system as compared to that in West Germany. Indeed, it seems clear that West Germany was lackluster in its pursuit of Nazi war criminals and that latent anti-Semitism and Nazism are to blame for that - nothing to celebrate. And Lower would have it that East Germany's higher rate of prosecution and conviction is a good thing. Maybe. To the extent that investigation and pursuit of these criminals involved the Stasi, it is hard to see that the results of these prosecutions, however satisfying and even necessary, can be called justice. At the very least, due diligence demands a writer point out (at length) the exceedingly different mechanisms available to the East Germans in their pursuit of war criminals.
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