Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields returns the Holocaust to something of its original horror. It is a study of German and Austrian women on the eastern front, and the simple revelation behind their story is that women were no less capable of brutality than men. This might seem banal—the banality of evil across the gender line. Yet Lower’s book is thoroughly shocking. What these women saw and did was shocking. What they believed was shocking. What they lied about after the war was shocking. No less shocking is the credulity invested in their lies by Germans and by Germany’s postwar occupiers. The final shock is the lack of earlier interest in their story, despite its enormous scope. At least half a million women went or were sent east during World War II. Some committed atrocities, and most witnessed atrocities. Hitler’s Furies, published 68 years after the war’s end, is, in Lower’s words, a “book about how we fail to reckon with the past.”

Lower is an American historian, and American intellectuals and citizens have long been struggling to reckon with the Holocaust. Worries have even been aired, in Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000), for instance, about an American Holocaust industry and about an excess of remembrance, which—by making the horrific familiar—might render the Holocaust normal. But, if anything, sustained study of the Holocaust has resulted in one provocative act of remembrance after another. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963, caused waves of outrage, while Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 brought the Holocaust narrative to a general reading public in 1975. The Maus series, by Art Spiegelman, reached beyond scholarship to storytelling, starting in 1991.

In Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), Daniel Goldhagen argued that many Germans—not just the SS—were complicit in the Holocaust. Goldhagen’s provocation was a popularized and less careful version of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland from 1993, which persuasively demonstrated the guilt of the ordinary German men who were asked—but not forced—to participate in mass executions, shifting the focus from the Nazi high command to the faces of the actual killers.

Now Hitler’s Furies contributes to this study of “ordinary people” in an important new way. It looks beyond Germany to the eastern front—Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine—where many of the deadliest atrocities took place. In this attention to place, Hitler’s Furies continues a project pioneered in Timothy Snyder’s 2010 masterpiece, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Arendt, Dawidowicz, Goldhagen, and Browning’s preoccupation with Germany was necessary, but it also reflected the fact that, until 1991, many crucial archival holdings were off-limits to Western scholars, confiscated by Soviet authorities, shipped to Moscow or dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. Nazi ideology and governance existed in three dimensions, while the Holocaust’s Eastern European terrain was harder to picture.

The idea for Hitler’s Furies came to Lower during a 1992 trip to Kiev. There she came across material previously hidden in archives “behind the Iron Curtain.” Twenty years in the making, Hitler’s Furies tells of the half-million German women who went east during the war. One-third of German women were “actively engaged in a Nazi Party organization,” Lower notes, and they participated in growing numbers from 1933 to 1945. Those who chose to go east were modern, “the daughters of those first-time [female] Weimar voters [who] imagined possibilities in Germany and beyond.” Their vehicle of advancement was the workplace: Female teachers, nurses, secretaries, stenographers, typists, and telephone operators were in demand. These women found the east “a place of liberation” with abundant “freedom for self-expression” and “social mobility.” To this degree, theirs was a conventional twentieth-century progression: the acquisition of valuable skills, the departure from stifling hometown and family circle, the prospect of self-fulfillment through work and travel. Yet there was nothing typical about their destinies in the bloodlands or killing fields, and many women went east with a fierce anti-Semitism in their hearts.