Wholesale Women of the Third Reich: From Camp Guards to Combatants

The women of the Third Reich were vital in a complex, vilified system. What was their role in administration, concentration camps, the Luftwaffe, and militia units, and how did it evolve? We hear from women who issued typewritten dictates, operated telephones, fought fires as cities burned, drove concentration camp inmates to their deaths, fired Anti-Aircraft guns at Allied aircraft, and joined militias amid impending destruction of the supposed thousand-year Reich. Each testimony is unique, each a victim of circumstance entwined in ideological obligation. In an interview, Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary, recalls: ‘There was so much hatred; it’s hard to understand how the state functioned... I am convinced all this infighting among the males in Hitler’s circle was detrimental to its downfall.’ Women of the Third Reich offers an intriguing, humorous, brutal, shocking, and unrelenting narrative journey into the hell of human consciousness at its worst.