Wendy Lower

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Wendy Lower (2017)

Wendy Lower (* 1965 ) is an American historian. Since 2012 she has held the John K. Roth Chair of History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont , California , and since 2014 she has also been the director of the Center for Human Rights there. As interim director, she has also headed the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington since September 2016 . Lower researches the history of Germany and Ukraine during World War II, the Holocaust, women's history, the history of human rights and genocide from a comparative perspective.

Life

Wendy Lower studied history at the University of Vienna in 1985/1986 ; In 1987 she received a BA from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York; In 1992 she studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin , and in 1999 she received her Ph.D. in European History from the American University in Washington . From 2000 to 2004 Lower was a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , from 2004 to 2007 Assistant Professor at Towson University in Maryland, from 2007 to 2012 research fellow at the History Department of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and from 2011 to 2012 as well Associate Professor at the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester.

Research on World War II

For her research on the history of Germany, Poland and the Ukraine, Lower received numerous prizes and honors, including a. 2007 Choice Award and the Southern Historical Association's Baker Burton Award for 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, the efforts to build up German colonies under SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and the complex role played by German bureaucrats, the military and the local population in carrying out the Holocaust. For Lower, arrogance, fear, hatred of Jews, Slavs and Communists are the central explanations for the imperial politics of the Nazis in Eastern Europe.

The monograph “Hitler's Furies”, published in English in 2013, has been translated into 21 languages; In 2014 it was published in German translation under the title "Hitler's Helferinnen". In Hitler's Helpers , Lower takes a look at nearly 500,000 women who went to Poland , Ukraine , Belarus , Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania during World War II , trying to investigate their motives and the question of why women perpetrators not prosecute after the war Were tried and convicted. She began her research in the early 1990s in Zhytomyr , Ukraine , where she was able to inspect numerous documents for the first time.

In the USA, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award (Nonfiction category) and for the National Jewish Book Award. The book received positive reviews in numerous magazines and daily newspapers, almost without exception. The New Republic called the book brave and praised the "biographical impulse". The verdict in The Guardian was ambivalent : On the one hand, Lower conveyed the physical and moral landscape of the time well, on the other hand, she did not include professional killers in the Reich Security Main Office and in the SS.

Lower also met with sharp criticism from the German-Canadian historian and Holocaust specialist Ruth Bettina Birn , who, together with the Ludwigsburg historian Volker Riess, “objected” to the fact that “the Holocaust has recently been used as a projection screen for gender studies”. Using numerous examples, Birn and Rieß come to the conclusion that Lower's theses are often not covered by the sources and that the sources sometimes state the opposite of what the author claims.

Publications

  • Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC et al. 2005, ISBN 0-8078-2960-9 .
  • The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (= Documenting Life and Destruction. Holocaust Sources in Context. 4). Altamira Press et al., Lanham MD 2011, ISBN 978-0-7591-2078-5 .
  • Hitler's furies. German women in the Nazi killing fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston MA et al. 2013, ISBN 978-0-547-86338-2 .
    • Hitler's helpers. German women in the Holocaust. Translated from the English by Andreas Wirthensohn. Hanser, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24621-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.cmc.edu/academic/faculty/profile/wendy-lower
  2. ↑ https://www.ushmm.org/research/the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies/about-the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies
  3. ↑ http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1316
  4. ↑ Barbara Möller: They were killers on occasion. Die Welt , August 30, 2014, accessed on August 31, 2014.
  5. ↑ Mirko Smiljanic : Hitler's helpers - German women in the Holocaust. Deutschlandfunk , August 18, 2014, accessed on August 31, 2014.
  6. ↑ Isabel Kershner: Women's Role in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions. nytimes.com , July 17, 2010, accessed August 31, 2014.
  7. ↑ Proof at perlentaucher.de , accessed on September 12, 2014.
  8. ↑ http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/awards/2013-national-jewish-book-award-winners
  9. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/05/hitlers-furies-wendy-lower-review
  10. ↑ Ruth Bettina Birn, Volker Riess: Sex, Crime and Women in Genocide. The Holocaust has recently been used as a projection surface for gender studies - with questionable findings: an objection . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 7, 2016, p. 14 .
personal data
SURNAME Lower, Wendy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1965