Drawing from wartime documents, postwar trials, private letters and interviews, this lecture focuses on outstanding cases of women who participated in the Holocaust, some in ghetto liquidations and mass shootings of Polish and Ukrainian Jews, others committed brutal acts on their own. In the colonial outposts of the Nazi East, German women were an integral part of the society of perpetrators. What some of these women chose to do with this new found power and how they were judged in courts after the war are the main themes of this presentation.

Wendy Lower, PhD. is Associate Professor of History and lectures at Maximilians University, Munich. She is the author of Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), and The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (2011). Her work on female perpetrators is being published by Houghton Mifflin (USA), and major presses in Europe and South America.

This event is part of the speaker series of the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies: "Holocaust, Genocides, and Race Relations in World History" and is co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.