Biographien der Gewalt: Massenmord in der Ukraine im "Zeitalter der Extreme"
Final Report Abstract
Dr. Lower’s “biographies of violence” are more than a collection of individual stories. Woven together, they become an international, socio-political history of total wars as experienced by ordinary men and women in central and eastern Europe. Lower’s research elucidates the imbalances and gaps in the official war crimes investigative material as a reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet, Austrian, East and West German approaches to justice. She compares the different laws and legal cultures and argues that these institutional and juridical variations were ultimately not as decisive in the pursuit of justice as political will, social responsibility (collective guilt), the determination of individuals driven by moral imperatives and emotional vengeance, and international pressure. Dr. Lower offers an interpretive framework for analyzing perpetrator and bystander testimony. Third, Lower’s comparative biographies of violence show that those who committed atrocities were not natural born killers, but became mass murderers because they were trained to do so and because of situational factors in Ukraine. Prewar experiences of men and women, whether they grew up in Stalinist Ukraine or the German Reich, were not as decisive as the prevalence of anti-semitism, the individuals’ association with states and political movements that had institutionalized, normalized violence, and the total war setting. The biographies demonstrate the extreme ability of humans to conform to their environments, in the extremes of war and peace. Since most of the perpetrators were young, the study also points to a generational cohort of the WWI era that came of age in an era of rampant racism, totalitarianism and anti-semitism. Many of the dominant ideological trends of the interwar era had been discredited by the Second World War. However the chameleon-like behavior of the perpetrators puzzled prosecutors and psychoanalysts, and is a main theme of Lower’s study. Lastly, as explained above, Lower’s work will shed new light on the gendered dynamic of the wartime violence and the different male and female defense and testimonial strategies after the war.
Publications
- Male and Female Holocaust Perpetrators and the East German Approach to Justice, 1949-1963. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 56-84. Polish translation 2012 in the journal, Zagla Zydow
Lower, Wendy
- “Hitlers Kolonisatoren in der Ukraine: Zivilverwalter und der Holocaust in Shitomir”. Fackelträger der Nation: Elitebildung in den NS-Ordensburgen eds. (Bohlau, 2010)
Lower, Wendy
- Pogroms, Mob Violence and Genocide in Western Ukraine, summer 1941: Varied Histories, Explanations and ComparisonsJournal of Genocide Research (Sept 2011): 1-30
Lower, Wendy
- Axis Collaboration, Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941 eds. Kay, Rutherford, Stahel (RochesterUniversity Press, 2012): 186-220
Lower, Wendy
- Hitler's furies : German women in the Nazi killing fields. Boston, Mass. ; New York, NY : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. ISBN 978-0-547-86338-2
Lower, Wendy
