Women and the Nazi East

"This book examines the role of German women in borderlands activism in Germany's eastern regions before 1939 and their involvement in Nazi measures to Germanize occupied Poland during the Second World War. Drawing on previously untapped material from Polish and German archives, as well as memoirs and oral testimony from German women who were sent to wartime Poland, Elizabeth Harvey analyses the function of female activism within Nazi imperialism and the extent to which women embraced policies intended to segregate Germans from non-Germans and to persecute Poles and Jews." "Casting fresh light on women's attitudes towards and involvement in Nazi policies, the book emphasises the distinctive nature of female complicity in the system of racist domination. Harvey offers a new perspective on Nazi occupation policies, with vivid insights into regime practices at the grass roots and German civilian responses to the treatment of the Polish and Jewish population. In addition, she explores the complex ways in which Germans after 1945 remembered the Nazi East."--Jacket.