Three activities are unique to the human race: war, slavery, and genocide.  Certainly, there are other attributes that one might claim are solely human, but these are the ones that are the bedrock of two seemingly very different readings:

• Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Dr. Wendy Lower is a study of women who actively participated in the holocaust.
• The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Dr. Andrés Reséndez is a study of the enslavement of indigenous natives in the Americas.

What could they possibly have in common?  Well, if you were paying attention: war, slavery, and genocide.

As old as time, the oppression and exploitation of anyone who looks or thinks or acts differently, is part of what makes us human.  And, as Dr. Lower, points out, gender is no discriminator.  In her study, she found that Hitler’s Furies, as she calls them, included women from every socio-economic strata, with varying levels of education and backgrounds.  Secretaries, housewives, nurses, and teachers were all either witnesses to or accomplices in the enslavement and murder of Jews and others.  They were not coerced, but participated willingly for a variety of reasons.  Some were driven by ideology, others by greed, and still others saw the war as their opportunity to break out of the cultural restrictions of German society.

None of this explains why seemingly ordinary women would become either complicit or directly participate in mass murder.

• Pauline Kneissler was a nurse who was part of a medical team that regularly gave lethal injections to wounded German soldiers, rather than having them sent home from the Eastern Front.
• Johanna Altvater went into the third floor children’s ward of a makeshift hospital in a Jewish ghetto in the Ukraine and simply picked up the children and tossed them out the window. On more than one occasion, she practiced what was snidely referred to as her “nasty habit” of luring children to her with candy and then shooting them in the mouth. 
• Erna Petri happened upon six Jewish children and it occurred to her that “these were the children who broke out of the boxcar at the train station at Saschkow.” They were scared and hungry, so she took them back to her villa and gave them some food to calm them.  She knew that all Jews who were found wandering around were supposed to be captured, then shot.  Her husband wasn’t home, so she took the children out to the woods and did just that.  None of the children tried to run away from the woman who had shown them kindness and then, one by one, murdered them. 
• Liesal Willhaus enjoyed having friends over to her villa, having drinks on the balcony, and shooting Jews working in nearby fields, while the “little daughter of the family, Heike, would applaud the sight.”

These are just a few of the examples cited in Hitler’s Furies.  Dr. Lower resists labelling these women as psychopaths, but the delight expressed by some in their acts and their lack of remorse certainly makes the label tempting.  To label these women, as a class of psychopaths, is almost too easy and may be seen as an act of dehumanization not wholly unlike the way that the Nazis viewed the Jews.  Human beings are an incredibly complex composite of their beliefs and experiences, as well as biological and environmental factors.  But once a group is conveniently labelled as something other than ‘normal’, as a subspecies, it is easy to cast them aside and view genocide as something other than murder.

And this naturally brings us to The Other Slavery and the war, enslavement, and genocide enacted against the native populations in the Americas.  Much like the Nazis, the conquistadores viewed the natives in the Caribbean, Central and South America, Mexico, and what would become the American Southwest as subhuman.   Dr. Andrés Reséndez provides a detailed, well documented, and readable study that reveals the dark history of colonization in the Americas.  With that revelation is the acknowledgement that our history is full of lies.  The Americas were built on a foundation of lust and greed by men who were slavers, sex traffickers, and mass murderers.  It is easy to talk about the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but more difficult to realize that many of the same acts were committed in the Americas.

It is more disturbing that the perspective of non-native peoples and institutions, in some cases, still continues today, most recently in the form of voter disenfranchisement of Native Americans.  The issues raised in this study are too broad and too complex to discuss in a single post.  This is a book that every American should read if they want to understand the truth about why America is what it is.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, three activities are unique to the human race: war, slavery, and genocide. These are the pillars upon which we, as human beings, build our societies.  Given that perspective, it should come as little surprise that humanity is in the terrible state that is in.

 

©Copyright 2018 by Kevin Fraleigh