Just finished reading this. I've always been fascinated by those surrounding the most horrible people. Often those who surround the people in the spotlight are ignored, or, as in the case of the Holocaust, women aren't seen as equal to men in their cruelty and culpability, especially the wives to those in Hitler's inner circle. But with a lot of parallels in today's modern world, in which so many have become brainwashed by hate propaganda and conspiracy theories it's easy to see that women can be just as cruel and hateful as men.

This book looks at the prominent wives of the highest ranking Nazis and explores their lives, their thoughts and beliefs through diary entries and their own words, to give a glimpse into the massive denial and delusions that many of these women lived in about what their husbands did and what was going on. I found it interesting to see how many of the wives simply refused to acknowledge the sides of their husbands who were involved in the true horrors, insisting they were the kindest of men, and to see how easily some went along with the Jewish propaganda and evil, in spite of having friends in their past who were Jewish. Sometimes they helped those friends, clearly being able to disconnect them from the general Jewish population, but still being unable to see from their friendship how wrong and evil it was against all the other innocents who perished. It seems people can convince themselves of all kind of illogical things and live happily in cognitive dissonance as long as they are living in luxury. Even after the end, when forced to hear about the atrocities and their husband's role in them, many still refused to accept the true horrors of what happened and their hand in it. It was a surprisingly fast and interesting read. ( )

You don't always know what you're going to get when you pick up a historical non-fiction book. Will it be dry and read like a textbook? What kind of slant will it have? Will I actually learn something?

Nazi Wives was an interesting read that focused not only on the women behind the top men in the party but gave a different perspective to the story of the rise and fall of Hitler's movement. Some of the information I was already aware of but I still learned quite a bit. Also, some of those women were much more devoted to Hitler and his ideals than their husbands.

I read a good chunk of the book with my eyes but switched over to the audiobook and definitely recommend it. Either way, if you're interested in WWII history, you might want to put this one on your TBR list.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ebook! ( )

Compagnes, suivistes, perdantes et coupables. Un gâchis. ( )

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann—names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse and Gerda...

These are the women behind these infamous men—complex individuals with distinctive personalities who, as they fell under Hitler's spell, were drawn deeper and deeper into a perverse version of reality.

In Nazi Wives James Wyllie skilfully interweaves their stories, exploring their roles in detail for the first time against a backdrop of the rise and fall of Nazism and in the context of the aftermath, notable for the resolute lack of contrition from those wives who survived.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review:

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

–Rudyard Kipling, "The Female of the Species"

We're not supposed to notice things like this in the time of "Believe Women"...yes, of course, if they're telling the truth, but always, always LISTEN to women with open minds...but the women in this book were not exemplars of twenty-first century womanhood's new (!) course. They were awful, racist, anti-semitic, and deeply spoiled people, as one would expect.

Ilse, Carin, Emmy, Gerda, Eva, Margaret, Lina, and Magda married men who ran the worst, most heinous government of the twentieth century. They knew, either from direct evidence or from the unavoidable lessons of sheer propinquity, the kind of men they were married to, and they acquiesced at the minimum and ably assisted in other cases (thinking of Magda Goebbels most especially) in forming and maintaining the ethos of the Reich.

Not one of the women who survived WWII ever expressed regret or remorse for her, or her husband's, actions. These women were prototypical, stereotypical Mean Girls. They reveled in their luxurious lifestyle, they shut down whatever empathy they possessed when confronted with anything that challenged their world, and most especially in the case of Magda Goebbels (who went so far as to murder her children when defeat was inevitable) showed no obvious signs of possessing a conscience.

That made the read kind of revolting on some levels and deeply upsetting on others. I wasn't aware of the facts presented by Author Wyllie. In many ways I wish I still wasn't! But the truth is, the authorial choice to refer to the men by their surnames and the women only by their first names made teasing apart which horrible woman was attached to what vile man more complicated than it needed to be. This is also a function of the organizational principle used, that of dealing with the entire pack of wolves as a whole. I found myself flipping around, looking to connect (eg, Gerda Bormann's, the most often) strands. Gerda was far and away the woman I found least interesting, coming across to me as a Stepford wife without much to recommend her in either positive or negative ways.

All that said, the organizational longueurs are the source of the rating but the informational content earns the author and the book my recommendation. I'm glad someone has, at long last, foregrounded the role that women played in the Third Reich, at the highest levels, in setting, supporting, and even exemplifying the worst of an awful regime. ( )

This account of the named topic is a bit of a slow burner and I wasn't too impressed with it at first; I found it facile and jumpy as it introduced a number of players in the context of less than interesting courtships. However, persevere and the book gains a lot of momentum and the ending chapters, with their detailed account of these women's treks through the maelstrom of postwar Germany, is irresistible reading. The author was not particularly well-served by his editor; there are a number of typographical errors, and his sometimes goofy syntax could use some work to get rid of some headscratchers, but, though this is mostly a collection of secondary sources, it's informative and readable, and the bibliography is great for guiding one deeper into areas of particular interest. ( )