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The good White Christian women of Nazi Germany

Recently I started reading Frauen, Alison Owings’s 1993 collection of oral histories of women who lived through the Third Reich. Owings realized that nobody had bothered to ask the women of Germany their thoughts on the war or the rise of Nazism. Men—the generals, the guards—had been interviewed so much that the phrase “I was only following orders” became a part of our cultural understanding of World War II. But what about the women? Owings wondered. Why did so many good Christian German women support the Nazi Party?