Overview

A compelling examination of Nazi women's perpetration of war crimes, and how—or whether—courts held them accountable To date, our understanding of women's participation in Nazi war crimes has been shaped by political decisions made by men, which reflect entrenched gender norms that diminish both women's agency and their accountability. Jessica Trisko Darden offers a corrective to this by providing a groundbreaking holistic account of the variety of war crimes that women of all ages committed during the Nazi era, as well as the range of legal outcomes that they faced in the wake of the Second World War. By analyzing records from German, French, Hungarian, Soviet, and Israeli trials, Trisko Darden observes that postwar politics contributed to disparities in sentencing between men and women, which in turn allowed some women to receive more lenient sentences than others, or to be acquitted altogether. Her rigorous analysis of these women's cases makes an important contribution to scholarship on women's agency and culpability in perpetrating violence.

Full Product Details

9780300278439

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Reviews

“Informative and illuminating, Trisko Darden's book provides the most comprehensive, comparative analysis of women accused of Nazi era crimes from war’s end to the present. Covering hundreds of trials in this masterful exploration of legal history, female agency, and morality, she reveals the 'patchwork of accountability' female defendants experienced in the courtrooms and streets of Germany, France, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Israel.”—Wendy Lower, author of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

Author Information

Jessica Trisko Darden is associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and coauthor of Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice and Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars. She is a research affiliate at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute and a nonresident fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

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