(Times of Israel) Matt Lebovic - With new access to archives, historians are supplanting archetypal images of Aryan Nazi men as the Holocaust's sole perpetrators. Perpetrator "sub-groups" being exposed range from women who guarded death camps to Dutch bounty hunters of Jews in hiding. Sarah Helm's 2015 book, Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women, looks at the camp where 132,000 women and children were imprisoned, which also functioned as an SS training camp for women to become concentration camp guards. Wendy Lower's 2013 book, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, also helped expand understanding of women's roles in the Holocaust. Dutch journalist and historian Ad van Liempt estimated that 15,000 Jews were captured in hiding by reward-driven Nazi collaborators. His 2012 book, Jew Hunt, exposed files on 250 Dutch police officers who organized units to locate and arrest Jews in hiding. "Every large town in the Netherlands had such units," he said. Some researchers are studying the role of Muslims recruited to the Waffen-SS in Yugoslavia, including Edwin Black in his 2010 book, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance During the Holocaust. Up to 42,000 Muslim SS members and police troops were recruited by the Nazis, and thousands of them participated in the slaughter of Jews and Orthodox Christians in Bosnia and Serbia, respectively. Muslim units also participated in the murder of Jews in Greece and Russia.
2016-01-15 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive