These women who participated in Nazi barbarism

Women in the service of the Reich

Tuesday, January 31 at 8:55 p.m. on Arte

They are secretaries, SS wives, guards, doctors… And played a direct role in the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. “History has forgotten them, but recent research lifts the veil on the involvement of women in Nazi criminal policies”, points out the narrator, actress Céline Sallette, in this documentary which dissects the cogs of their long-remaining acts. in the shadows – and less severely punished. Reasons for engagement vary. Some women seek to break the monotony of their bourgeois life, others to reorient themselves after the Nazi regime refused access to the studies they coveted.

There are also those who dream of social ascent. Liselotte Meier, for example, does not want to spend her life in the factory. She became a secretary in the Lida ghetto in Belarus, where she was responsible for issuing work permits to Jews. In other words, to decide their fate. The young woman gradually delights in this dominant position, until she strips them of the effects she finds to her liking.

Several women’s journeys are thus told in detail, the destiny of each illuminating the mechanisms of the system as a whole. And recalling how the Nazi ideology made its way winding through the female population.

The documentary alternates archives, contextualizations by historians and the words of descendants. The result is strong testimonials. “I was ashamed of my mother. And, then, I ended up saying to myself: “I was born in 1951. I am not responsible for that”, loose the daughter of Liselotte Meier.

The violence of certain images is counterbalanced by the choice to use drawings by former prisoners to document the actions of these women. A convincing bias.

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