Accused

A compelling examination of Nazi womens perpetration of war crimes, and howa "e;or whethera "e;courts held them accountableTo date, our understanding of womens participation in Nazi war crimes has been shaped by political decisions made by men, which reflect entrenched gender norms that diminish both womens agency and their accountability. Jessica Trisko Darden offers a corrective to this by providing a groundbreaking holistic account of the variety of atrocities 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 womens cases makes an important contribution to scholarship on womens agency and culpability in perpetrating violence.