Women Defying Hitler

This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler’s dictatorship. Paying acute attention to the differences that gender made, Women Defying Hitler examines the forms of women’s defiance, the impact these women had, and the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced. Several essays also address the special problems of the memory and historiography of women’s history during World War II, and the book features standpoints of historians as well as the voices of survivors and their descendants.

Notably, this book also serves as a guide for human behaviour under extremely difficult conditions. The book is relevant today for challenging discrimination against women and for its nuanced exploration of the conditions minorities face as outspoken protagonists of human rights issues and as resisters of discrimination. From this perspective the voices being empowered in this book are clear examples of the importance of protest by women in forcing a totalitarian regime to pause and reconsider its options for the moment. In revealing so, Women Defying Hitler ultimately foregrounds that women rescuers and resisters were and are of great continuing consequence.

Nathan Stoltzfus is Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies and of History at Florida State University, USA. He is the author of Hitler's Compromises (2016) and Resistance of the Heart (1996), which was a co-recipient of the Institute of Contemporary History's Fraenkel Prize.

Mordecai Paldiel is Adjunct Professor in Jewish History at Yeshiva University, USA. He is the author of several books, including Saving One's Own (2017) and The Righteous Among the Nations (2007).

Judy Baumel-Schwartz is Director of the Schulman School of Basic Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is the author of many books including Double Jeopardy (1998), Perfect Heroes (2010), and Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women (2013).