Lecture to explore roles of women in Hitler's regime

Posted 01/03/01

The role of women in Adolph Hitler's SS Corps will be the topic of a lecture by German scholar Gudrun Schwarz at 4 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 4, at Dartmouth College's Rockefeller Center. Titled "Forgotten Perpetrators: Women in the SS," the lecture is free and open to the public.

Schwarz, an assistant professor at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in Hamburg, Germany, will offer insights into why significant numbers of women joined the SS as part of the Women's Corp or took up employment with the organization during the Second World War.

Created in 1942, the Women's SS Corp had a large role in supporting and upholding the Nazi regime, according to Schwarz's research. Women's many roles included security guards; physicians and nurses; telephone, telegraphy and radio operators; drivers; and typists, secretaries and office assistants.

Schwarz is a scholar in the Hamburg Institute's research group on the theory and history of violence. Established in 1984, the Institute is a nonprofit foundation whose main goal is to initiate and carry out research projects in the social, political and historical sciences.

The Dartmouth lecture is funded by a gift from Leon Black '73 to the Jewish Studies Program.