Includes bibliographical references and index.

A Note about Language, Translation, and Truth -- Idealism and Chasm / Margarete (Margrit) Fischer -- Motherhood Times Ten, and Food to Spare / Wilhelmine Haferkamp -- A Matter of Fate / Marianne Karlsruhen -- National Socialism and Christianity / Ursula Meyer-Semlies -- Retrospective Guilt / Liselotte Otting -- The History Lesson / Mathilde Mundt -- An "Exotic" Past / Verena Groth -- A Cosmopolitan View of the World / Maria von Lingen -- Learning How Communism Works / Irene Burchert -- Solidarity and Survival / Charlotte (Lotte) Muller -- "We Did Love Our Fuhrer, Really!" / Ellen Frey -- Before, During, and After the Firebombing / Ursula Kretzschmar -- The Ambivalence of Avoidance / Martha Brixius -- From the Emperor to a Mud Hole / Margarete (Gretl) Sasowski -- Rural Perspectives / Barbara Amschel, Anna Lieb and Anna Maier -- A Modest Woman of the Resistance / Freya von Moltke -- The Schisms of a "Flakwaffenhelferin" / Erna Tietz -- On Megalomaniacs and Little People / Anna Rigl -- Dissident Clergy and Dissident Actions / Emmi Heinrich -- A Job in Its Own Category / Anna Fest -- A Child Not of the Times / Karma Rauhut -- "A Very Unpolitical Woman" / Anne Hepp -- "I Was Alone. And I Had the Whole City Against Me." / Margret Blersch -- "I Am Never Dishonest." / Regina Frankenfeld -- Life as a Cabaret / Christine (Tini) Weihs -- A Natural Matter of Friendship / Erna Dubnack -- Talking about Silence / Rita Kuhn.

What were the women of Germany doing during the Third Reich? What were they thinking? And what do they have to say a half century later? In Frauen we hear their voices - most for the first time. Alison Owings interviewed and here records the words of twenty-nine German women who were there: Working for the Resistance. Joining the Nazi Party. Outsmarting the Gestapo. Disliking a Jewish neighbor. Hiding a Jewish friend. Witnessing "Kristallnacht." Witnessing the firebombing of Dresden. Shooting at Allied planes. Welcoming Allied troops. Being a prisoner. And being a guard. The women recall their own and others' enthusiasm, doubt, fear, fury, cowardice, guilt, and anguish. Alison Owings, in her pursuit of such memories, was invited into the homes of these women. Because she is neither Jewish nor German, and because she speaks fluent colloquial German, many of the women she interviewed felt comfortable enough with her to unlock the past. What they have to say will surprise Americans, just as it surprised the women themselves. Not since Marcel Ophuls's controversial film The Sorrow and the Pity have we been on such intimate terms with "the enemy." In this case, the story is that of the women, those who did not make policy but who lived with its effects and witnessed its results. What they did and did not do is not just a reflection on them and their country - it also leads us to question what actions we might have taken in their place. The interviews do not allow for easy, smug answers.

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