Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais ISSN: 1519-6089
[email protected] Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul Brasil Pohn-Lauggas, Maria The hidden perpetrators. Female involvement in National Socialism and its biographical adaption Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais, vol. 16, núm. 1, enero-marzo, 2016, pp. 85-99 Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=74245835007 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative http://dx.doi.org/10.15448/1984-7289.2016.1.23289 Dossiê: Mulheres e violência The hidden perpetrators Female involvement in National Socialism and its biographical adaption As perpetradoras ocultas Envolvimento feminino no Nacional-Socialismo e sua adaptação biográfica Maria Pohn-Lauggas* Abstract: Women who were not persecuted by the Nazi regime were integrated in various ways into the Nazi society and so contributed to its stabilization and perpetuation. The question of the ways in which women contributed to Nazism and so to its crimes was suppressed after the Nazi defeat. On the basis of their gender, women were constructed as victims of the war and the hardships of the post-war period. In Austria specifically, this victim construction was blended with a national victim discourse that depicted Austria as the first victim of Hitler’s Germany, so allowing the denial of Austrians’ participation in Nazi crimes. In this context, this article aims to show, through three reconstructed biographies how, with the help of victim constructions, the biographical subjects extenuate and deny their own involvement in the Nazi society, in so doing positioning women’s activity as exterior to the practice of a perpetrator group constructed as male.