The Accused by Jessica Trisko Darden

A compelling examination of Nazi women’s perpetration of war crimes, and how—or whether—courts held them accountable

To date, our understanding of women’s participation in Nazi war crimes has been shaped by political decisions made by men, which reflect entrenched gender norms that diminish both women’s 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 women’s cases makes an important contribution to scholarship on women’s agency and culpability in perpetrating violence.