“They Forgot Their Role”: Women Perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

Abstract

They Forgot Their Role is a comparative study of women’s actions and agency during genocide, examining women perpetrators of the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda. It foregrounds the stories of individuals’ experiences of genocide and examines the impact of deeply entrenched patriarchal systems on women who became perpetrators in Nazi Germany and 1994 Rwanda. It explores how, in both instances, many of the socially prescribed and perpetuated norms of gendered behavior were suspended, modified, or dissolved. It asks how this “relaxing” of the patriarchal order facilitated women’s participation in both genocides and considers the impact of a prevailing silence that has influenced women’s post-genocide trajectories and narratives. Men perpetrators are “ordinary,” women perpetrators are “aberrant, flawed, or inhuman.” And it argues for further discussion and analysis of women perpetrators in contemporary society and in scholarship.