But british officials perceived to be in their interest. They might use it at the planters paid travel. Also if slaves were out. The expectation was made clear that if theres a slave revolt in trinidad they were supposed to help suppress the. They were supposed to catch runaways are not receive them into their communities. So its only in the 1830s the british will make a concerted effort, Parliament Passes law for the gradual emancipation through this conversation apprenticeship horrendously cheap on the west indies. Often enslave people get impatient with this and they will rise up and demand more immediate freedom. So it is a tangled process, but it is through it is around civil war. Thats fairly easy to do with the Political Center is in london in the planter class has limited power by the team 30s in parliament. Much less so than that. And he has studied so well when the planter passes far more in parliament and it was in 1830s. Another question here. This is the last one. Im just wondering, did the british can did her son and then to sierra leone . Was that an option or too far ordered the freed slaves simply not want to go back . To africa. Good question. I dont see evidence that the proposed sierra leone for the war of 1812 refugees. Sierra leone was pretty well understood and turned out to be a disaster. A very extensive disaster in the lives of the people sent their hand and cost of the british. The Sierra Leone Company that organizes the bankrupt British Government was left holding that. So they dont want to repeat that. So none of these former american slaves were in sierra leone, as far as i can tell. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv will be live on espn2 and booktv that work for the 64th annual National Book awards in new york city this wednesday, november 20. Tune in at 7 40 p. M. Eastern for coverage of the entire awards ceremony. Booktv will be live from the 64th annual National Book awards on november 20th that he stands here. In anticipation of the live program, we are featuring the five finalists from our fiction. Next, wendy lower, history professor at Claremont Mckenna college and historical consultant to the u. S. Holocaust memorial and the young recounts the road is one that played the holocaust or her National Book nominated title, hitlers hits furies german women in the nazi killing fields. This talk from Los Angeles Museum of the holocaust is one hour and 20 minutes. Thank you very much. I want to thank the Los Angeles Museum of holocaust for this opportunity to speak today to you. Can you hear me in the back . Ashes be quite loudly . Is this better . Better . Or too loud . Okay. I also want to make sure i dont speak too quickly. I get very excited about my research and sometimes i start speaking too quickly. I hope you give me a signal and that both in terms of your ability to hear me im really happy to be here. Dr. Mellman and i actually have done some Research Together in the field and ukraine. We worked on a diary project together and there was a very, very special project, took many years to produce. Not as fun as this one, but a completely different perspective on the holocaust in the eyes of one jewish man, polish jewish man who found himself in the mouth drum on the mass murder. I just want to mention not dr. Mellman contribution to that particular project with the weekend. I want to thank you for that. The story of warren was not something that i went to the archive looking for. I will be archived in the harmer soviet union and were craned in the dark 1992 with a completely different question. This is rather typical of Historical Research that you think you go after some bank and you go into an archive and find a file that looks kind of strange and curious and gets you wondering, why is this here im not sure. In the summer of 1992 come in the soviet union had collapsed. Ukraine had become an independent country as in 1991. For me and i saw that as an opportunity as a budding scholar. I was a graduate student, to go into this territory and try to see what was there. I have been much in a material in the National Archive in washington d. C. , the things that the military had seeped out. Confected nurnberg trial documents and captured german record. A lot of the material in washington was essentially the high command order, thanks captured in germany proper. Documents for berlin, theyre not trailer the agency is headquartered germany. What about all those regional offices where the german and baylor roots in lithuania, estonia where these crimes occur . Was going on out there in the field they get into those hard copies and start to understand and imagine the scope of the violence occurring in the open era setting outside of those killing centers like i should end now if your family are with the work of someone like timothy snyder, blood land, its even more apparent to us now, more evident as close to half of it is of the holocaust perished outside of peace gaseous centers in the open air Mass Shootings, and together liquidations, during the deportations, and the use communities, okay . My first trip in the summer of 1992, i made my way to the sheik omar regional archive about 100 miles hundred miles and the reason why i went there was because i figured out from my advisors were, Richard Brightman wrote an excellent study of heinrich himmler, the head of the whole ss Police Apparatus that hitler had is headquarters in finance, about 50, 60 miles south. So i thought come here is an interesting place. Its in the heart of the settlement, which is historically important for jewish russian jewish history. Catherine the great fit at this reservation to find Jewish Population of the empire to this particular area. It was at the heartland of jewish history, obviously a large population. Concentrations are sometimes dirty to 50 and not cause for once, of course from ikea. I thought you got hitler station there. In these regional archives. I can start to understand what happened locally and whether or not hitler had a direct influence on that. In the early 90s, the big question of historiography with the decisionmaking question. When did the holocaust began . That was really what i was thinking when i went out there. I was naive enough to think may be some of the most important material is not turned. And the horde quarters. And someone gets copied on a file at a lower level, it ends up in a regional archives. Maybe im going to find some important highlevel directives that are going to tell us more about how the holocaust started in hitlers direct influence on not. When i got to the archives, i was astounded because there is a significant collection of material, things dont have looked at before. These were files that have bitterly footprints on the documents. The judges were burned. I could imagine when the red army came in at the end of 1943 to reoccupy that they were picking stuff up because there was warfare in the city and shoving these things and files in the archivist there was incredibly gracious because of this moment in time is establishing itself that hasnt instituted archival procedures and away. Things that have been classified and bringing me tea and sandwiches. But the woman who was very generous of the materials to read german. I was looking at german files. So i she doesnt know whats in here. Theres no copy machine. I was just transcribing as fast as i could. Among the files was this list of very innocuous personnel listed that showed young women, unmarried women if there is basically between the ages of 18 and 25. Kindergarten teachers and welfare workers were sent charged with doing the kind of missionary work. Germinates in this region because its going to be in nazi thinking utopia, the living space is going to be the empire for germans only hitler referred to parts of ukraine. He said this is going to be our riviera. Nongermans are going to be eliminated starting with the jews in a completely transformed the landscape. They had gotten us there. They have other technocrats and specialists trying to 10 of utopia. They have a direct hand in creating these experimental colonies had so these women were brought in to participate in the colonization process. I figured this out in my Research Later on. Initially i thought, where these young women here quite this is a war zone. This is where the war of destruction come as the germans called it, is taking place. Its titanic struggle, the military campaigns obviously. I thought that ordinary german women were at home, taking care of the home front and having babies so that more soldiers could go into battle and more territory could be covered. Here is an example of the kind of document. This is not just from the archive, but just to show you this personnel. This is from riga. For nicer to realize this phenomenon of these women going east could start to find documentation from other parts of eastern europe, local, regional records. You can see the telephone operators. One is situated in the office, kind of an executive secretary in the front office and starting to figure out through this documentation that women document that i found is possibly the tip of the iceberg. When i went back to washington after the first trip i looked at what existed and thought okay, let me see if general holocaust history book and nazi germany books to what extent do women daycare and these books . Had a presence in this place is . Maybe someone else has dirty come across as and talked about it. When i couldnt find the women that i was looking now. Of course i was fine a moment that i was trying to find them on the map of eastern. I was finding a lot of photographs. Can this be in Research Effort to all different heads the sources. This is the challenge of especially writing were emerging in these places in all different capacities. If a way for providers to the eastern territory, she is not going to be there is not going to be a paper trail. You find these women circulating. This is a classic image, a group shot. The commandant and the personnel bear. The city arms wrapped around him. And it says on the caption, an unknown woman. Another unknown woman below. The cover of the book is another unknown woman. I wanted to find out who those unknown women were and what were they doing. I also noticed that a lot of research had devoted to coming up with different perpetrator tapes that we had these kind of characterizations that emerge in the literature. The antisemites. You have the ordinary man. You have the banal for your credit, the technocrat, the first soldier. These types have emerged and we were expanding our understanding of perpetration of the holocaust but these kinds of nuances in a similar kind of development was not happening with the womens role. Is there a female version . Is very female version of an ordinary man . They even put into killing unit. What extent women might fit into those categories. He went back to the standard documentation weve been using. Then i went back to the archives to some of the things they been using an investigative material. I started to notice that women were called to testify alive. They were very instrumental at the number of trial and started to realize, well, women are coming in to testify against their mailboxes or even their spouses. They have a lot of information. They are providing a lot of historical, valuable information to prosecutors. Information historians have pulled up in written history from. But not question, why does this woman knows so much . How come she is telling me every detail about procedures taken in the proper way documents are handed, how orders are conveyed to killing units, the mood in the office, what happened in terms of the distribution of property, who has access to safe classified material, identifying killers and often describing scenes from massacres. Womens testimony has been underappreciated or taken for granted in many ways and we had massive document the testimony how can they know so much . They must have been there. And if they were there, what did they do but theyre not revealing in this testimony . We have to go back to these traditional sources and ask new questions. Eventually, i was able to determine by this collect enough or if they came menieres that there were approximately a rough estimate of future research may change this, but i could account for about half a million german women who have circulated in the eastern territories during the war and different capacities. The german red cross train 640,000 women during the nazi era. Some 300,000 of them were in the eastern territories. The german army trained another half a million women in support positions as flight recorders from a radio operators, wiretap yours, gamblers ss trained some 30,000 women and certified them. They had to maintain secrecy and these are special auxiliaries. Gestapo headquarters and prisons. 2500 2500 teachers were sent to one region alone in poland to participate in a german station after to set up kindergarten when the german refugees came in to teach them all about the nazi ideology and so forth. So of course over 200,000 women 240,000 women apply to be the wives of ss men and they were encouraged to go stay with them and because the organization was a breeding organization, that leads to racial organization. We find many ss lies in these locations where their memoir so that they could be together and continue to promote the race and have more children. Heres an image, i think it is quite illustrative of this phenomenon. The nurses being sworn in brooklyn. You can see the magnitude during the war. All of them in uniform. The other initiative rightists in the cover of a brochure. The east means you and this is trying to recruit women to be resettlement advisers so an ethnic german refugees were brought into these colonies, it was german women who were brought in to teach them the language, teach them germans on the german cooking, how to maintain a proper german household, all the kinds of activities. Now, while i was putting this picture together, what i came to realize theres a whole generation of german women because if you think about it, who are the individuals that are going to be going off in the nursing staff, and the secretary of. These are young women. Young women who were fertile, who can reproduce for hitler and also young women who are single who are working in these offices and working on the nursing profession as teachers. I notice most of these women were on between 1920 and 1924 thereabout. And so now i not only have women on the eastern territory, but looks like a generational phenomenon that was emerging. So i start to refer to them is the First World War i baby boomers. This fits into the general history of nazi germany that the leadership itself was young. Those that committed these crimes were young within the german population. You had people like hitler and how mart in their 40s with enormous amounts of power and similarly women of marriage age in their 20s also wielded considerable power and the implications of that coming young people wielding the power, lifeanddeath ability to make lifeanddeath decisions over nongermans. In the summer of 2005 is that the u. S. Holocaust memorial museum, still on this collect enough for, piecing this together. Hadnt written up by results yet. Things are just starting to take shape. I at this point wasnt really sure how close the women got to the killing. I had evidence to show that many more were direct witnesses and many more were in the machinery as secretaries in particular. But i didnt have a lot of cases of killers in the last couple of years, when i started to turn the sub as my Research Focused on those perpetrators. This is a case that i came across in the archives in washington. I distinctly remember going through that microfilm and being really just hours on mashed by these documents. Even 60 plus years after the event, was absolutely chilling. This case is one of the more prominent ones in my book. The name of the individual is earned a peace treaty. The reason why we have this documentation on this killer is because she was arrested by the east german and she was interrogated by the east german police. Her husband, the two of them stood trial together in 1962. When i looked to my finding, i thought this is an unbelievable case. A husband by standing trial together. The husband gets the guillotine. She gets a life sentence in that committed their crime on a farm in ukraine outside the camp system. Already when i thoughti might not have got to look at this case. And then i get into the real and i see this confession here. Thats her certificate. Shes apprehended. Thats her mug shot. Theyre to the right right is the beginning of what is a confession. If you look on the righthand corner, if you can make that out, you can see shes interrogated for full day with one lunch break and it starts in the morning and ends at 9 45. Of course, this is the nice clean copy. Someone got the information out of her and made this digest other further. In this document, she admits to killing six jewish boys on their farm and shooting them in the back of the neck. Sukarnoputri was one of an entire generation of young german women who saw their future in the eastern territory and they arrived there throughout different paths interject race. If they shared certain outlets, certain ambitions. Verna petrie admitted in her compassion the reason why she killed those children was because she had been so indoctrinated in the 1920s and taught to hate jews. She also said in her compassion she wanted to prove herself to the man. Many of these women when they went east were put in all kinds of situations that they went there with a certain idealism, certain convictions, certain ambitions and certain hopes and dreams. Many of them of course didnt go voluntarily because they had compulsory wartime service. But they did share this nationalist outlook as to why they were there and why they had to defend her right. Even one of my cases who probably has the most moral sensibilities and was most conflicted about the violence she confronted, she still when i interviewed her in 2010, it was still clear to me that she didnt question that she had to be there to defend our homeland. Even after shed seen the most terrific or heard about and talk to her perpetrators in ukraine, she followed her orders and went to krasnodar, and deeper, further east into the were some and that she did not question because her sense of duty prevailed over a kind of sense of morality. In this regard, men were no different from women. So here, you can see t