BOOK REVIEW : An Intimate and Powerful Look at German Life Under the Nazis : FRAUEN: German Women Recall the Third Reich; <i> by Alison Owings</i> ; Rutgers University Press;$24.95, 550 pages

When Alison Owings met Frau Popist on a sojourn in Spain, she discovered that the elderly German woman was full of pleasant chat about “the usual matters--wine, men, and goats.” And Frau Popist even offered some sly sexual initiation to her young American friend.

“She . . . peppered me with advice,” writes Owings. “To raise my arms above my head if I stood nude in front of a man; the stance showed off one’s breasts.”

And then, one evening, the talk to turned to an uglier and more ominous subject--what it was like to live in Nazi Germany. Frau Popist described how she encountered a gang of Jewish slave laborers under the whip of their Nazi guards.

The experience was an epiphany for Frau Popist--and for Owings.

“Not only had Frau Popist been talking about a catastrophe of humanity whose combined method and scale was unparalleled in Western memory,” writes Owings, “she was talking about it as a witness, an insider, as an adult citizen of the Third Reich.”

So Owings sought to collect and assemble “the female-related pieces of the Third Reich puzzle” by preserving the recollections of other German women who had lived through the Nazi era. And the result of her quest is “Frauen,” a remarkable work of history that stands out from the vast library of World War II studies for its sheer intimacy and its sometimes startling perspectives.

Some 50 women were interviewed for the book, and more than two dozen are profiled in tight close-up, but Owings does not merely present the dry transcripts of their testimony. Rather, “Frauen” is a collection of vivid profiles, each one enriched and enlivened with biographical detail, explanatory asides on history and politics, notes on the coloration of meanings in their choice of words, and the author’s own sharp insights into the credibility of her informants. Thus, “Frauen” transcends the genre of oral history and turns into something more elaborate and accomplished and memorable.

The recollections of life in Nazi Germany in “Frauen” range from the commonplace to the horrific, but they always have a ring of authenticity and an immediacy that are seldom found in more scholarly work.

Frau Mathilde Mundt, for example, sings the praises of law and order in the Third Reich: “One could let the wash hang on the line.” But Frau Wilhelmine Haferkamp recalls that, as a young girl, she saw her family doctor as he was forced to run naked through the streets with a sign covering his genitals: “I am the Jew Dr. Stein.”

And Frau Ann Fest describes how she was “inducted” into the SS and given the task of guarding the Jewish women inmates of the Ravensbruck concentration camp and, later, the “work camps” that were satellites of Buchenwald. Frau Fest recalls the first time she saw a beating by a camp guard: “Stay seated if you can,” warned a fellow guard, “and look away.” And she tells us that she brought supplies into the camp “and then the prisoners baked and made Christmas tree ornaments.”

A few of the women in “Frauen” are Jewish--or at least Jewish enough to have attracted the attention of the Nazis. Frau Verena Groth recalls that her Jewish grandmother was forced to wear the yellow star, but her father--thanks to his marriage to her “Aryan” mother--was spared. “If my mother had divorced him,” she recalls, “he’d have been in a concentration camp immediately.” And she adds, rather chillingly: “Many divorced.”

Only rarely do we encounter a woman who can be credited with at least a spark of resistance against the Nazi regime. Freya von Moltke was married to the man who founded the so-called Kreisau Circle, a “spiritual counterpart” to the New Order, and she describes how she struggled (but failed) to save his life when he was swept up by the Gestapo after the attempted assassination of Hitler.

“Don’t make my role too big,” she warns Owings. “I say that no one who survived in Germany is guiltless. Such a person does not exist.”

Owings, a television news writer, notices things that professional historians might have overlooked. She wondered, for example, if she might be able to determine whether a woman was pro-Nazi or anti-Nazi by some aspect of her demeanor or personality. “Neither physical appearance nor home decor revealed a woman’s personal politics,” Owings concludes. “I did find, though, that the rare untidy German home generally signaled a Hitler opponent.”

Owings was perfectly willing to ask the hard questions about what these women knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it. And she concedes that their answers sometimes amount to “a kind of tortured ballet of exoneration danced over the women’s and their country’s past.” Still, Owings asks us to share her compassion toward the women in “Frauen.”

“I see the women face day-to-day consequences of the Third Reich with varying morsels of impudence or despair,” she concludes, “with hesitation or hope or humor, with prejudice, with contradictions, with shame, with first refusals and second thoughts, and with blinders.”