Before coming to Duke in 1988, she taught at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts,[10] and at Long Island University, Southampton from 1969 to 1971.

A reviewer in the New York Times wrote that Mothers in the Fatherland explored the “paradox that the very women who were so protective of their children, so warm, nurturing and giving to their families, could at the same time display extraordinary cruelty.”[14] Koonz has claimed that women involved in resistance activities were more likely to escape notice owing to the "masculine" values of the Third Reich.

Koonz includes women who were opposed to Nazism 100% as well as "single issue" critics (of, for example, sterilization and euthanasia) but did not protect or protest the deportation of Jews to death camps.

[2][16][17][18] Mothers in the Fatherland integrates archival research into an exploration of “the nature of feminist commitment, complicity in the Holocaust, and the meaning of Germany’s past.”[19][20] The Nazis promised “emancipation from emancipation,” an appeal that resonated with Germans who feared that male-female equality meant “social and family disintegration.” But Koonz highlights the paradoxes produced by the Third Reich’s dependence on women’s participation (as subordinates, to be sure) in child-bearing, social work, education, surveillance, health care, and compliance with race policy.

And colonizers both lorded and ladied it over the colonized of both sexes.”[22] Conventional scholarship defines Nazism by its anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, and anti-liberalism, as expressed in publications like Der Stürmer, but The Nazi Conscience examines the “positive” values of community and ethnic purity that attracted ordinary Germans, including millions who had never voted Nazi before Adolf Hitler's takeover.

[25] This was a time when National Socialist racial policy congealed, or according to Koonz, “metastasized” in three contexts: Hitler’s public persona, academic think tanks, and bureaucratic networks.

Most citizens “accepted a new Nazi-specific morality that was steeped in the language of ethnic superiority, love of fatherland, and community values," according to another review of The Nazi Conscience.

“In examining how National Socialism mobilized diverse but quotidian institutional contexts to create a ‘community of moral obligation,’ she invites us to reflect on .

"[24] Corey Robin noted Koonz “might have cited Thomas Jefferson who, anticipating the Nazis by more than a century, saw no future for freed blacks other than deportation or extermination.”[29] Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, Koonz published articles in History News Network and the New School's Public Seminar warning about the risks of autocracy in the United States.