Perpetrators

“We must look into the abyss to see beyond it,” psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton once stated, after dedicating decades to explaining why perpetrators of atrocities, massacres, and genocide did what they did. In this spirit, historians, sociologists, and, not least, psychologists have inquired into the actions, mindsets, and motivations of Holocaust perpetrators and published hundreds if not thousands of books and innumerous articles. Guenter Lewy’s new book synthesizes the most important in masterly fashion. While the basic results, developments, and controversies of Holocaust perpetrator studies have been reviewed many times—most recently and most convincingly by Peter Hayes in Why? Explaining the Holocaust (2017)—Lewy’s account manages to assemble a plethora of details tucked away in the often remotely published German as well as English literature. To date, it is the most comprehensive summary. Although occasionally drawing on lesser-known examples from the 929 German trial verdicts published in forty-nine volumes by Amsterdam University Press between 1968 and 2012 (not translated and thus unusable in Anglophone classrooms), Lewy does not seriously dig into primary sources. The work’s major achievement is an analysis of the existing body of research. Its first four chapters describe perpetrator deeds in concentration and death camps and during mass shooting operations in the East; here and elsewhere Lewy also documents the fact that Germans almost everywhere had the choice to disobey orders to murder Jews or other civilians. Chapter 5 looks more closely at some of those few Germans who refused to join in the killing. In many cases, they had an ambivalent, often contradictory attitude to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The most prominent was Wilhelm Kube, head of the civilian occupation in Belorussia, who, despite having publicly expressed the crudest antisemitic views, tried to save thousands of deported German Jews by employing them there in ghetto factories

Genocide · German · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Holocaust · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law · History · Law