Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers

by Guenter Lewy

"Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis--members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions.
Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions.
Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life--and of human history--that cannot be forgotten.

Genres: History, Holocaust, World War II, Nonfiction, Sociology, European History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2017

About the author

Guenter Lewy is a German-born American author and political scientist who is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His works span several topics, but he is most often associated with his 1978 book on the Vietnam War, America in Vietnam, and several controversial works that deal with the applicability of the term genocide to various historical events, where Lewy denies both the Romani genocide and the Armenian genocide.

In 1939 he migrated from Germany to Palestine. After World War II, he migrated to the United States to reunite with his parents. Lewy earned a BA at City College in New York City and a MA and PhD at Columbia University. He has been on the faculties of Columbia University, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., and was a frequent contributor to Commentary.

Reviews

[Pauly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very short book (the main body of the book is only 136 pages). The first half goes over old ground about the structure of the KZ system and the role of the Einsatzgruppen. The second half is quite interesting about individual perpetrators and their careers, post-war trials and the flawed West German legal system's approaches to war crimes. Although the second half is good, it takes time to get to the informative sections.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that I am thankful this book was short. I have read many books on the holocaust, I have been to the Holocaust Museums in Washington and Jerusalem. I have been to the Dachau concentration camp, so I have some knowledge of the subject. This book went into brutal detail of how the perpetrators rolled out the Final Solution from Babi Yar to Auschwitz, so of which I knew, but not to that amount of detail. The author goes into great detail of the trials after the war. I had no idea how lenient the German courts were, compared with the Allied courts. All in all, I am glad I read this book

[Anastasia Bodrug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cartea descrie scene destul de violente, care uneori surprind prin sofisticarea lor. Autorul a încercat să înțeleagă cum s-a întâmplat ca poporul german să se transforme în monștri și cine este de vină pentru asta - cruzimea care este în fiecare persoană, sau Hitler și anturajul său, propaganda lor. Cartea se bazează pe materialul prezentat în instanțe, care, desigur, nu reflectă imaginea completă a ceea ce se întâmpla, dar, sper, arată o imagine imparțială.

Unde este linia dincolo de care încetezi să mai fii soldat care îndeplinește ordinul altcuiva și începi să îți asumi personal responsabilitatea pentru acțiunile ilegale pe care ți s-a ordonat să le faci? Mai mult, există un război în care toate mijloacele sunt bune, iar tu ești ambițios și vrei să avansezi în serviciu. Și ce alegere ați face în mod special în această situație? Cred că, indiferent de ceea ce spun oamenii despre ei înșiși, ar fi mulți care ar ucide mii de oameni în beneficiul lor sau pur și simplu pentru că nu văd ceva greșit în asta. Din punct de vedere logic, nu pot concluziona dacă persoanele care au urmat ordinul sunt vinovați că și-au făcut treaba și dacă soldații ar trebui să aibă propriul lor punct de vedere.

În descrierea Holocaustului, este dificil să rămâi imparțial, deoarece întreaga lume îl condamnă în unanimitate pe Hitler, pe poporul german și pe restul participanților. Iar autorul acestei cărți, inclusiv în narațiunea scenelor de abuz asupra copiilor sau descrierea numărului de victime, nu rămâne departe de opinia publică acceptată. Cu toate acestea, el încearcă să descrie ceea ce s-a întâmplat fără emoții inutile.

[Ksenia Bannykh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely leave a comment but in this case I believe I should do it. I would call this book eye-opening for me - not because I don’t know enough of Holocaust horrors (though it doesn’t mean one could ever stop to have chills thinking about it), but because I found out that the majority of the people who took part in these endless tortures and murders got away with it - they just spent a couple of years in prison and then came back to their usual life: family, work, hobbies, pension - a life that more than a million of Jews from KZs were not destined to experience. It also came as a surprise to me that actually anyone who didn ‘t want to do anything with it could ask for a transfer to any other work - no punishment, no consequences, no hard feelings, and still only few did it. Most of them preferred to go on with murders, later claiming their innocence while referring to the fact that they just obeyed the commands… My mind is still not able to process how all of this could happen

[Booreiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave the book four stars for the information I learned, especially about the trials in Germany post -war and the convoluted subjective form of justice by judges who served under Hitler. The book is brutal with facts of the operations of "extermination.".
I did not think the that the objective of the book that there is no one personality or sort of person who can be involved in the killings was really proven as the author kept contradicting himself or making distinctions without a difference. Do I think it could happen again? After the reaction by so many to Trump and the internet conspiracies that so many believe......yes.

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure there's all that much in here that's new. And the conclusion that there are many reasons human beings commit genocide, not just one, is hardly ground-breaking. But the book is well-written and includes an extensive bibliography.

[Taisia Crudu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guenter Lewy face un studiu amplu asupra Holocaustului. Dacă până acum în majoritatea cărților cu aceeași tematică îi aveam drept protagoniști pe Victimile Holocaustului, în această opera accentul este pus pe Asasinii lor. Desigur în comparație cu victimile, criminalii naziști nu au scris autobiografii în care să-și prezinte actele de cruzime.
✍️La baza cărții stau cele 929 dosare judiciare germane despre ucigașii naziști publicate de Universitatea din Amsterdam. De aici autorul a scos la rampă multe exemple dându-ne numele și faptele concrete ale acestora, inclusiv soarta lor ulterioară în Germania Democrată.

Mai întâi Lewy prezintă câteva date generale despre Holocaust, descriind apoi uciderile în masă. În următoarele capitole este prezentată și exemplificată acea slujbă în “Fabrica morții” și se face un portret detaliat al ucigașilor. Se efectuează o incursiune în modul de selectare a naziștilor, a psihanalizei lor, dar și a celor “piloni slabi” ai acestei fabrici care au refuzat să participe la omoruri. Vedem motivațiille și viziunile lor. În penultimul capitolul, ne sunt prezentate câteva procese judiciare ale naziștilor inclusiv pedepsele suportate de acești monștri, majoritatea fiind niște erori judiciare. Ultimul capitol explică cum a fost posibil Holocaustul, din punctul de vedere al contextului istoric și al ideologiei naziste.

PS Merci mult, Cristina, pentru carte, chiar a meritat👍

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

If one is looking for a concise examination of the factors that generated the Holocaust, one could do quite a lot worse than this monograph, written by a man who witnessed "Crystal Night" as a child, and who has spent much of their career dealing with the analysis of organized violence against peoples. Concentrating on motivation amongst the field commanders and foot soldiers of the Nazi war on the Jews, Lewy is quite prepared to split hairs between genuine haters, careerists, and people just swept up in events. The one point Lewy comes back to, and essentially ends on, is that while you can't expect suicide to be a general option by which to maintain personal integrity, even in Nazi Germany one did have options to avoid participating in industrialized murder, and the actual killers seldom availed themselves of it.

Apart from that, one thing that undercuts this monograph is that Lewy does invoke the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose experiments were being debunked basically as this book was coming out.

Actual rating: 3.5.

[Donald Schopflocher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covering well plowed ground except in the section detailing the leniency of the post war German courts, this short work lacks cohesiveness, and provides few new insights.

[Jenny Wiley]

It was a hard but interesting read.

[Elias · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lies repeated over and over again. (History is written by the victors)

A fantastic book I recommend:
https://archive.org/details/tellthetr...

[Reuvenc]

I found the recurring use of the words "had had" (you know, to convey the meaning of the verb 'have' in the past perfect; some examples : "Graalfs told the court that he had had a half-Jewish acquaintance", "noted that the young officer had not been a fanatical National Socialist, and even had had a Jewish woman as a friend.", "It would appear that Täubner had had the bad luck of being caught for taking pictures and showing these pictures to a large number of individuals.") to be somewhat grating. I mean, in comparison to the deeds and fates of Hans Graalfs and Max Täubner themselves (and so many of their ilk!) my annoyance here is obviously and unreservedly small potatoes and should really go w/o mention but nonetheless, here I am, mentioning it. No particular infelicity of style (if that is even the case, truly, I have no clue, maybe it's fine to write "had had", I just don't much like the way it feels going into my eyeballs and sinking into the shallow depths of my brainpan) ought to prevent anyone from reading this book, though.