Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers by Guenter Lewy (review)

"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.

In lieu of a conclusion, the last chapter surveys the most popular explanations of perpetrator behavior: theories of individual pathology, including the now-obsolete theory about sadistic personalities; discarded theories about the specifically German characteristics such as obedience to authority (Theodor Adorno) or eliminationist antisemitism (Daniel J. Goldhagen); situational models such as the (not specifically German) social psychology of obedience to authority and group pressure (Stanley Milgram; Philip Zimbardo); and dispositional explanationssuchasantisemitism.

A strength of the book consists in its assemblage of biographical and individual cases—its narration of what individual perpetrators did in what contexts. The book is weaker in explaining why they did it. Indeed, Lewy resorts, in a rather traditional manner, to combining or juxtaposing the above-mentioned situational models and dispositional explanations, all of which have been in use for decades and which shaped the Browning-Goldhagen controversy in the mid-1990s. The culture of obedience on the one hand and antisemitism on the other were constitutive for perpetrators' choices, in Lewy's view. And they certainly were. However, inquiries into Holocaust perpetrators as well as perpetrators of other genocides—the work of Alex Hinton on the Khmer Rouge and of Scott Straus on Rwanda, for instance—have moved on, not least inspired by Browning's case study of Reserve Police Battalion 101. The latter study showed that Germans had choices, and that the choices they took varied. It also illuminated the dynamics of violence by exploring the role of communications and interactions between perpetrators, bystanders (or onlookers), and those who backed out and shied away from murder. Instead of explicitly questioning the murderous activities of their comrades or the Nazi rationale for genocide, the many dissenters thought of their own dissidence as deviant, as "weakness." In doing so, they confirmed the genocidal norm, and so contributed their share to making the genocide happen, even without wanting it.

There is certainly a need to distinguish those who pulled the trigger or opened the gas chambers from those who applauded, looked the other way, or filled out the paperwork. But only a sociologically informed perspective on the functional...