Perpetrator Character and Motivation: An Emerging Consensus?

The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps, Michael Thad Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), xii + 376 pp., $39.95.

Bürokratie und Terror: Das Judenreferat der Gestapo Düsseldorf, 1935-1945, Düsseldorfer Schriften zur neueren Landesgeschichte und zur Geschichte Nordrhein-Westfalens 58, Holger Berschel (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 478 pp., € 39.00.

Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges, 1941-1944, Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, ed. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 749 pp., € 30.00.

Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), xi + 360 pp., $35.00.

Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, James Waller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xx + 316 pp., $29.95.

Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führerkorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 964 pp., € 40.00.

Over the past dozen years, scholars have focused heavily on the perpetrators of the Holocaust. ¹ Although many in the general population have re-embraced the emphasis on a special "German" predisposition, ² most scholars have dismissed such an approach as simplistic. However the notion of the banal bureaucrat and of its opposite, the psychologically predisposed perpetrator, remain flashpoints for debate.

In the 1990s many scholars abandoned efforts to find acceptable generalizations about perpetrator type, instead seeing a number of groups playing diverse roles. Near the top of the hierarchy, a core group emerged as an "ideological elite." Historian Ulrich Herbert led the way, depicting Nazi official Werner Best as the prototype of a generation radicalized by war. These adherents of "heroic realism" and "scientific racism" required drastic measures to build a healthy racial community, measures Best and his ilk designed and often executed. ³ Yet case studies of Sipo-SD regional leaders and "Jewish experts," T-4 killers, camp guards, the SS and police leadership, and the civil administration in the East also have presented complex and heterogeneous pictures of mid- and lower-level participants. The "shooters," the rank-and-file Einsatzkommandos, Reserve Police, Waffen-SS, and Wehrmacht were composed mostly of "ordinary Germans." The ideological indoctrination that they experienced during the war increasingly has come under examination, as have more self-serving motives for participation in genocide. Non-German collaborators have also been included in the picture, further diminishing the image of German uniqueness.

Although each executive group such as Gestapo chiefs, Einsatzgruppen commanders, and camp commandants had its own generational, social, and/or professional homogeneity, the remaining groups and levels of participants had no typology. No age, gender, social, educational, ethnic, or religious cohort proved immune to involvement. In his recent analysis of the literature, Gerhard Paul points to several unresolved questions. ⁴ Were those who behaved proactively at all levels "normal" representatives of German society or a radicalized minority? Were all involved "normal" representatives of Western industrial societies, individuals whom extraordinary circumstances and pressures had turned into perpetrators? Among the majority of killers a direct causal relation cannot be established between fanatical antisemitism and actually murdering Jews. What made the difference for those who withdrew or even resisted? Would more comparative analysis, removed from the emotional minefield of Holocaust studies, be a more productive venue for the pursuit of such questions?

Three new books examine perpetrator groups that frequently have been lumped together and poorly diagnosed as banal bureaucrats or administrative criminals. A fourth book deals with the ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers who often became facilitators and even shooters. In the final two volumes reviewed here, social psychologists focus on comparative cases of genocide, providing theoretical contexts for the thick detail of historical studies.

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In The Business of Genocide, Michael Thad Allen examines the SS Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), which designed, built, and managed the concentration camps, as well as oversaw the system of slave labor, all SS industries, and the construction projects for Himmler's Eastern Settlements Program...