Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2017), and son of a camp survivor, begins his new study of Holocaust perpetrators with the same question: \u201cHow could such terrible deeds happen in the heart of Christian Europe and among a nation known for its poets and thinkers? What had converted so many seemingly ordinary people into killers, willing participants in what is the worst crime in modern history?\u201d<\/p>\nLewy\u2019s study is the first English-language volume to make use of the 49-volume collection of 929 German trial records of Holocaust perpetrators recently published by the University of Amsterdam (it is not made clear why the records were not published in Germany). He also draws upon an enormous accretion of \u201cpreviously untapped\u201d sources such as the 50,000 letters and diaries of Wehrmacht soldiers recently released by German archives, as well as victim recollections and, most importantly, hundreds of trial records of Nazi functionaries, beginning in Nuremberg in 1945 and continuing to the present day. Of the 1,200 citations in the 25-page bibliography and the 600 footnotes, by far most of them are from the late 1990s to the present.<\/p>\n
Lewy\u2019s conclusion is similar to Levi\u2019s and Browning\u2019s: the perpetrators were not characteristically sadists or psychopaths, or even necessarily antisemites, but simply obtuse followers of orders, vassals to peer pressure, or simply \u201cordinary people\u201d trying to advance their careers.<\/p>\n
Lewy\u2019s graphic details and conclusions will be familiar to readers of Saul Friedlander\u2019s monumental Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination<\/em> (2007), but Lewy\u2019s access to the most recent documentation brings some new and important facts to light.<\/p>\nFirst, the whole notion of a \u201cclean Wehrmacht\u201d can now be dismissed. Lewy proves conclusively that there was close contact between the Wehrmacht and the SS and particularly the 38 \u201cTotenkopf\u201d<\/em> (\u201cDeath\u2019s Head\u201d) divisions of the Waffen-SS: new evidence shows that Jews were \u201csquarely in the crosshairs of the Wehrmacht\u201d and that the number of members of the Wehrmacht who took part in the murder of Jews \u201cis in the tens of thousands.\u201d<\/p>\nSecond, Lewy\u2019s close study of the new material available allowed him to conclude that \u201cnot a single person who asked to be relieved [from duty in the killing squads] was tried by a military court\u201d and, in fact, \u201cmost of their requests were granted.\u201d Lewy found 85 cases of Wehrmacht soldiers who refused to shoot civilians: all were simply transferred to other duties. The significance of this finding, of course, is that it puts the lie to the excuse frequently made by the killers that they \u201chad no choice\u201d and \u201chad to follow orders.\u201d (Lewy points out, significantly, that Yad Vashem has in fact recognized 45 Wehrmacht soldiers as \u201csaviours of Jews.\u201d)<\/p>\n
In the sixth chapter of Perpetrators<\/em>, \u201cFlawed Justice,\u201d Lewy makes his most significant mark. Here, Lewy reveals that, of the 200,000 or so former Nazi killers who, through 2005, were investigated by German authorities, fewer than 10% had charges brought against them; and, of these, only half were convicted. Light sentences were the norm; and only eight of the 2,000 former members of the Einsatzgruppen investigated received life sentences. Most of these examples of \u201cflawed justice,\u201d Lewy concludes, had to do with the fact that so many judges were \u201ctainted\u201d as former party members, and that German law (unlike Canadian law) distinguished between perpetrators and accomplices, usually finding the latter innocent, as they were \u201conly following orders,\u201d that they were only \u201ctools\u201d or were not \u201cunseemingly zealous\u201d in their murderous actions. (Two years ago, German courts finally adopted Canadian\/American style \u201ccommon design,\u201d sharing the guilt between perpetrators and accomplices.)<\/p>\nIn his final chapter, \u201cExplaining the Holocaust,\u201d Lewy concludes that nobody, ultimately, can simply give up his freedom. Situation, genetics, conditioning are all significant, but \u201cthey do not dictate or determine character.\u201d In fact, recalling how anxiously in 1945 the Nazis strove to cover up what they had done led Lewy to conclude that \u201ceven Hitler and the members of his immediate entourage probably knew deep down that they were doing wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, as Lewy concludes, in his last sentence, \u201cThe fact that so few avoided evil orders remains an ineradicable blot on an entire German generation and a cross that their descendants continue to bear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perpetrators <\/em>is a valuable addition to a long story, one which may never be conclusively told.<\/p>\nGraham Forst,<\/strong> PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who could shoot at close range two million children, women and men who were standing at the sides of graves they had just been forced to dig? And then, when this process proved inefficient, who could herd four million more into cement bunkers and drop cyanide pellets on top of them? Were they monsters? \u201cMonsters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[7723,4242,53,2038,7722],"class_list":["post-27409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-guenther-lewy","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-nazis","tag-perpetrators"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"book](\"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/books.12.Perpetrators-cover.jpg\")
<\/a>The controversial nonagenarian scholar Guenther Lewy, the author of Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2017), and son of a camp survivor, begins his new study of Holocaust perpetrators with the same question: \u201cHow could such terrible deeds happen in the heart of Christian Europe and among a nation known for its poets and thinkers? What had converted so many seemingly ordinary people into killers, willing participants in what is the worst crime in modern history?\u201d<\/p>\n