Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers

Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers by Guenter Lewy, 195 pages.
Lewy seems to be wanting to get to some definitive answers as to the motives of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, without going too far in any one direction. The book is massively sourced and footnoted,  with  over 30 pages of source material, and 156 footnotes in the second chapter alone. At the same time, with only 136 pages of text including the introduction, he doesn't seem to leave himself a lot of room to explore his several topics in depth.
He covers the concentration camps, deaths by shootings, the development of more efficient ways of killing (seeking to avoid stresses on the killers), the hunt for and trials of those responsible, all while trying to give individual and group motivations for killing thousands and thousands of people. An interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying book.

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