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.

The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals became the World's Most Successful Manhunt

The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt by Julian Borger, 400 pages.

Borger recounts how in the aftermath of the Balkan wars accused war criminals were successfully tracked down and arrested by British, German, and American forces, sometimes working together, and sometimes impeding one another.

Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields / Wendy Lower 270 pp.

I share Patrick's lukewarm assessment of this book. Lower's research expands the examination into the role of German women in the murder of Jews and others in WWII. She moves beyond the crimes of female camp guards to include those of teachers, nurses, social workers and wives. Her analysis, which breaks these women into categories of witnesses, accomplices and perpetrators, is heavily influenced by feminist theory, and was largely interesting. But the writing style is unsatisfactory; I found myself repeatedly wondering, "Where's the topic sentence?" as though I were grading a high school essay.

I was also troubled by the latter portion of the book's seeming praise of the East German justice system as compared to that in West Germany. Indeed, it seems clear that West Germany was lackluster in its pursuit of Nazi war criminals and that latent anti-Semitism and Nazism are to blame for that - nothing to celebrate. And Lower would have it that East Germany's higher rate of prosecution and conviction is a good thing. Maybe. To the extent that investigation and pursuit of these criminals involved the Stasi, it is hard to see that the results of these prosecutions, however satisfying and even necessary, can be called justice. At the very least, due diligence demands a writer point out (at length) the exceedingly different mechanisms available to the East Germans in their pursuit of war criminals.