Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives
Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives

Author: Joanne Pettitt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-04-19

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 3319525751

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This study provides a comprehensive analysis of representations of Holocaust perpetrators in literature. Such texts, often rather controversially, seek to undo the myth of pure evil that surrounds the Holocaust and to reconstruct the perpetrator in more human (“banal”) terms. Following this line of thought, protagonists frequently place emphasis on the contextual or situational factors that led up to the genocide. A significant consequence of this is the impact that it has on the reader, who is thereby drawn into the narrative as a potential perpetrator who could, in similar circumstances, have acted in similar ways. The tensions that this creates, especially in relation to the construction of empathy, constitutes a major focus of this work. Making use of in excess of sixty primary sources, this work explores fictional accounts of Holocaust perpetration as well as Nazi memoirs. It will be of interest to anyone working in the broad areas of Holocaust literature and/or perpetrator studies.

Perpetrators
Perpetrators

Author: Guenter Lewy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0190661143

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"Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis--members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions. Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions. Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life--and of human history--that cannot be forgotten.

Perpetrating the Holocaust
Perpetrating the Holocaust

Author: Paul R. Bartrop

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-01-11

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 1440858977

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Weaving together a number of disparate themes relating to Holocaust perpetrators, this book shows how Nazi Germany propelled a vast number of Europeans to try to re-engineer the population base of the continent through mass murder. A comprehensive introductory essay, along with a detailed chronology, reference entries, primary sources, images, and a bibliography provide crucial information that readers need in order to understand Hitler's plan, as carried out through legislation and armed violence. The book also demonstrates that both within Nazi Germany, and in other parts of Europe, all sectors of society played a role in planning, facilitating, and executing the Final Solution. In addition to entries on nearly 150 perpetrators, the book includes 25 primary source documents, ranging from government memoranda to first-hand observations of Nazi killing activities to field reports from senior officers on the scene of Holocaust killing sites. Also included are excerpts from literary memoirs. Students and researchers will find these documents to be fascinating statements as well as excellent source material for further research.

Nazis after Hitler
Nazis after Hitler

Author: Donald M McKale

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-06-14

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1442213183

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The stories of thirty war criminals who escaped accountability, from a historian praised for his “well written, scrupulously researched” work (The New York Times). This deeply researched book traces the biographies of thirty “typical” perpetrators of the Holocaust—some well-known, some obscure—who survived World War II. Donald M. McKale reveals the shocking reality that the perpetrators were rarely, if ever, tried or punished for their crimes, and nearly all alleged their innocence in Germany’s extermination of nearly six million European Jews. He highlights the bitter contrasts between the comfortable postwar lives of many war criminals and the enduring suffering of their victims, and how, in the face of exhaustive evidence showing their culpability, nearly all claimed ignorance of what was going on—and insisted they had done nothing wrong. “McKale ends the book with a haunting question: whether life would be different today if the Allies had pursued Holocaust criminals more aggressively after WWII. History buffs and students of the Holocaust will be fascinated.” ―Publishers Weekly “Gripping and important reading.” —Eric A. Johnson, author of What We Knew

Ordinary People as Mass Murderers
Ordinary People as Mass Murderers

Author: O. Jensen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-11-03

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0230583563

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Since the 1990s scholars have focused heavily on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and have presented a complex and diverse picture of perpetrators. This book provides a unique overview of the current state of research on perpetrators. The overall focus is on the key question that it still disputed: How do ordinary people become mass murderers?

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction
The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction

Author: Erin McGlothlin

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0814346154

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Examines textual representations of the consciousness of men responsible for committing Holocaust crimes. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfictioncontains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators’ performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator’s experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator’s consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

The Holocaust in the East
The Holocaust in the East

Author: Michael David-Fox

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2014-02-05

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0822979497

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Silence has many causes: shame, embarrassment, ignorance, a desire to protect. The silence that has surrounded the atrocities committed against the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II is particularly remarkable given the scholarly and popular interest in the war. It, too, has many causes—of which antisemitism, the most striking, is only one. When, on July 10, 1941, in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, local residents enflamed by Nazi propaganda murdered the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland, the ferocity of the attack horrified their fellow Poles. The denial of Polish involvement in the massacre lasted for decades. Since its founding, the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History has led the way in exploring the East European and Soviet experience of the Holocaust. This volume combines revised articles from the journal and previously unpublished pieces to highlight the complex interactions of prejudice, power, and publicity. It offers a probing examination of the complicity of local populations in the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in areas such as Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina and analyzes Soviet responses to the Holocaust. Based on Soviet commission reports, news media, and other archives, the contributors examine the factors that led certain local residents to participate in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors; the interaction of Nazi occupation regimes with various sectors of the local population; the ambiguities of Soviet press coverage, which at times reported and at times suppressed information about persecution specifically directed at the Jews; the extraordinary Soviet efforts to document and prosecute Nazi crimes and the way in which the Soviet state's agenda informed that effort; and the lingering effects of silence about the true impact of the Holocaust on public memory and state responses.

Second Generation Voices
Second Generation Voices

Author: Alan L. Berger

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2001-06-01

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780815606819

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Heirs to the legacy of Auschwjtz, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators have always been thought of as separated by fear and anger, mistrust and shame. This groundbreaking study provides a forum for expression in which each group reflects candidly upon the consuming burdens and challenges it has inherited. In these intensely personal and frequently dramatic pieces, understandable differences surface. The Jewish second generation is unified by a search for memory and family. Their German counterparts experience the opposite. Yet surprising common ground is revealed. Each group emerges out of households where, for vastly different reasons, the Holocaust was not mentioned. Each struggles to break this barrier of silence. Each has witnessed the continued survival of parents and must grapple with living in households haunted by denial. And each knows it is his or her charge to shape the Holocaust for future generations. To be sure, there is disagreement among the groups about the need for-or wisdom of-dialogue. Yet Second Generation Voices boldly engenders authentic grounds for discussion. Issues such as guilt, anger, religious faith, and accountability are explored in deeply felt poems, essays, and narratives. Jew and German alike speak openly of forming and affirming their own identities, reconnecting with roots, and working through their own "psychological Holocaust."

Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film
Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film

Author: Jenni Adams

Publisher:

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780853039594

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These essays analyze representations of the Holocaust perpetrators. In doing so, they explore what has until now held critics back from this topic, including moral and emotional distaste, the dangers of confusing understanding with exculpation, and the possibility of problematic identification.