Guenter Lewy, “Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Nov 29, 2017 · 39m

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in German, Lewy presents a typology of perpetrator types and dispels the idea that it was impossible for killers to walk away. He also presents arguably the most accessible analysis of the post-war justice…