The best books about perpetrator motivation in the Holocaust

Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men launched perpetrator studies in the field of Holocaust Studies with its publication in 1992 and became the foundation for subsequent scholarship on the topic.

Focusing on a group of middle-aged German men mobilized for occupation duty in Poland, Browning argued that peer group pressure, obedience to authority, and individual ambition rather than ideological belief provided the motivation for these men to engage in acts of atrocity and mass murder against Polish Jews.

Based on postwar interrogation and trial transcripts for the unit, Browning expanded historical studies to incorporate social science theory such as works by Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Ervin Staub to explain how these “ordinary” Germans became involved in mass murder during World War II.

Wendy Lower’s powerful examination of the role of German women as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators in the Holocaust exposed the participation of women in the genocide of the European Jews during World War II.

Focusing on individual histories, Lower reveals the backgrounds, actions, and motivations of a cohort of mostly young women who became complicit in mass murder.

Full of haunting descriptions, the image of the wife of a German SS officer leading a group of naked Jewish boys to a woods near her home and shooting them as they wept because she wanted to prove her toughness to the men is only one unforgettable example of women’s participation in the Holocaust.

Originally published in German, Wildt studies the role of the mid-level leadership of the Nazi SS who worked on the implementation of the “Final Solution” and the mass murder of the alleged racial and political enemies of the Third Reich.

Using a collective biographical approach and examining the individual backgrounds of these SS perpetrators, Wildt found that, contrary to popular belief, these men were not the so-called dregs of German society, but rather a cohort of ambitious, intelligent “men of action” many with advanced university degrees who came from borderlands areas throughout Germany. 

Whether with a pen or a pistol in their hands, these men proved adept at moving from desk duties to the field and were key actors in the implementation of mass murder.  

The Holocaust survivor, Richard Glazar, authored a compelling memoir of his imprisonment and escape from the Nazi killing center at Treblinka in occupied Poland, a site at which an estimated one million Jewish men, women, and children perished at the hands of the SS and their Ukrainian auxiliaries.

Glazar provides a first-hand and extended look not only at the process of mass murder at the camp, but he also provides extensive descriptions and analysis of the SS men he encountered in the camp including their daily habits, personalities, and actions.

The memoir exposes the full range of the emotional, psychological, and physical hardship experienced by Glazar in the “death factory” of Treblinka and places perpetrator actions within the context of prisoner experience. 

Before being drafted into the German Army in 1941, Willy Peter Reese was a bank clerk who spent his time engaged in reading German literature and attempting to become a writer in his own right.

The memoir is a compilation of his journal entries as he reflected on his transition from civilian to soldier. Originally published in German, Reese’s journal demonstrates the way in which a relatively naïve and carefree intellectual became involved in the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union.

The transformation from a bookish, sensitive, and brooding teenager into a soldier who lost empathy for the people suffering under German occupation demonstrates how some German youth became actors and accomplices in the Nazi regime’s crimes.