MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Nikolaus Wachsmann

State prisons played an indispensable part in the terror of the Third Reich, incarcerating many hundreds of thousands of men and women during the Nazi era. This important book illuminates the previously unknown world of Nazi prisons, their victims, and the judicial and penal officials who built and operated this system of brutal legal terror.

Nikolaus Wachsmann describes the operation and function of legal terror in the Third Reich and brings Nazi prisons to life through the harrowing stories of individual inmates.

Drawing on a vast array of archival materials, he traces the series of changes in prison policies and practice that led eventually to racial terror, brutal violence, slave labor, starvation, and mass killings. Wachsmann demonstrates that “ordinary” legal officials were ready collaborators who helped to turn courts and prisons into key components in the Nazi web of terror. And he concludes with a discussion of the whitewash of the Nazi legal system in postwar West Germany.

Yale University Press, May 26, 2015, 538 pages

Edited by Herbert R. Reginbogin, ‎Christoph Safferling

60 years after the trials of the main German war criminals, the articles in this book attempt to assess the Nuremberg Trials from a historical and legal point of view, and to illustrate connections, contradictions and consequences. In view of constantly recurring reports of mass crimes from all over the world, we have only reached the halfway point in the quest for an effective system of international criminal justice. With the legacy of Nuremberg in mind, this volume is a contribution to the search for answers to questions of how the law can be applied effectively and those committing crimes against humanity be brought to justice for their actions.

Berlin: De Gruyter Saur, 2006. 320p.

By Adele Valeria Messina

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 498p.

Editor: Colin Tatz  

Genocide isn't past tense and the Nazi and Bosnian eras are not yet closed. The demonising of people as 'unworthy' and expendable is ever-present and the consequences are all too evident in the daily news. These fourteen essays by Australian scholars confront the issues: the need for a measuring scale that encompasses differences and similarities between seemingly divergent cases of the crime; the complicity of bureaucracies, the healing professions and the churches in this 'crime of crimes'; the quest for historical justice for genocide victims generally following the Nuremberg Trials; the fate of children in the Nazi and postwar eras; the 'worthiness' of Armenians, Jews and Romani people in twentieth century Europe; and the imperative to tackle early warning signs of an incipient genocide. Colin Tatz is a founding director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, visiting fellow in Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University, and honorary visiting fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. He teaches and publishes in comparative race politics, youth suicide, migration studies, and sports history.

Sydney:  UTS ePRESS, University of Technology Sydney, 2012. 497p.

By Timothy Williams

Why do people participate in genocide? The Complexity of Evil responds to this fundamental question by drawing on political science, sociology, criminology, anthropology, social psychology, and history to develop a model which can explain perpetration across various different cases. Focusing in particular on the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, The Complexity of Evil model draws on, systematically sorts, and causally orders a wealth of scholarly literature and supplements it with original field research data from interviews with former members of the Khmer Rouge. The model is systematic and abstract, as well as empirically grounded, providing a tool for understanding the micro-foundations of various cases of genocide. Ultimately this model highlights that the motivations for perpetrating genocide are both complex in their diversity and banal in their ordinariness and mundanity.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 281p.

S. Giora Shoham.

S. Giora Shoham reveals the social, cultural and political mechanics of how anti-Semitism became the motivating ideology of the Third Reich and the Nazi movement. This ideology impelled an evil empire to murder some six million Jews and millions of other undesirables, viz., Slavs, Gypsies, Communist commissars, etc.
The book provides the most detailed and cogent answer yet to the often asked question: how is it possible for the “most civilized nation” possessing the highest technological and scientific skills to embark on a campaign of murder, rape, and robbery on a scale unprecedented in world history? Even more pertinent for the Jews has been the question: why were the Jews singled out for immediate massacre and then systematic destruction? No single compelling answer has been proffered in the past fifty years. Shoham explains, why the German social character and the Jewish social character were dramatically opposed, why the clash between them was inevitable given the right circumstances, and why the Holocaust was inevitable in Germany due to an incestuous relationship between Germans and Jews.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012.

By Joachim J. Savelsberg

Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles.. “This book brings together the topic of genocide and a comprehensive sociology of knowledge (360 degrees, as one reader suggested). The empirical focus is on the Armenian genocide. I ask how repertoires of knowledge emerge, among Armenians and Turks and in world society, and what dynamics they unfold. Importantly, by knowledge, I do not mean certified knowledge but simply humans’ taken-for-granted assumptions about the world.Everyday exchanges, or micropolitics, lay the foundation. They involve conflicting pressures to silence, deny, or acknowledge. Knowledge entrepreneurs, actors with privileged access to channels of communication, often set the parameters for such exchanges…”

UC Press. (2021) 264 pages.