In 2016, one of the authors of this book, Paul R. Bartrop, produced a volume entitled Resisting the Holocaust: Upstanders, Partisans, and Survivors. It was a book about people who said no to the attempt by National Socialist Germany, between 1933 and 1945, to disenfranchise, dehumanize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish people of Europe. Those who said no did so in a wide variety of ways and for a plethora of reasons. If we were to group them all together, we would inevitably find ourselves using a single word—“resistance”—to describe their activities.
After the book’s appearance, it took little time to realize that a second volume examining those who committed the crimes of the Holocaust would have to be written. It would be the darkness that so illuminated the light generated by the resistance book—the yin, so to speak, of the first book’s yang. And given the uncertain times characterizing the second half of this century’s second decade, such a book was considered both timely and necessary, if only for the reason that more and more people are demanding to know why such acts as the Nazis perpetrated took place—and what this means for our world today.
The Holocaust was the most horrific crime any group of people ever perpetrated against another. It spoke of a human dream: how, in the Nazi view, humanity could be perfected. In attempting to reach this perfection, the Nazis concluded that it was necessary to eliminate those they considered to be an impediment to achieving this goal—the Jews. In the Nazi view, they acted with the best of intentions and to guarantee the future of the “Aryan” people. Their Jewish victims, on the other hand, possessed neither a present nor a future, other than as a people who until now had avoided their intended (and inevitable) fate. As the Holocaust’s perpetrators, the Nazis planned, perpetrated, and presided over that fate. They were committed, for reasons clear to them, to realizing the dream of achieving racial and national homogeneity for the German people, a pure society comprised only of others like themselves, a place representing the closest possible approximation to human perfection. The deeds carried out by those perpetrating the Holocaust were vicious, violent, inhumane, and, from the perspective of Western morality at least, utterly wrong.
That said, this work does not attempt to judge or assess the behavior of those it discusses, but merely to tell their story in summary form and to allow the unfolding narrative of each to encourage readers to draw their own conclusions. In that sense, this is not meant as the last word on each subject but rather as an introduction to each of those whose biographies are narrated here. We have not sought to ask why people behaved in certain ways, and to the best of our ability, we have refrained from making judgments about their behavior. Some, indeed, we consider to be morally repugnant, but in all instances, we have done our best not to let our bias show.
This is, therefore, a reference work designed to assist others in their own research. It is not an examination of ethical behavior as such, although the actions of all those here could serve as a manual of how not behave in any given situation.
When we began our hunt for perpetrators of the Holocaust, we thought that the process would be relatively easy. It took us no time at all to find a seed list of major perpetrators, but this only fed our desire to dig deeper. We began looking for others to add to the list. Sometimes it was through sheer accident or luck that we found names that had been little studied up until now. In other instances, dealing with one name led inevitably to uncovering another—just as with the layers of an onion, we kept peeling back without ever reaching a central core. The process of discovery continued right up to the very last days. Long after we thought the phase of writing the entries was finished, we found ourselves still adding one or two or three names to the list and then writing up their stories.
As we found, however, choosing the people to feature here was actually no easy task, and the list could easily have been extended into the thousands. In addition, our selections were conditioned by our preference for examples representative of the wide range of perpetrator activities that could have been, and were, undertaken. For every person included here, there were dozens more we could have added.
This presented an added problem: space. We simply could not include every leader, enabler, or collaborator who had an involvement in the Holocaust, as the amount of space permitted by the publishing process would not allow for this in a single volume. More is the pity; practical considerations have led to many people being omitted, although this can count as a positive for students and researchers seeking to undertake their own projects. The field, in many respects, remains wide open.
Tens of thousands of perpetrators, of all kinds and in all locations, deserve their place in a book of this kind, and as authors, we frequently faced a dilemma as to whom to leave out. It is our hope, therefore, that readers will appreciate that those profiled here are but a sample of an otherwise-enormous range of human beings who, for one reason or another, chose to follow Adolf Hitler in his search for German glory and destructive plans for the Jews of Europe. Those not appearing in these pages were no less dishonorable or murderous than those who are.
That said, it is our hope that the entries we have included here provide a profile of Holocaust perpetrators that is broad enough to enable readers to derive some measure of understanding regarding the men and women who chose to commit this enormous crime. We hope, in this context, that the examples we have included will be sufficiently illustrative of a cohort that is thousands of times greater in expanse than the current volume suggests.
The entries have been organized in such a way as to provide maximum accessibility for readers. It is a straightforward alphabetical listing, by last name, of a variety of Holocaust perpetrators, whether those who led the process, those who made it happen, or those who collaborated. To assist readers where cross-references occur, we have placed figures in bold when they appear in the entries of others featured in the volume.
In writing this work, we have employed a wide range of sources, ranging from books and documentaries to a massive range of Internet sites that could not be listed even if we were to try. Often while researching a person’s life, we had to consult up to 30 or more sites only to find three or four key facts. Sometimes, despite all efforts, some data simply could not be found. On other occasions, we were lucky and hit the information mother lode after consulting only five or six sites. In every case, however, we would only consider a piece of data legitimate after corroboration from two or more sources independent of each other. Internet sites are notorious for the extent to which they lift the work of one or two generic sites and then just keep replicating the same information uncritically again and again. It is our hope that the standards of corroboration we have applied have dealt with the issue satisfactorily and eliminated the worst excesses of inexactitude.
A further note of explanation is needed. Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was a continent in flux; countries and regions changed borders, and towns and cities often changed names. To preserve the contemporaneity of the situations under examination, we have preserved the names of the localities by which they were best known within the context of the Holocaust (e.g., Vilna) with their modern renditions in parenthesis alongside (Vilnius). Our hope is that this will enhance clarity for modern readers and cut through what might otherwise be a confusion of names.
The extensive bibliography has been designed as more than just a list of relevant books and articles. In most of the titles listed, the name of at least one of the perpetrators has been added in bold, to better enable readers to locate pertinent works on the perpetrator and the events in which he or she participated.
Finally, mention should be made of two additional lists that accompany the volume. First, a listing of abbreviations of Nazi terms, as used in the text, has been included to assist readers and not crowd the text. Also, rather than replicate the equivalence of SS and U.S. military ranks, we have provided a list with these details. Within the text itself, only the SS ranks have been included.
As this project developed, we were fortunate to receive encouragement and support from several people who now deserve our public thanks. Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) is a vibrant center of educational excellence, which presented many opportunities for us to develop and extend our thoughts regarding those listed in this work. The associate vice president of research and dean of graduate studies, Dr. T. C. Yih, and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Robert Gregerson, have been steadfast in the confidence they have shown us as we worked through this often-difficult project. Dean Gregerson, furthermore, found funds to help hire a graduate assistant, Taylor Neff, who helped us with researching some of the people featured here.
The library staff at FGCU have assisted in numerous ways throughout the project and deserve our deep respect and gratitude.
Throughout the writing of this book, we have been fortunate to have a remarkable editor at ABC-CLIO who has shown complete faith in the project from its inception. We are pleased to express our appreciation to Padraic (Pat) Carlin for his help, ideas, and forbearance. The book would not have appeared without his assistance.