By Cassandra Steer. This book seeks to understand how and why we should hold leaders responsible for the collective mass atrocities that are committed in times of conflict. It attempts to untangle the debates on modes of liability in international criminal law (ICL) that have become truly complex over the last twenty years, and to…

By Dan Plesch. Human Rights after Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg…

Edited by Scott W. Murray. Understanding Atrocities is a wide-ranging collection of essays bridging scholarly and community-based efforts to understand and respond to the global, transhistorical problem of genocide. The essays in this volume investigate how evolving, contemporary views on mass atrocity frame and complicate the possibilities for the understanding and prevention of genocide. The…

By Maureen S. Hiebert. This book addresses two closely related questions: what is the process by which the relatively short and violent genocides of the twentieth century and beyond have occurred? Why have these instances of mass violence been genocidal and not some other form of state violence, repression, or conflict? Hiebert answers these questions by…

By Steven Remy. During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven…

By Guenter Lewy. The Nazis’ attempt to annihilate the Jewish people, the Holocaust, continues to raise a disturbing question. About six million defenseless men, women, and children were murdered for no reason but their ancestry. Close to two million Jews were killed in mass shootings, while the remainder were asphyxiated or worked and starved to…

By Norman N. Naimark. Genocide occurs in every time period and on every continent. Using the 1948 U.N. definition of genocide as its departure point, this book examines the main episodes in the history of genocide from the beginning of human history to the present. Norman M. Naimark lucidly shows that genocide both changes over time,…

By Joanne Pettitt. 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…

By Erin Jessee. This book is an oral history-based study of the politics of history in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Using life history and thematic interviews, the author brings the narratives of officials, survivors, returnees, perpetrators, and others whose lives have been intimately affected by genocide into conversation with scholarly studies…

Edited by Frank Bajohr and Andrea Löw. This book explores the Holocaust as a social process. Although the mass murder of European Jews was essentially the result of political-ideological decisions made by the Nazi state leadership, the events of the Holocaust were also part of a social dynamic. All European societies experienced developments that led to the social…