Perpetrator Studies Network

Books

Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer – Alexander Laban Hinton

Description During the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as…

Read more

Blitzed. Drugs in Nazi Germany – Norman Ohler, Shaun Whiteside (translator)

The sensational German bestseller on the overwhelming role of drug-taking in the Third Reich, from Hitler to housewives. ‘Bursting with interesting facts’ Vice ‘Extremely interesting … a serious piece of scholarship, very well researched’ Ian Kershaw The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler’s gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third…

Read more

Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention – Scott Straus

Since the Holocaust and World War II, an international community of policy makers, scholars, and activists has developed a loose network of norms, institutions, and policy tools to prevent and respond to acts of mass violence against civilians. Fundamentals analyzes the normative, legal, and operational opportunities and challenges associated with preventing genocide and mass atrocities…

Read more

The International Journal of Human Rights; special issue on perpetratorhood

The International Journal of Human Rights covers an exceptionally broad spectrum of human rights issues: human rights and the law, race, religion, gender, children, class, refugees and immigration. In addition to these general areas, the journal publishes articles and reports on the human rights aspects of: genocide, torture, capital punishment and the laws of war…

Read more

The Genocide Contagion: How We Commit and Confront Holocaust and Genocide – Israel W. Charny

In The Genocide Contagion, Israel W. Charny asks uncomfortable questions about what allows people to participate in genocide – either directly, through killing or other violent acts, or indirectly, by sitting passively while witnessing genocidal acts. Charny draws on both historical and current examples such as the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, and presses readers around the…

Read more

The Höcker Album. Auschwitz Through the Lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi Leadership at the Camp – Christophe Busch, Stefan Hördler, Robert Jan van Pelt

SS photographers took pictures of what happened to the Hungarian Jews in 1944. This photoseries has been preserved in the Auschwitz Album. For a long time the album was perceived as the only photoseries about Auschwitz-Birkenau that was made during the Second World War. However, in 2007 a second album with photos from Auschwitz-Birkenau was…

Read more

Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America – ed. by Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto

This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most…

Read more

My grandfather would have shot me. A black woman discovers her family’s nazi past. – Jennifer Teege & Nikola Sellmair

When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea that her life would be irrevocably altered. Recognizing photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovers a horrifying fact; Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillinly depicted by Ralph Fiennes…

Read more

The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial – Lawrence Douglas

In 2009, Harper’s Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in…

Read more