audiobook Making Saints in Modern China by From Ownby David in History

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Monsters exist; but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men; the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders; such as Hitler; Himmler; and Heydrich; is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders; in fact; relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis--members of the killing squads; guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps; civilian employees of the SS; the drivers of gas trucks; and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers; Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions.Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources; including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia; the recollections of Jewish survivors; archival documents; and most importantly; the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly; extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators; their mindset; and the motivations for their actions.Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight; the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities; offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty; obedience to authority; thirst for career; and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology; among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor; Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life--and of human history--that cannot be forgotten.