The crime of the century? The case for the Holocaust

Crime, Law & Social Change 34: 21–41, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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The crime of the century? The case for the Holocaust DAVID O. FRIEDRICHS Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510-4605, USA (e-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. With the twentieth century now ended the Holocaust is surely a leading contender for the title of “The Crime of the Century.” Although a massive literature exists on the Holocaust, very little of this literature has been produced by criminologists. Some reasons for this relative neglect are identified and a case is made for the claim that criminology can contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust and that the Holocaust can contribute to the development of a more profound criminology. This paper draws upon an integrative criminological approach to construct a framework for understanding the Holocaust. This multi-disciplinary framework links philosophical, sociolegal, sociological, behavioral and criminological dimensions to discriminate between unique and non-unique aspects of the Holocaust as a case of genocide and as crime. The paper closes with some observations on the relevance of the Holocaust for challenges confronting a twenty-first century criminology.

Introduction With the twentieth century now ended we have many attempts at retrospective assessments and evaluations and any number of lists of the greatest achievements, books, leaders, minds, and so on of this century. What of the crime of the century? This term has been applied most readily to sensational murder cases, such as the killing of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the kidnapping/death of the young son of Charles Lindbergh (with Bruno Richard Hauptmann convicted and executed in this case), and the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman, with her ex-husband O.J. Simpson tried (and acquitted) for the crime.1 What should the criteria be for designating the crime – or one of the crimes – of the century? Any such designation has an inevitable dimension of arbitrariness, and artificiality, to it. The crime of the century for Americans is not likely to be the crime of the century for people in other countries. Ultimately any such claims have a subjective aspect as well. For victims of heinous crimes – or their survivors – the crime against them is likely to be experienced as the crime of the century. Nevertheless, a relatively small number of crimes and trials acquire a status – at least within a particular culture – that clearly separates them from other crimes, and such crimes and trials become eligible for “of the century”

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designation. The degree of harm, of evil intent and of unusualness (in some aspect) are possible criteria, but any such designation also importantly incorporates the level of public and media interest, impact on popular imagination and endurance as an iconic or mythic event. Obviously we have countless cases where children were not merely killed – as in the Leopold and Loeb and Lindbergh cases – but were tortured, where the purity of evil intent, to the extent that such a thing can be measured, was as great or greater, and where especially bizarre aspects were present. The cases identified earlier are distinctive, then, more for the immense public and media interest in them, the massive coverage of the subsequent trials and their assumption of iconic or mythic status in our culture than for the nature of the crime itself. If any event merits the designation of “crime of the century” in broader terms the case is made here for the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis in the early 1940s.2 Or at least the claim is made on behalf of the Holocaust for Western developed nations, and between such nations the salience of the Holocaust varies (i.e., highest for Israel, and in a different way for Germany; perhaps much lower for some South American countries). The claim that the Holocaust has a special, or universal, significance has not gone unchallenged. For example, a lawyer defending one of the last Nazis to be brought to trial (Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”) denigrated the Holocaust as a “eurocentric preoccupation,” or simply one of the unfortunate but hardly unique consequences of a wartime situation.3 Indeed, the Holocaust had both unique and non-unique aspects, as a genocidal event.4 Is the claim for the Holocaust as “crime of the century” made on the basis of the number of victims, the scope of suffering, the purity of evil intentions, the degree of cruelty inflicted or the uniqueness of this event? No. On each of these criteria one could identify other criminal events during the course of the twentieth century that equaled, or possibly exceeded, the Holocaust. No claim is made here, then, that the Holocaust was necessarily the worst case of genocide in history. Indeed, some have argued that other cases of genocide – for example, the genocide directed at Native Americans – were more enduring and resulted in much greater loss of life.5 By some estimations, more people died as a result of policies and practices pursued in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Mao’s People’s Republic of China than died in the Holocaust.6 Specific acts of gratuitous cruelty carried out in many genocidal campaigns (for example, in the rape of Nanking by Japanese soldiers and in the “dirty war” in Argentina carried out by the military leadership) are no less extreme than those carried out in conjunction with the Holocaust.7 Is it really possible (or desirable) to have a comparative sociology of cruelty, or relative evil? Rather, the combination of the events of the Holocaust, the response to them, the massive literature and analysis, the Holocaust’s role as metaphor,

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the impact and influence of the event – that is, the totality of the event itself and its aftermath – renders the Holocaust a criminal event apart from all others. Without systematically documenting the claim that the literature pertaining to the Holocaust and the number of references to the Holocaust far exceeds that for any other genocide (or specific crime) occurring in the twentieth century, one hopes that the claim can be “stipulated” (to use the legal term when a claim is accepted in court without having to be proven).8 Why has the Holocaust inspired such an immense response? First, one should note that relatively little attention was directed toward it until the 1960s and the application of the term “the Holocaust” to this event only occurred during this decade. But several reasons can then be identified for this singular level of attention. The Holocaust occurred in the heart of Europe in conjunction with a widely covered war; the Nazis lost the war; an unprecedented international tribunal was formed to try the surviving Nazi leadership and evidence of their crimes was systematically collected; the Nazis had documented their crimes to an extent surely unusual for genocides; Hitler and the Nazis were always uncommonly “colorful” media copy, whatever else one says about them; their primary target group, Jewish people, has a long and enduring tradition of commitment to literacy, higher education and scholarship, contributing greatly to the Holocaust-related literature, and at least from the 1960s on many Jewish (as well as non-Jewish) scholars focused on the Holocaust as a cataclysmic event in Jewish (and world) history; the Jewish state of Israel in various ways promoted attention to the Holocaust; and so on. No other criminal event, then, has so fully captured the attention of so many people; no other criminal event has produced such a large (and ever-expanding) literature. The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis is often invoked as the paradigmatic case of genocide in the modern world. It has been commonly noted that genocide itself is hardly new to the twentieth century, although the concept of genocide is, and the mass technology of genocide is as well. The term genocide was introduced in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, who applied it to the destruction of a nation or ethnic group.9 In subsequent decades the term has been invoked in quite different ways: broadly – e.g., the non-lethal destruction of indigenous cultures – and narrowly – e.g., intentional mass killing with the purpose of exterminating an identifiable group of human beings.10 The destruction of the Hittites and of Carthage in the ancient world, the Albigensian Crusades, and the witch hunts in medieval Europe, have all been identified as historical cases of genocide. In the twentieth century genocides have occurred in many different parts of the world and have involved many different nationalities and ethnic groups. Fairly or not, the German involvement in genocide has been highlighted in

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most accounts on the subject. The massacre of some 65,000 Southwest African Herero tribesmen by German colonial forces, beginning in 1904, may be the first significant case of genocide in the twentieth century. As was suggested above, the Holocaust engineered by German Nazis near the mid-point of the century is surely the most famous twentieth century case of genocide. At century’s end, Germany undertook its first military action since World War II, participating in the NATO effort to stop the “ethnic cleansing” (or genocidal enterprise) in Kosovo. The overall German repudiation of its genocidal past in the final decades of the century was heartening; the outbreak of genocidal campaigns in the former Yugoslavia and in other parts of the world during the final years of the twentieth century was disheartening. Learning from history was both possible and far from assured.

Criminology and the Holocaust A massive and ever-growing literature on the Holocaust has developed, especially since the 1960s. Many different disciplines have contributed to this literature, including: history, philosophy, theology, political science, literature and art.12 The social sciences – for example, psychology and sociology – have also made some noteworthy contributions to the literature. Many other disciplinary or transdisciplinary perspectives – for example, a feminist perspective – have been applied to an understanding of the Holocaust, although at least some such applications are controversial. But a specifically criminological approach to the Holocaust has been largely – although not wholly – absent.13 If a case can be made for the Holocaust as the crime of the century, why has it been largely neglected by criminologists, what are its specifically criminological dimensions, and what can criminologists contribute to its understanding? Few if any contemporary criminologists would deny that the Holocaust was a terrible “crime,” in some sense of the term, yet very few criminologists have focused on the Holocaust as a criminological phenomenon.14 We may speculate that this neglect can be attributed to viewing the Holocaust as a topic lying outside the boundaries of appropriate criminological concerns (i.e.; a topic more appropriately addressed by historians and other specialists); that criminologists would in any case have nothing very useful to contribute to the understanding of the Holocaust; that criminologists who might even contemplate addressing the Holocaust are overwhelmed by the prospect, on different levels, and have a sense of impotence on effectively responding to the problem of genocides generally; and that criminological attention to the Holocaust would deflect attention from other legitimate criminological concerns. Criminologists in the course of their graduate training


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and professional socialization are not typically taught to regard the Holocaust as a criminological phenomenon. Through much of its early history criminology was principally concerned with conventional crime and delinquency. Edwin Sutherland’s call for criminological attention to white collar crime – issued in 1939 – did not elicit much of a response from criminologists until the 1970s; since that time we have witnessed significant criminological attention to white collar crime.15 Although Sutherland was undertaking his principal work on white collar crime during the period of the Holocaust (the 1940s), he did not address genocide as a form of white collar crime.16 Some contemporary students of white collar (or occupational) crime have explored the generic relationship between such crime and genocide.17 We can identify parallels as well as significant differences between white-collar crime offenders and state criminals, or between corporate executives with complicity in illegal pollution, production of unsafe products or unsafe working conditions, and Hitler and the Nazi leadership and a genocidal campaign.18 Political crime has also been a marginal concern of criminologists.19 Earlier treatments of political crime focused principally on anti-state activities such as political assassination or terrorism, and on corruption, although a more recent text identifies genocide as a form of political crime.20 In the final decades of the twentieth century some prominent criminologists called for-attention to the threat of nuclear war as crime (Richard Harding), state-organized crime (William Chambliss), and violations of human rights (Stanley Cohen).21 Inspired at least in part by such initiatives we have begun to witness the emergence of a criminology of state crime.22 Jeffrey Ian Ross has documented some of the grounds of resistance to criminological attention to state crime and has formulated an agenda for such attention.23 Alexander Alvarez has initiated an ambitious call for criminological attention to genocide specifically.24 It seems likely that such calls will eventually be widely heeded, but as in the case of white collar crime this may take time. Some commentators on the great expansion of studies of the Holocaust from many different disciplinary viewpoints have expressed reservations that could hypothetically be applied to a criminological approach to the Holocaust. Gabriel Schoenfeld contends that the Holocaust has become “academized,” so that the application of various “explanatory variables” diminishes the natural horrors of the Holocaust itself.25 On this view the Holocaust has now been invoked on behalf of many special agendas – e.g., feminism – and has been misappropriated for careerist reasons. In a somewhat related vein Alvin Rosenfeld has criticized “the Americanization of the Holocaust,” or its invocation to call attention to a wide range of social problems.26 The concern here is with an excessive relativism and abstraction as applied to

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the Holocaust, feeding into a broad cult of victimhood. This commentator, along with others, expresses reservations about a search for redemptive meaning in the Holocaust.27 Elie Wiesel, arguably the best-known contemporary commentator on the Holocaust, has questioned whether we can understand it at all; rather, we should commemorate it.28 For some, explanation inevitably leads us to a posture of excusing, in some sense, the actions of the perpetrators. Such concerns have to be taken seriously, but it seems to me we can separate the commemoration of the Holocaust (and its victims) from the endeavor of attempting to learn whatever we can both about and from the Holocaust, and in the latter case should not be constrained by anyone’s claims of “correctness” in this enterprise. Serious attempts to explain and understand the Holocaust, from whatever disciplinary or ideological vantage point, should not be equated with the pernicious phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Accordingly, some specific counter-arguments can be offered on behalf of criminological attention to the Holocaust and genocide. The threat and scope of harm from intentional (typically illegal) genocidal actions vastly exceeds that from crime more conventionally defined. And genocide may well be more of a threat in the 21st century than conventional crime and violence. Criminologists should be able to apply some of what they have learned about conventional crime and violence to the study of genocide, and should in turn be able to enrich their understanding of conventional crime and violence from the study of the Holocaust. By failing to define the Holocaust and genocide as specifically criminological events criminologists may well contribute – however unwittingly – to a public resistance to viewing criminality and crime more inclusively. Discussion of criminological theory – explaining crime – does not always clearly differentiate between explaining criminality, or the propensity of individuals and entities to commit crime; explaining crime, or the occurrence of an event involving the violation of law; and explaining criminalization, or the process of certain activities being defined as criminal. Crime generally – including a state crime such as the Holocaust – can only be properly understood by addressing these several levels of explanation. Understanding the Holocaust in terms of criminality Any discussion of criminality and the Holocaust must begin with a recognition of the Nazi endeavor of ascribing criminality to those whom they wished to defeat or obliterate. One must discriminate between an ascription of criminality based upon beliefs and behavior and one based upon “race” or condition. The Nazi ascription of criminality to communists, then, belongs in a somewhat different category than the Nazi ascription of inherent criminality


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to Jews. The first case is quite consistent with a widely diffused tendency to ascribe criminality to those who are viewed as a direct threat to the state; the second is a somewhat extreme version of a biogenetic view of criminality. For example, one difference between the Holocaust and the Stalinist genocides is that the latter did not target children, but was focused on adults perceived to be enemies of the state. Second, what of the sources of the criminality of the Nazi elite? The Nazi leadership did not regard itself as criminal and was not so regarded by most of the German people during their reign of power.29 The leadership gave criminal orders without, for the most part, being directly involved in the implementation of these orders. Genocide differs from conventional interpersonal violent crime by virtue of this distancing effect, or the separation of those who administer criminal orders from those who carry them out. Although Hitler is widely believed to have given the order setting the Holocaust into motion he was not involved directly in its implementation and seems to have spent the war years primarily focused on the military campaigns and never visited the death camps.30 Although the second primary architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, did visit the camps, he was reportedly made ill by what he observed.31 Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the process of transporting millions of Jews to the death camps, also claimed to have been sickened by a rare, direct encounter with the actual process of extermination.32 We need to understand more fully differences in the psychodynamics of instigators as opposed to hands-on perpetrators.33 Those who formulate the instigating orders in cases of genocide might not be capable of implementing these orders; and those who implement the orders might not be capable of instigating them. In one approach (which I find generally persuasive) the actions of the Nazi elite (including Hitler), of the middlelevel German bureaucrats (not all of whom were Nazis), and of the police battalion or death camp personnel who actually carried out the killing process are explainable by different processes or combinations of factors.34 An ideological commitment to exterminate the Jews, a careerist concern on the part of bureaucrats, an adaptation to extraordinary circumstances and peer conformity on the part of perpetrators, contributed to the lethal dynamic of the Holocaust. Until quite recently relatively little systematic study focused on the handson perpetrators or those who implemented the genocidal actions of the Holocaust. Christopher Browning’s (1992) Ordinary Men and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners are two noteworthy studies of these perpetrators, focusing on German members of the Einsatzgruppen or killing squads.35 Although they examined some of the same archival records, Browning and Goldhagen arrive at somewhat different interpretations of the

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fundamental motivations and dynamics involved in the killing process. As Browning’s title suggests, in his interpretation the killers were essentially “ordinary men” who engaged in a savage process of killing in response to the circumstances in which they found themselves and with a range of different motivations. Peer group conformity and the brutalizing context of war played important roles in the homicidal actions of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. Once these men began killing civilians in large numbers they became, over time, somewhat desensitized to the true nature of what they were doing. Browning’s interpretation of the “ordinary men” who carried out the genocidal killing of the Holocaust inevitably provides a basis for making connections between the Holocaust and a wide range of other genocidal (or homicidal) events in other places and at other times. For Browning we can find some connections, for example, between the dynamics involved in the Holocaust and in the My Lai (Vietnam) massacre as well as the Watergate affair. Goldhagen has looked at some of the same perpetrators and records that Browning examined, but has advanced a very different thesis. For Goldhagen, the perpetrators were motivated by an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that was pervasive in Germany. In this sense, they are better understood as ordinary Germans, as opposed to ordinary men. For Goldhagen, the gratuitous cruelty and the uncompromised extremity of the exterminationist campaign against Jews can only be explained in this way. While Goldhagen naturally acknowledges that large numbers of non-Jews were also killed by the Nazis, he holds that the process of exterminating the Jews was both quantitatively and qualitatively operating on an entirely different level. Goldhagen’s book was a best-seller (not only in the United States, but in Germany), and has generated a formidable amount of controversy.36 In part, its appeal may be linked to the fact that it claims to have identified the fundamental cause of the Holocaust and this form of unidimensional explanation is easily comprehended. In one sense, Goldhagen’s approach might be regarded as reassuring if one takes it to mean that the Holocaust occurred in a particular time and place, and within the context of a unique set of circumstances. In my interpretation, Goldhagen may well have made a case that the specifically anti-Semitic dimension of the killing process is somewhat slighted in most accounts, but I do not find his overall account persuasive. The far more complex, nuanced interpretation of Browning is more convincing and provides an appropriate framework for the comparative analysis of genocide.37 It also provides a sounder basis for a specifically criminological approach to the Holocaust.


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Genocide as a form of state crime has required a cooperative endeavor by individuals operating on many different levels of the state, with dramatically different orientations, objectives and motivations. In criminological terms those at the top – the evil masterminds – and those at the bottom – the actual killers – may represent less of a challenge for understanding than some of those in the middle. In particular, some of those with complicity in genocidal campaigns would appear to be the absolute antithesis of “the criminal” as conventionally conceived. They are highly intelligent, cultivated and articulate; they have had careers focused on constructive, productive activities; they claim to have a humane conscience and express profound anguish over the genocides and losses of human life with which they are associated. The specific extent to which their actions are deemed genocidal and the nature of their complicity in such actions may be a matter of dispute. In specifically criminological terms one may ask whether it is both appropriate and fruitful to apply a criminological framework to their cases. Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of War Mobilization, fits the profile outlined in the preceding paragraph.38 Is there any justification for applying a criminological framework to the case of Speer? No one has contended that he was directly involved in planning or carrying out the Holocaust, nor has anyone (to my knowledge) produced evidence that he specifically favored genocide. Yet Speer was indisputably a top Nazi official, a member of the “inner circle” around Hitler for some years and someone in charge of a war mobilization endeavor that used slave labor. Speer was the one defendant at the principal Nuremberg Trial who expressed some degree of remorse; in addition, his whole persona set him apart from coarse, brutal Nazi leaders. Speer received a twenty year prison sentence (over the protest of the Russians, who wanted him executed) and subsequently wrote a famous account of the Nazi leadership and of his years in Spandau prison.39 He was released from prison in 1966 and lived on for another fifteen years. Speer long denied awareness of the extermination process, although the writer Gitta Sereny elicited an indirect admission of awareness on Speer’s part.40 His most recent biographer regards Speer as a careerist whose cynical actions and choices were driven principally by the desire for personal advancement, and for self-preservation.41 Furthermore, he finds evidence that Speer was directly involved in the eviction of large numbers of Jews from Berlin, that he displayed indifference at a minimum to the fate of the Jews, and that he must have had some fairly concrete knowledge of what was happening to the Jews in the final years of World War II. Speer’s conviction in criminal proceedings by an international tribunal renders him an appropriate subject for criminological inquiry. Furthermore, Speer may be viewed as an especially conspicuous representative of a type

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essential for the successful implementation of the crime of genocide: the powerful (and less powerful) bureaucrats who provide the critical logistical support for state crimes such as genocide, even if they are not directly involved. State crime generally, and large-scale genocidal campaigns specifically, differ from conventional crimes because they are only possible with the indirect cooperation and support of large numbers of officials on every level. My argument here is that it is appropriate to apply a criminological analysis to “marginal” cases such as Speer and to understand his complicity in terms of criminality, crime and criminalization. It is instructive in any such exercise to delineate what such cases do and do not have in common with more conventional criminal cases. Some of the conundrums, contradictions and complexities associated with the whole idea of crime are surely highlighted in this process. Finally, on the matter of criminality, one must note the role of “ordinary” criminals in the extermination process. Some of the higher level personnel of the extermination process – notably Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz – had records as conventional offenders.42 And some ordinary criminals were enlisted within the concentration camps in connection with the extermination process.43 We have a case here of conventional criminality being harnessed, so to speak, in service of state crime, with a conflation of individual and state motives for criminal conduct. That humans are capable of murder has always been disturbing, but that murders on a monumental scale have been carried out on behalf of states is still more disturbing. Yet murder per se has been identified primarily with individual offenders. Murders carried out on behalf of states, or with the approval, knowledge and support of state authorities, have often been viewed as a fundamentally different phenomenon than interpersonal murders. We can recognize that such murders are both driven by different dynamics than conventional murders but also have some features in common with conventional murders. Humans killing other humans takes many different forms along a continuum ranging from the intensely personal to the utterly impersonal. One of the intellectual challenges here is to delineate both the differences and the similarities between impulses for committing genocidal murder and for committing interpersonal murder. In this section, then, the relevance of the concept of criminality for the Nazi case has been explored. The specific criminological challenge is to explore the parallels and differences between criminality in Nazi case and in relation to more conventional forms of criminal conduct.


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Understanding the Holocaust in terms of crime In terms of explaining the Holocaust as a crime, one must address the configuration of circumstances making this “event” possible. On one end of the spectrum we have the view that the Holocaust cannot be explained and understood, it can only be commemorated; on the other hand we have a massive literature that attempts to identify the circumstances and factors explaining the Holocaust.44 In my view, we can identify factors that contributed to the occurrence of the Holocaust, although it does not follow from this that we can achieve a total understanding of how such a crime could have occurred. In efforts to explain the Holocaust we have a division between those who essentially adopt monocausal explanations and those who adopt multi-causal explanations. Goldhagen’s highlighting of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” is a conspicuous example of the former approach; most large-scale studies of the Holocaust adopt some form of a multi-causal approach. In the recent era we also have a division between those who adopt an intentionalist approach and those who adopt a functionalist approach to an understanding of the Holocaust.45 The intentionalist approach holds that the genocidal program was a specific objective of Hitler and the Nazis from the outset; the functionalist approach holds that the Holocaust came about primarily due to the circumstances that arose in the context of World War II. First, I strongly adhere to the multi-causal explanation approach. Second, I adopt the view that intentionalist aspirations (or fantasies) could be realized due to a complex of circumstances favorable to genocide. Altogether, we can only approach an understanding of the crime of the Holocaust in terms of the interaction of structural, organizational, social psychological and individualistic factors. The crime of genocide is different from conventional forms of mass murder because it is carried out by a regime that is widely regarded by a large proportion of its citizens as undertaking many positive or progressive initiatives. Considerable evidence documents the claim that support for Hitler and the Nazi party – by the German people, as well as admirers in many other countries – was primarily a function of the perception that Hitler and the Nazis would provide strong leadership to effectively address economic and political turmoil, would restore law and order, would revive natiònal pride and would initiate many constructive programs. The anti-Semitic aspect of the Nazi program was certainly of primary importance to some supporters of Hitler and the Nazis, but apparently not to the majority of its supporters. William Brustein (1996), in The Logic of Evil, makes the somewhat contentious case that support for the Nazis and Nazi party membership was driven primarily by rational, instrumental considerations.46 And through much of the 1930s Hitler and the Nazis were viewed by many Germans (and foreign

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admirers) as successful in addressing many of the problems confronting Germany. Some commentators believe that had Hitler died in 1938, history would have regarded him as a great German leader (although surely the relentless anti-Semitic campaign, totalitarian rule and ruthlessness of the Nazis would continue to be assessed negatively).47 In a book with the surprising title The Nazi War on Cancer Robert N. Proctor explores the Nazi campaign on behalf of good health, and reveals that German scientists during this period were the first to establish a link between smoking and cancer and that German health authorities were the first to promote breast self-examination for women.48 The Nazi campaign to obliterate the “cancer” of a Jewish presence – as they defined it – as well as other “societal cancers” such as homosexuals and Gypsies, is well-known, but these campaigns on behalf of the supposed social health of society were intertwined with a campaign on behalf of good health in more conventional terms. The complex intermixture of the good with the bad and the complex of motivations involved on the part of both Nazis and their supporters has to be fully appreciated, because the crime of genocide occurs in this context and not as a wholly independent endeavor. Good things have been promoted by evil, criminal states and conversely, terrible crimes have been carried out on behalf of generally beneficient, democratic states. State crime has in common with corporate crime that it is intertwined in complex ways with productive and beneficial activities. This section has considered some of the circumstances making the crime of the Holocaust possible. Criminologists can address the parallels and differences between such organizational homicide and homicides involving conventional criminal entities such as juvenile gangs. Understanding the Holocaust in terms of criminalization Criminalization is the third fundamental criminological issue pertaining to the Holocaust. This issue has two basic dimensions for criminologists. First, how did the Nazis effectively criminalize those whom they sought to destroy; second, what was the process involved in criminalizing the genocidal activities of the Nazis? On the first question, in one view, the predominance of legal positivism as a jurisprudential philosophy in Germany in the early decades of the twentieth century facilitated the Nazi crimes; a challenge to this view holds that an emerging national socialist jurisprudence – with the “Fuhrer principle” privileging Hitler’s commands over legislative acts and the claimed needs of the state taking precedence over formal law – really operated at odds with the fundamental tenets of legal positivism.49 Despite Hitler’s written authorization for the pre-World War II euthanasia program directed at various


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“defective” human beings, the strictly “legal” status of these (and later) mass killing activities was questionable at best and challenged by at least some members of the judiciary and the larger German public.50 That law-making overall became increasingly dominated by the Nazis and that the judiciary for the most part cooperated willingly or even initiated some Nazi law has been quite thoroughly documented.51 A criminological approach to the Holocaust, then, requires some attention to the “criminalization” of Jews and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state. On the second question, by what criteria and process does the Holocaust come to be defined as a crime? That the Holocaust was not only a crime but a crime on a monumental scale is certainly a widely accepted proposition, and the term “crime” is commonly applied to the Holocaust. The term crime is invoked in somewhat different ways, however. In moralistic and humanistic terms the Holocaust was a crime by virtue of violating widely embraced views of morality and by causing objectively identifiable harm as a consequence of intentional policies and actions. In political terms the Holocaust was a crime because it was so defined by opposing political entities (both in the form of other nations and oppositional political forces within Germany). In legalistic terms the status of the Holocaust as crime is somewhat more complicated. But the post-war indictment of leading surviving Nazis and the Nuremberg Trials determined that various policies and actions of Nazi Germany (including the Holocaust) were violations of widely recognized international law and many Nazis were then found guilty of crimes by a formal, adjudicatory process.52 In a criminological context the status of international law as comparable to state law, and the validity of the international tribunals, arises. The process of criminalization in relation to the Holocaust has been considered here. How does the process of criminalization of a genocide such as the Holocaust compare with, and how does it differ from, the process of criminalization for conventional forms of crime?

An integrative criminological framework for understanding the Holocaust We can explain and understand the Holocaust. We cannot explain and understand the Holocaust. Both of these statements are correct. We can explain and understand many of the contributing factors; we cannot fully and wholly explain how the Holocaust could have occurred. Theories can be invoked in trying to explain and understand the Holocaust; no “rigorous” theory of the Holocaust is possible. The need for an integrative criminological framework would seem to be exemplified by the case of the Holocaust specifically, and by genocide more

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generally. Such a framework draws upon the widest possible range of disciplines; it adopts a fairly inclusive concept of crime, transcending narrow legalistic boundaries; and it draws upon a humanistic tradition as opposed to being limited to a narrowly positivistic (or “scientific”) tradition.53 Diane Vaughan has argued that the study of organizational crime calls for a theoretical framework linking the macro and the micro level, or the integration of structural, social psychological and individualistic levels of explanation.54 An integrative criminological approach to the Holocaust must draw upon as many disciplines as possible and must address it on historical, societal, organizational, communal, peer group, situational, and psychological levels. More specifically, the Holocaust can only be understood in the context of an understanding of: European, and German, history; the character and composition of postWorld War I society; the nature and dynamic operation of the government bureaucracies (from departments of the state to death camp administrations), as well as non-governmental organizations (e.g., the IG Farben corporation); intergroup relations within German communities and within concentration camps; peer group pressures (for example, within the Einsatzgruppen killing squads); situational factors arising in the specific circumstances of the killing process, which can take on a life of its own; and psychological dimensions involving the perpetrators on all levels.55 Although biogenetic factors may be relevant for understanding some manifestations of crime their contribution to explaining the Holocaust is questionable, I share with Gregg Barak the view that both the complexity of crime (especially genocidal crime) and immense methodological challenges preclude the development of a truly testable integrated theory. At best, we can hope to achieve a rough approximation of the relative “weight” of a broad range of factors in contributing to the genesis of the Holocaust, and to specific actions within the Holocaust. At the end of our analysis we have a “residual” dimension, or something left over that we cannot fully explain.

Conclusion In the year 2100 a criminologist will surely address the “crime of the century” issue, just as assessments of the twenty-first century are made. What will it be? Arguably the single most disturbing possibility is a nuclear holocaust with a scope almost unimaginable to us. In the worst case scenario, with the “death of death”, there will be no criminologists (or anyone else) left to identify this crime of the century. Richard Harding in the early 1980s (in a presidential address to a criminological division), called upon criminologists to direct more of their attention to nuclear issues, but this call was largely ignored.56 Parallel calls by a handful of criminologists for more attention


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to genocidal issues were noted earlier. If the world escapes a major nuclear holocaust in the twenty-first century it seems improbable in the extreme that it will avoid some major genocidal campaigns, possibly of a magnitude hitherto unexperienced due to the use of advanced technology. What, then, will a review of crime in the twenty-first century look like at its end? Conventional crime will hardly have disappeared during the course of this century but the contours, demographics and distribution of crime are likely to be quite different from what they are today. Surely some forms of crime will have largely disappeared (perhaps syndicated crime), just as some forms of crime (e.g., safecracking, train robberies) largely disappeared by the end of the twentieth century. Altogether, it seems more likely that we will have had greater success in addressing the least sophisticated forms of crime (e.g., conventional crime) than the most sophisticated (e.g., finance crime) and the crimes of the powerless over the crimes of the powerful. In particular, the crimes of states (and non-state political entities) are likely to be far harder to control and far more consequential. The characterization of the Holocaust as the “crime of the century” is inspired at least in part by the conviction that we must promote a general transformation of public (and professional) consciousness that tends to separate conventional crime from state crime, and homicide from genocide. Genocides such as the Holocaust are widely characterized as “crimes”, but they are typically thought of as quite unrelated to conventional forms of crime. A criminological approach to the Holocaust should clarify as specifically as possible ways in which genocidal homicide both differs from and has elements in common with conventional homicide. A criminological approach to the Holocaust should introduce concepts and insights that have been largely absent from the analysis of this event, as interpretation and analysis of the Holocaust has been dominated by other disciplines. A criminological approach to the Holocaust should contribute to the legitimation of state crime as a proper and fruitful realm of inquiry for criminologists. The case for recognition of the Holocaust as the “crime of the century” is rooted in the conviction that criminology must attend more fully to genocide, that if we can order crimes at all by seriousness then genocide should be recognized as the worst of all crimes, and that the societal response to crimes is one vital dimension of their overall significance. In accord with these criteria, then, a case can be made for the Holocaust as the crime of the century.

Acknowledgements This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Toronto, November, 1999. The assistance of a University

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of Scranton Faculty Research Grant facilitated research on this paper and a Judaic Studies Committee travel grant made it possible to present the paper in Toronto; both grants are gratefully acknowledged. My collaboration since 1994 with several colleagues on an interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust has been an important stimulus to my thinking on this topic, as was our shared journey to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Theresienstadt; they are: Jody Dunn; Frank Homer; Darlene Miller-Lanning; Bill Rowe; Carl Schaffer; and Marc Shapiro. Finally, I wish to thank the guest editor of this issue for his encouragement and helpful suggestions.

Notes 1. Geis, Gilbert and Leigh B. Bienen, Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O.J. Simpson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). Geis and Bienen’s cases involve one or more of the following elements: celebrity, wealth, an element of mystery, a denial of guilt, and blatant injustice. 2. The term “the Holocaust” here refers to the systematic extermination of millions of people by the Nazis during the early 1930s, with Jews as the principal victims. The term “holocaust” has been applied to other genocides and events – somewhat controversially – and some Jews prefer the term “the Shoah” for the Nazi war against the Jews. 3. Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 4. Sources on the “uniqueness” question include Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1996 (25), 65–85; Allan S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocides (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1999 (13), 28–61. An especially concise rendition of the uniqueness claim has been formulated by Eberhard Jaeckel: “The Nazi extermination of the Jews was unique because never before had a state, under the responsible authority of its leader, decided and announced that a specific group of human beings, including the old, the women, the children, and the infants, would be killed to the very last one, and implemented this decision with all the means at its disposal.” (Eberhard Jaeckel, quoted in Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On the other hand a claim to fundamental uniqueness has been challenged on a number of grounds (For example, see David E. Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Rosenbaum, op. cit., 163–208, and Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, editors, Century of Genocide – Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997). 5. See Stannard, op. cit. 6. For example, see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts – Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: The Free Press, 1997). According to one source, as many as 70 million people died as a consequence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Roy Baumeister, Evil – Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1997).).


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7. In her study of events in 1937 Iris Chang observes that “The torture that the Japanese inflicted upon the native population at Nanking almost surpasses the limits of human comprehension.” It included live burials, disembowelments, nailing of prisoners to wooden boards and running over them, gouging out of eyes, hacking off of noses and ears, mass incineration, intentionally freezing people to death, burying victims to their waists and then allowing dogs to rip them apart, saturating victims in acid, impaling babies on bayonets, and hanging people by their tongues; in addition, as many as 80,000 women were brutally raped. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). And Ervin Staub makes this observation: “. . . extreme evil defies comparisons of magnitude. What is the degree of evil in the act of torturers who insert a tube into a man’s anus or a woman’s vagina and seal into it a rat, which then tries to get out by gnawing its way through the victim’s body? This method of torture was used in Argentina.” Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Forms of Group Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The military in the “dirty war” in Argentina also allegedly tortured children in front of their parents (Clendinnen, op. cit., 14). 8. An impression of the extraordinary scope of the literature on the Holocaust can be obtained by consulting the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as well as Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Re-Examined (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), and Michael Dobkowski, “The Holocaust,” in M.N. Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman (eds), Genocide in Our Time: An Annotated Bibliography with Analytical Introductions (Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian Press, 1992). 9. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). 10. Much debate has surrounded the question of how to best define genocide, then, and I will not here attempt to engage with this debate other than to adopt the position that it is probably now futile to insist on a single correct usage of the term. Rather, those who invoke the term genocide in a particular context should then clarify which usage of the term they are adopting. For some noteworthy contributions to the definitional debate see Louis Rene Beres, “Genocide,” Policy Studies Review 1985 (4), 397–406; Frank Chalk, “Definitions of Genocide and their Implications for Prediction and Prevention,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1989 (4), 149–160; Israel W. Charny (ed.), The Widening Circle of Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994); Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, Fourth edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997). For an especially provocative contribution to this discussion see Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997). We also have the introduction of some related terms – such as politicide and democide – into the literature (e.g., see Barbara Harff, “Recognizing Genocides and Politicides,” in Helen Fein (ed.), Genocide Watch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), and R.J. Rummel, Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992). 11. See Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) for a historical survey of genocide and discussion of the definitional issue. See also Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig Bjornson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998).

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12. For just one representative source on the interdisciplinary literature on the Holocaust see Saul S. Friedman, Holocaust Literature – A Handbook of Critical, Historical and Literary Writings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993). 13. This relative neglect has been noted by William S. Laufer, “The Forgotten Criminology of Genocide,” in William S. Laufer and Freda Adler (eds.), The Criminology of Criminal Law (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications, 1999), and has been documented by George S. Yacoubian, Jr., “Underestimating the Magnitude of International Crime: Implications of Genocidal Behavior for the Discipline of Criminology,” Injustice Studies November, 1997 (1:1) (http://wolf.its.ilstud.edu/injstice/yacoubiandoc.htm). A few exceptions to the proposition that criminologists have largely ignored the Holocaust include: Alexander Alaverez, “Adjusting to Genocide: The Techniques of Neutralization and the Holocaust,” Social Science History 1997 (21), 139–178; Alexander Alvarez, “States of Destruction: Government, Genocide, and the Criminological Imagination,” A Work-inProgress; Augustine Brannigan, “Criminology and the Holocaust: Xenophobia, Evolution, and Genocide,” Crime & Delinquency 1998 (4), 257–276; L. Edward Day and Margaret Vandiver, “What Do We Know About Genocide and Mass Killing: Testing Theories Against Current Examples,” A Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego, November, 1997. Brannigan applies principles of evolutionary psychology to an understanding of the Holocaust as a manifestation of xenophobia, with this approach generating a theory of genocide. Alvarez specifically applies the criminological theory of neutralization, developed by Sykes and Matza, to explain the kinds of genocidal crime exemplified by the Holocaust, and in his larger work is attempting to develop a comparative understanding of the Holocaust, with some attention to the criminological contribution. Day and Vandiver explore the relevance of theories developed by Bauman, Goldhagen, Kelman and Rummel to an understanding of genocide, with some special attention to the relevance of specifically criminological ideas for these theoretical approaches. The distinguished criminologist Gilbert Geis has explored comparisons between medieval persecution of witches, especially in Germany, and the Holocaust, and has looked at links between Germany’s traditional xenophobia and current immigration policies in that country (Gilbert Geis, “Is Germany’s Xenophobia Qualititatively Different from Everybody Else’s?” Crime, Law and Social Change 1995 (24), 65–75). 14. Some exceptions to this proposition are identified in the previous note. In a companion piece to the present paper I have explored parallel issues in the neglect of crime in high places, and specifically presidential crime (see David O. Friedrichs, “Crime in High Places: A Criminological Perspective on the Clinton Case,” in Jeffery Ulmer (ed.), Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, forthcoming). 15. Edwin H. Sutherland, “White-Collar Criminality,” American Sociological Review 1940 (5), 1–12. For one fairly recent review of the white collar crime literature see David O. Friedrichs, Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society (Belmont, CA: ITP/Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996). 16. Edwin H. Sutherland, White Collar Crime (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949). 17. In my white collar crime text I discuss genocide as a form of governmental crime (more narrowly, of state crime), which in turn is treated as having a cognate relationship to white collar crime (see Friedrichs, op. cit.). Gary Green classifies genocide as a form of “state authority occupational crime” (Gary S. Green, Occupational Crime, 2nd edition (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1997)).


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18. David O. Friedrichs, “Governmental Crime, Hitler and White Collar Crime: A Problematic Relationship,” Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Social Psychology 1996 (2), 44–63. 19. For one discussion of the interrelation of crime and the political see Stanley Cohen, “Crime and Politics: Spot the Difference,” British Journal of Sociology 1996 (47), 1–21. 20. Frank E. Hagan, Political Crime: Ideology and Criminality (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997). 21. Richard Harding, “Nuclear Energy and the Destiny of Mankind – Some Criminological Perspectives,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 1983 (16): 81–92; William J. Chambliss, “State-organized Crime,” Criminology 1989 (27), 183–208; Stanley Cohen, “Human Rights and Crimes of the State: The Culture of Denial,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 1993 (26), 97–115. 22. E.g., see Gregg Barak, ed., Crimes by the Capitalist State, 1991 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., Controlling State Crime (New York: Garland Press, 1995); David O. Friedrichs, ed., State Crime, Volumes I & II (Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth/Ashgate, 1998); David Kauzlarich and Ronald C. Kramer, Crimes of the American Nuclear State (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998); Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., Varieties of State Crime and Its Control (Monsey, NY: Criminal Jutice Press, forthcoming). 23. Jeffrey Ian Ross, “Situating the Academic Study of Controlling State Crime,” Crime, Law & Social Change 1998 (29), 331–340; see also, J.I. Ross, G. Barak, J. Ferrell, D. Kauzlarich, M. Hamm, D. Friedrichs, R. Matthews, S. Pickering, M. Presdee, P. Kraska and V. Kappeler, “The State of State Crime Research: A Commentary,” Humanity & Society 1999 (23), 273–281. 24. See Alvarez, work-in-progress, op. cit. 25. Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary 1998 (June), 42–46. 26. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” Commentary 1995 (June), 35–40. 27. See Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995). 28. Elie Wiesel, One Generation After (New York: Avon, 1970). 29. The fact that Himmler was concerned with maintaining the secrecy of the extermination enterprise suggests at least an awareness that in terms of conventional morality it would never be viewed as justifiable (Saul Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Peter Hayes (ed.), Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 30. John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Knopf, 1997). 31. Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hannover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992). Clendinnen, op. cit., 91, points out the bizarre incongruities in Himmler’s apparent outlook, when he commends the SS killers for their “decency” but condemns the immorality of stealing a watch. 32. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963). 33. The question of just who should be included among the perpetrators is somewhat complicated (Clendinnen, op. cit., 62). For example, by some criteria the “Sonderkommando” – principally Jewish men who participated in the extermination process but were largely fated for extermination themselves – were perpetrators, but by other criteria they were obviously victims.

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34. Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 35. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996). 36. Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial – The Goldhagen Thesis and the Historical Truth (New York: Henry Holt, 1998); Franklin H. Littell, Hyping the Holocaust – Scholars Answer Goldhagen (East Rockaway, NY: Cummings and Hathaway, 1997); Robert R. Shandley, Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 37. As Clendinnen, op. cit., 118, notes, Goldhagen is not really curious about the “Order Police” because he already knows why they did what they did. 38. See Joachim C. Fest, The Faces of the Third Reich (New York: Ace, 1970), and Dan van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997). Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and a prime architect of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, also fits this profile (For a powerful analysis on this theme see Paul Hendrickson, The Living and the Dead: Robert MacNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)). Obviously any attempt to characterize American actions in Vietnam in genocidal terms is controversial. However, at least some observers have characterized it this way. The International Tribunal conducted by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre specifically characterized American involvement in Vietnam as genocidal (e.g., see Jean-Paul Sartre, On Genocide (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); see also Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy New York: Bantam, 1970)). Robert McNamara was never formally charged with or tried for any form of criminal wrong-doing. On this basis the argument could be made that he is not a proper subject for criminological concern. However, McNamara was very directly involved in the decision-making process leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives (as well as some 58,000 American lives). In his published account of the Vietnam war McNamara famously conceded that “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”(Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995)). Much evidence indicates that McNamara’s intentions were hardly genocidal and that McNamara endured from at least 1966 on much anguish over the Vietnam issue. But he did not speak out against American military involvement while he was Secretary of Defense (through 1968) when it might have made a difference. His rationale for having failed to do so is that it would have been improper and disloyal for him to challenge the President under whom he served. Consequently McNamara may be held to have complicity in the unnecessary loss of many lives. 39. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970); Albert Speer, Spandau – The Secret Diaries (London: Collins, 1976). 40. Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer – His Battle with Truth (London: MacMillan, 1995). 41. Van der Vat, op. cit. 42. Fest, op. cit., 411. 43. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 44. On various aspects of this conflict see: Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996); Peter Hayes (ed.), Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Alvin H. Rosenfeld (ed.), Think-


45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

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ing About the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (eds), Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections from a Dark Time (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988). See Browning, op. cit., 1992. William Brustein, The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). For other sources on support for the Hitler and the Nazis see: Conan Fischer, The Rise of the Nazis (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995); Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Detlef Muhlberger, Hitler’s Followers: Studies on the Sociology of the Nazi Movement (London: Routledge, 1990). Lukacs, op. cit. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Walter Ott and Ranziska Buob, “Did Legal Positivism Render German Jurists Defenseless During the Third Reich?”, Social and Legal Studies 1993 (2), 91–104. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide – From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995). David Fraser, “Law before Auschwitz: Aryan and Jew in the Nazi Rechtsstaat,” in P. Cheah, David Fraser and Judith Grbich, Thinking Through the Body of Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Matthew Lippman, “They Shoot Lawyers Don’t They?: Law in the Third Reich and the Global Threat to the Independence of the Judiciary,” California Western International Law Journal 1993 (23), 257–318; Richard Lawrence Miller, Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1995); Ingo Muller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Michael Stolleis, The Law Under the Swastika (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The literature on the Nuremberg trials, as well as subsequent trials of Nazis, is very large. A highly selective introduction to this literature could include: M. Cherif Bassiouni, “International Law and the Holocaust,” California Western International Law Journal 1979 (9), 202–298; Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983); David A. Hackett, Elusive Justice: War Crimes and the Buchenwald Trials (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (New York: Knopf, 1992); Robert Wolfe, “Flaws in the Nuremberg Legacy: An Impediment to International War Crimes Tribunals’ Prosecution of Crimes Against Humanity,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1998 (12), 434–453. Gregg Barak, Integrating Criminologies (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998). Diane Vaughan, “Boundary Work: Levels of Analysis, the Macro-Micro Link, and the Social Control of Organizations,” in Patricia Ewick, Robert A. Kagan and Austin Sarat (eds), Social Science, Social Policy, and the Law (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999). See Friedrichs, forthcoming, op. cit., for a parallel characterization of an integrative criminological approach to crime in high places. Harding, op. cit. Kauzlarich and Kramer, op. cit., is one important exception to this proposition.