Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Memoirs of Perpetrators

Perpetrator behavior shakes one's sense of humanity and provokes a desire to be separate from such cruel barbarism, often achieved by characterizing perpetrators as demonic or psychologically deformed. The historical record and insights of scholars are used to confirm this judgment. But most contemporary work on this subject supports the recent conclusion of social psychologist James Waller who argues, "that it is ordinary individuals, like you and me, who commit extraordinary evil. Perpetrators of extraordinary evil are extraordinary only by what they have done, not by who they are" (2002, p. 18).

Judgments about perpetrators are often made without their own accounts. Facing condemnation and punishment, perpetrators are unlikely to record their experiences in memoir form. Thus, while survivor memoirs, especially of the Holocaust, multiply, those of perpetrators are rare, even when supplemented by the writings of those who...