The Holocaust was carried out by people. The phrase the Nazis is a useful shorthand, but it conceals more than it reveals. The men who organised, ordered, supervised and personally conducted the killing were named individuals, with biographies, with careers, with families and friends. They worked alongside hundreds of thousands of other named individuals who carried the operation out at every level. They depended, at scale, on the cooperation of national governments, of major corporations, of professional bodies, and of ordinary populations across the whole of occupied Europe. The pages in this section name the names. Each is a separate accounting of what each individual or institution did, when, on whose orders, and with what consequences.
What is here
The Perpetrators covers the named individual figures of the regime: Hitler at the top of the chain, the senior SS officers who ran the killing programme (Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, Globocnik, Müller), the camp commandants (Höss, Stangl, Heim), the Einsatzgruppen commanders (Jeckeln, Rauff), the senior Reich officials who provided the legal and political framework (Göring, Frank, Frick, Rosenberg), and the figures whose post-war careers and prosecutions extended the Holocaust’s legal aftermath (Eichmann, Demjanjuk, Barbie, Brunner). Twenty-seven named pages.
Nazi Ideology and Rise covers the broader question of how Nazi ideology emerged and what made it possible. The pages cover the role of the inter-war fear of communism, the path from antisemitic ideology to bureaucratic policy to mass murder, the role of the Christian churches in providing the theological background to modern antisemitism, the propaganda apparatus, and the question of how ordinary Germans became participants in the killing.
Collaborators and Collaborating Nations covers the non-German collaboration that made the Holocaust possible at scale. The pages cover the major collaborationist paramilitary movements (Arrow Cross, Iron Guard, Ustaše, Lithuanian Activist Front, Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, French Milice, Polish Blue Police), the named senior collaborators in occupied or allied national governments (Antonescu, Horthy, Pétain, Laval, Quisling, Mussert, Waldheim), and the contested figure of Pope Pius XII and the wartime Vatican.
Industrial Complicity and Slave Labour covers the German and Austrian companies that profited from the Holocaust, both directly through forced labour and indirectly through the Aryanisation of Jewish-owned property. The pages cover the major German corporations (IG Farben, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Siemens, Volkswagen, Thyssen, Krupp), the financial sector (Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, the insurance companies), the German railway (Reichsbahn), and the underground production facilities and the prisoner sabotage that affected them.
What this section is and is not
This is not a complete list of every perpetrator. The Holocaust was carried out by hundreds of thousands of people, of whom only the most senior figures and a few of the more notorious mid-level perpetrators have entries here. The wider apparatus is covered indirectly through the country pages (under What Happened, Beyond the Camps), through the camp pages, and through the trials pages. The figures named here are the senior architects, the men whose decisions and actions shaped the operation as a whole, and the named individuals whose post-war prosecutions or escapes have given them a particular place in the historical record.
The point of naming names is not to satisfy a reader’s curiosity about a few notorious figures. It is to make clear that the Holocaust was the work of identifiable individuals, each of whom made decisions, took actions, and bore responsibility. The collective categories (the Nazis, the SS, the Germans) are useful for shorthand. They cannot, by themselves, do the moral and historical work of accounting for what was done. Naming the men who did it is part of that accounting.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Penguin, 2008
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards