ABSTRACT
The judicial reckoning that Nazi officials faced for the crimes they perpetrated during the Second World War—beginning with the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1945 and the 12 subsequent Nuremberg Military Trials (NMT), to the on-going trials held by Germans ensured that hundreds of individual perpetrators were interrogated and called as witnesses to testify against their colleagues, or to directly answer for the crimes they had committed. It is in the courtroom that perpetrators have spoken of their wartime experiences, and in doing so they have left a vast repository of testimony, interrogations, affidavits, and other documents that scholars have utilized in an attempt to understand what motivates individuals to participate in persecution, mass murder, and genocide, acts that social-psychologists refer to as “extraordinary human evil.” This chapter examines the relationship of the law, perpetrator motives and behavior, and genocide. It critically evaluates some of the major themes and debates in Nazi Perpetrator Studies as they relate to law, especially the benefits and shortcomings that arise in utilizing Nazi perpetrator testimony.
