ABSTRACT
The Compromised are perpetrators who were either vulnerable or victims themselves and were crushed by the oppressor's manipulative system and forced to commit crimes often against their own people. They are in the grey zone as Primo Levi called it, and sometimes hard to classify: are they perpetrators or victims or both? Some stopped cooperating as soon as they had the chance to, but others didn’t: they adapted and preferred to become the hunters rather than being the hunted. Some even started to enjoy their role. The Nazis were especially infamous for the cruel ways in which they enforced cooperation from the Jews. They did so via the Jewish Councils and Jewish traitors like Ans van Dijk but even enforced cooperation in the death camps where Jews made up the Sonderkommandos or had to help Nazi doctors like Josef Mengele with their cruel experiments. It also delves into the askari system in South Africa during the apartheid regime and Sedibe who ‘turned’ after he was tortured. Lastly it discusses children who are used as child soldiers, revolutionaries or terrorists and zooms in on Dominic Ongwen, the recent convict at the International Criminal Court who was abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda as a young child but grew up to become one of its leaders.
