Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond: Compromised Identities

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Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later a topic that remains highly relevant today. Using the notion of compromised identities to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between peoples behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence. Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how peoples stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.

Author Bio

Stephanie Bird is Professor of German Studies at University College London, UK. She is the author of Women Writers and National Identity (2003) and Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (1998). Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London, UK. She is the author of Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018, winner of the Wolfson History Prize) and A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012, winner of the Fraenkel Prize), amongst others. Stefanie Rauch is Research Fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, UK. She is the author of Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: A British Case Study (2020). Bastiaan Willems is Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern European History at University College London, UK. He is the author of Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944-1945 (2021) and A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of the Two World Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022).