The Making of an SS Killer: The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/gerhis/ghx030
ISSN1477-089X
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoIn The Making of an SS Killer, Alex Kay delves deeply into the life of Alfred Filbert, commander of Einsatzkommando 9 and responsible for the murder of over 18,000 Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Kay rightfully points out that there have been quite a few prosopographies of this group of perpetrators (such as Michael Wildt’s seminal work A Uncompromising Generation). Yet there are few, if any, detailed studies of the individual men tasked with carrying out the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe which has come to be known as the Holocaust by Bullets. Kay astutely notes that, in the case of Filbert, his ‘anonymity…should not be understood as a synonym for unimportance’ (p. 4). He then sets out to document Filbert’s life and crimes from his earliest days to his death in 1990. With this task in mind, Kay mobilizes an impressive amount of source material, moving beyond more traditional documentation by corresponding with Filbert’s relatives and conducting interviews with a variety of people who knew him from a Holocaust survivor to a film employee. In addition to these finds, Kay, of course, bolsters his source material with the incredible amount of archival and published evidence on the Holocaust in the East. As a result, he crafts a different kind of perpetrator narrative, one which more closely resembles that of survivor interviews which begin at birth and end at the present day. While this has been the norm for video interviews, for example, much perpetrator literature seems to focus on particular periods in the subject’s life either during the war or in relation to post-war justice. The Making of an SS Killer provides us with an alternative approach to mid- to low-level perpetrators, in itself a useful intervention.
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