La recherche en langue allemande sur les exécuteurs du crime : Évolution, résultats et limites de la Täterforschung

Résumé 0

German historiography on Holocaust perpetratorsOver the past 25 years, Western scholars have focused heavily on the Holocaust murders. Perpetrator research ( Täterforschung) has mainly emerged in Germany. This article aims to examine the changing construction of the definition of “perpetrator” in German Holocaust historiography since the 1990s.From pioneering works on Nazi officials such as Ulrich Herbert’s biography, which depicted Werner Best as the prototype of a generation radicalized by the war, to prosopographical studies of core groups and major Nazi institutions, including Gestapo chiefs, Einsatzgruppen commanders, “Jewish experts,” T4 killers, camp guards and the Wehrmacht, perpetrator studies have grown exponentially and have helped to build a much more complex, heterogeneous picture of the Holocaust. Historians such as Jürgen Matthäus, Gerhard Paul and Peter Longerich, social psychologists such as Harald Welzer and political scientists such as Götz Aly have all dealt with the key question of the perpetrators’ willingness to persecute and kill the Jews.Today, most German historians agree that the Holocaust must not be considered an exclusively German or Nazi crime but rather, a European crime that involved a huge mass of people who carried out many different actions against the Jews, including but not limited to murder. Therefore, the meaning and definition of “perpetrator” have become very broad. Consequently, recent historiography tends to include in the category of the Täter not only those who pulled the trigger and killed the victims but also the millions of “ordinary” people who assisted and collaborated in the entire process of destroying the European Jewry. This process comprised acts such as the plunder of Jewish properties and the logistical organization of the deportations.However, the significant extension of the notion of “perpetrator” is highly problematic and challenges the idea of individual responsibility for the mass murders. Täterforschung has developed in every direction. For instance, researchers have focused on the behavior of German women and their careers as secretaries or employees in the Nazi administration and their roles as wives and mothers of Nazi criminals. This development risks minimizing the key role played by the upper hierarchy of the Nazi regime and by the individuals directly in charge of the murders, ranging from those who sent the orders from Berlin to those who acted in the occupied territories.Although each executive group had its own social background and cultural and political homogeneity, a biographical approach can hardly explain the motivations of everyone who willingly participated in the Holocaust but did not belong to a specific group.Were they monsters and psychopaths or banal bureaucrats and administrative criminals ? The current German historiography does not appear to have reached a consensus. It seeks to investigate a wider microcosm of perpetrators, including men and women from both Germany and Europe, whose motivations require multi-casual explanations and must be analyzed within the context of the entire 1933-1945 period.