Organizational structures have played a key role in modern state-sponsored mass murder. The author of this article criticizes and synthesizes the existing scholarship, focusing first on historiographical debates surrounding the Holocaust. He then considers the Stalinist purges, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Genocide in the light of this and other theoretical literature. The article sheds light on the ways organizational norms have interacted with other motivational factors to shape the behavior of mass murderers in distinct historical episodes.

Although much has been written about the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, relatively little research has been done on the Soviet military tribunals that took place during and after World War II. The Soviet government conducted thousands of open and closed tribunals through the 1980s, trying tens of thousands of Germans and Soviet collaborators for crimes committed on Soviet territory. The 1943 Krasnodar trial was the first open military tribunal to take place during the war. Eleven Soviet citizens accused of betraying their country and collaborating with the Nazis were found guilty; eight were hanged in front of tens of thousands of cheering Soviet citizens. In light of recently declassified Soviet archival materials, and with the help of recent scholarship, it is now possible to reconstruct the roles of the major actors as well as to assess the social impact of the publicity that the military tribunals received. Finally, a close analysis of the Krasnodar tribunal brings to light the authorities' motivations—political, economic, and ideological—for conducting such trials.*

Primo Levi asks his readers to consider whether those who live comfortable lives have some meaningful connection to those who suffered in Auschwitz. He suggests that discovering such a connection is, paradoxically, both improbable and imperative. Alternatively, Hannah Arendt argues that the thoughtlessness of the perpetrators and the suffering of the victims in the camps amount to meaningless banalities. For her, totalitarianism is an attack on humanness as such and the best response to it is to practice a different, more human type of politics. However, Levi's paradox shows us that thoughtlessness is an insufficient diagnosis of the Nazi bureaucrat and that our relationship to those who suffer cannot be separated from politics or the question of what it means to be human. Instead, the essential political question after Auschwitz is whether or not those who suffer are part of the human community.

How did Nazism attract some of those German Catholic clergy whose political sympathies lay with the right? The following biographical study documents how Father Wilhelm Maria Senn was drawn into the orbit of National Socialism; how this fact caused discomfort for many of Senn's parishioners, fellow clergymen, and Church superiors; and how Nazi nationalism, anti-liberalism, and antisemitism continued to pose temptations for other Catholic clergymen.*

This research note explores the influence of prewar cultural experiences on two eyewitnesses' responses to the Holocaust. While differences of gender, age, and social position affected the emotional responses of the two writers, the historical-cultural prewar context informed their ideological responses. Elisheva Binder, a young woman of twenty-one, was influenced by her literary self-education and her faith in the universality of humanistic ethics. In contrast, the writings of war veteran and Judenrat member Juliusz Feuerman reflect his Zionist convictions. That two such different testimonies demonstrate the strength of prewar ideological influences teaches us that in order to rescue the individuality of the victim from the dehumanizing anonymity of the Holocaust, we must consider the writer's ideals, values, and ideological background.