xx Preface refrained from making judgments about their behavior. Some, indeed, we consider to be morally repugnant, but in all instances, we have done our best not to let our bias show. This is, therefore, a reference work designed to assist others in their own research. It is not an examination of ethical behavior as such, although the actions of all those here could serve as a manual of how not behave in any given situation. When we began our hunt for perpetrators of the Holocaust, we thought that the process would be relatively easy. It took us no time at all to find a seed list of major perpetrators, but this only fed our desire to dig deeper. We began looking for others to add to the list. Sometimes it was through sheer accident or luck that we found names that had been little studied up until now. In other instances, dealing with one name led inevitably to uncovering another—just as with the layers of an onion, we kept peeling back without ever reaching a central core. The process of discovery continued right up to the very last days. Long after we thought the phase of writing the entries was finished, we found ourselves still adding one or two or three names to the list and then writing up their stories. As we found, however, choosing the people to feature here was actually no easy task, and the list could easily have been extended into the thousands. In addi- tion, our selections were conditioned by our preference for examples represent- ative of the wide range of perpetrator activities that could have been, and were, undertaken. For every person included here, there were dozens more we could have added. This presented an added problem: space. We simply could not include every leader, enabler, or collaborator who had an involvement in the Holocaust, as the amount of space permitted by the publishing process would not allow for this in a single volume. More is the pity practical considerations have led to many people being omitted, although this can count as a positive for students and research- ers seeking to undertake their own projects. The field, in many respects, remains wide open. Tens of thousands of perpetrators, of all kinds and in all locations, deserve their place in a book of this kind, and as authors, we frequently faced a dilemma as to whom to leave out. It is our hope, therefore, that readers will appreciate that those profiled here are but a sample of an otherwise-enormous range of human beings who, for one reason or another, chose to follow Adolf Hitler in his search for German glory and destructive plans for the Jews of Europe. Those not appearing in these pages were no less dishonorable or murderous than those who are. That said, it is our hope that the entries we have included here provide a profile of Holocaust perpetrators that is broad enough to enable readers to derive some measure of understanding regarding the men and women who chose to commit this enormous crime. We hope, in this context, that the examples we have included will be sufficiently illustrative of a cohort that is thousands of times greater in expanse than the current volume suggests. The entries have been organized in such a way as to provide maximum acces- sibility for readers. It is a straightforward alphabetical listing, by last name, of a
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