Talking to the Nazis Who Ran the Camps : SOLDIERS OF EVIL The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps <i> by Tom Segev (McGraw-Hill: $17.95; 272 pp.) </i>

Scholarship and literature discovered the interview method for research into National Socialism (Nazism) only very late. In the postwar years, investigations into the Nazi era and its tangled personalities were mainly historical, psychological, sociological and political. So-called “oral history” was employed mostly when dealing with victims; by and large, the perpetrators were left alone. Thus, the literature of the last few decades was often the attempt to deal with the “phenomenon” of Nazism as writers sought to explain the inexplicable.

Today one must admit that almost all those attempts were failures. Also, the fact that today, almost 50 years later, there exist two radically different German states with utterly distinct political systems suggests that the consequences of Nazism are not to be grasped as a single undifferentiated thing.

There may have been various reasons why the direct questioning of former officials was so seldom attempted. During the broad but illusionary reconstruction of the postwar era--the years of the Cold War, when the Germans above all were required to forget--direct interrogation of the actual perpetrators was simply never considered. Perhaps there was also a taboo against giving the perpetrators a forum.

Over the last few years, this has changed, largely because a new generation of researchers and writers is taking up this apparently timeless subject. Those who cannot be counted as having belonged at the time to either side (because they were not yet born) have sought to conduct conversations with the dwindling number of survivors. This is, right from the very structure of the interview, no simple matter. When the interview is of a former official or collaborator, neither the selection of the interviewer nor the content of the conversation can be neutral.

Tom Segev’s book is an important step toward a demythologization of the perpetrators. Neither psychological nor sociological explanation is offered. Instead, the 55 men themselves, or their wives and children, take the floor. The system of duty and obedience described is one that an official in that era would no more have thought to question than he would have thought to question the daily movement of his bowels. Came the order to kill the Jews, one did it. Came the order to shoot women and children, one did it. Had the order come to stone redheads only, one would have done it, and this not because of any underlying conviction but only because the order had come. The title of the book, “Soldiers of Evil,” is therefore well chosen.

In a notably informative afterword, Segev explains why he came to the conclusion that the 55 concentration camp commandants were not fanatic, politically motivated Nazis. Not one of them had joined the SS on political grounds; not one had really had anything much to do with Nazi theory, whence it is conceivable (if scarcely quite believable) that they were not even convinced anti-Semites. The “political soldier,” as Segev calls him, appears, however, precisely on account of his “usability,” to be a still more dangerous creature than the political fanatic.

Here were people at work who simply obeyed and who consequently were not even of the opinion that they had done anything wrong. A soldier is a soldier and must obey orders: Such is his calling and his task. Why should anyone at a later date criticize him for this, for acting in accord with his earlier orders?

The life stories of the individual concentration camp commandants in “Soldiers of Evil” appear terrifyingly normal. But this shows less Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” than it shows how weak a predictor childhood is, in the end, for any particular outcome at maturity. The abused child, the broken home, the child without parental love, the domineering authority of the father and so forth: All become possible grounds for defective development. But what about the many others who with just such childhoods become very different adults?

The upshot is a double puzzle:

First, how could human beings be found to organize and implement this mass murder? And second, why, later, did so few of the perpetrators feel really guilty? Segev’s book offers no answer. Perhaps there is none.

The book, “Soldiers of Evil,” makes for suspenseful and exciting reading. In the end, however, it leaves behind a somewhat clueless reader, one to whom the individual fates of the concentration camp commandants have been presented but to whom nothing has been said about what follows therefrom for the present and the future. In his analysis, the author avoids the question of who the Germans are and to what extent they have been formed and marked by their past. But perhaps no answer is an answer after all.

Translated from the German by Jack Miles.