Latest / New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Edward B. Westermann, "Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany" (Cornell UP, 2021)
The title of Edward Westermann's new book, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Cornell University Press, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021), suggests that it is about the use of alcohol by perpetrators of the Holocaust. And it is. Westermann documents extensively how alcohol served to bind perpetrators together and to help them celebrate, conduct and perhaps forget mass murder. The amount of alcohol consumed as part of the German war is astonishing.
But Westermann's book is broader than its title suggests. At the heart of…
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