Had been looking forward to reading this book. Sadly it wasn’t for me. It just lacked a good plot to get you excited and wanting more. It was very slow paced and never picked up

Westermann has clearly addressed an aspect of the Holocaust that is not frequently discussed in the literature. That is not easy to do in a topic as thoroughly covered as this. As such, this book makes an important contribution to studies of the topic. And it has certainly been extensively researched and presented here. Kudos in that regard.

There are clearly important lessons to be learned and conclusions to be drawn from this topic. I appreciated the book in that regard. However, even if not unusually long, this book could have been far shorter and still been equally effective. At times this book felt almost voyeuristic. Stories - or at least similar ones from case to case - became rather unneccesary and repetitive.

Excellent - careful, non-sensational scholarship that takes what might seem a similar approach to Norman Ohler's more problematic claim, but instead studies the role of alcohol in Nazi Germany in its several roles, never allowing the easy dodge that it enabled or explained atrocity.

This book put into contexts about how ordinary people can be transformed into mass murderers. Mr.Westermann argues that extreme alcohol use was a key component of that transformation. Now obliviously I don't assume killers were less culpable because they were drunk but I feel like he sometimes makes sweeping statements that are not adequately backed with data, thus taking me out of the book personally.

Essential reading for aficionados of the grimmer dimensions of human nature: a meticulously erudite and finely detailed chronicle of the varied roles alcohol consumption took throughout the Holocaust among perpetrators of staggering atrocities and cruelties. A difficult but important work.

I've read quite a few books about the rise of Nazism and the atrocities of WWII, but this is definitely a take I hadn't heard before! Well researched and well written.

Even for someone who spends a lot of time reading books about the atrocities of WWII, this was still a difficult book to get through, emotionally speaking. There were times when I had to close my eyes for a moment and re-center myself. The author does not hold back when it comes to giving the straight facts about what happened to people, and the torture they suffered at the hands of their tormentors.

This is one of those uncomfortable to read and yet important books. Not only because it deals with the darker side of humanity that many of us would rather pretend doesn't exist, but because it deals with other issues as well, such as alcohol abuse. The connections the author makes between comradeship, group hypermasculinity and both literal and metaphrical intoxication are interesting. As much as one can say they enjoyed a book of this nature, I suppose I did. I learned a lot of things that are valuable to my own research and personal knowledge.

I would recommend this book to others looking to know more than just what is breezed over in the history books and popular historical accounts.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley. All opinions are my own

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

While it was well-written and not a particularly long book, "Drunk on Genocide" was difficult at times to read and did take me a relatively long time to finish. This is, of course, because of the difficult subject matter included within its pages. As a reader of WWII history, I have read a decent number of books about the Holocaust and the behaviour of its participants, of both Germans and their allies. But a great deal of this book I had not found detailed in other books on the Holocaust, in particular the violations and sexual abuse that German personnel (soldiers, guards, police, etc) incurred upon their victims, and the sadistic pleasure they took in torturing their victims before killing them, often while under the influence of alcohol. This makes the book, while important and necessary, one that I frequently had to put down, take a breather and read something else.

I did appreciate the author's pointing out that alcohol, while a big part of the Final Solution invoked by the Nazis, was not the primary cause of the attempted annihilation of the Jews. In the conclusion, Westermann notes "alcohol was not the cause of the atrocious behaviors of the perpetrators, but merely a pleasurable accessory for inducing disinhibition, for facilitating, celebrating, and in some cases coping with the expanded boundaries of permissible behavior and the power over life and death enjoyed by the killers", which is a solid summation of the book's primary thesis.

Westermann lays out how alcohol was involved in the daily lives of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and how killing ordinary civilians too often became a macabre celebration/party, with music, entertainment, food, and the terrible combination of alcohol and male bonding over the slaughter of innocents.

Westermann also goes out of his way to point out that Blitzed, a recent book on connections between the German people and the Holocaust, in a lot of ways leaves itself open to being used as an argument that the perpetrators did not know what they were doing; Westermann explicitly lays out that leaving this door open is dangerous as it potentially allows blame to be laid upon the substance and not focused on the intent of the killers, as it should be.

I will be searching out additional books by Westermann, as I appreciated his perspectives in this book.

This is not an easy book to read but it is an important one for any reader interested in learning more about how ordinary people can be transformed into mass murderers. The author argues that extreme alcohol use was a key component of that transformation. The author demonstrates how Nazi killing units transformed mass murder, torture and rape into toxic-masculine bonding parties. While the author's references are many, he sometimes makes sweeping statements that are not adequately backed with data.

A good reference book? Yes. But readers shouldn't assume killers were less culpable because they were drunk

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