Drunk on Genocide is an important and terrifying book that tackles a persistent question in the study of the Holocaust and World War II: how was it possible that the Germans killed so many people and behaved so brutally in the Soviet territory they invaded and occupied? Edward Westermann quickly dispenses with the notion that alcohol was the primary cause of violence. In fact, he acknowledges it was not even a sufficient condition: Nazi Germans carried out many massacres sober, too. But he shows that alcohol was a powerful and frequent accessory to violence: alcohol lubricated and rewarded the perpetrators of atrocity; it was central to how they established camaraderie, performed masculinity, enjoyed sexual predation, and revelled in murder. Focusing on these roles of alcohol reveals the devastating insight captured in Westermann's title: the SS and police killers were drunk above all on their own power, intoxicated by the thrill of dominance over other people.

Westermann's carefully researched book models how to present horrific material without flinching, yet with respect to the victims, and also the readers. Quoting Vasilii Grossman: “Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead” (207), Westermann reminds readers of the responsibility to look and shows that looking need not constitute voyeurism. The book includes only a few photographs and none of victims: no naked women or mass graves. Instead, the images Westermann shares depict uniformed Germans grinning, singing, and drinking. They illustrate the use of alcohol for celebration by men who enjoyed parties, banquets, festivals, and feasts before, during, and while humiliating and killing other people. Westermann draws on the work of Miriam Schulz and the Yiddish khurbn-shprakh, language or vocabulary of destruction, to describe SS and police murderers who, as Jews observed, behaved like they were at a wedding.

One of the many strengths of the book is Westermann's skillful integration of the Holocaust and the war. His focus is the SS and police, but an extensive chapter on the Wehrmacht shows its members were capable of the same brutality. Indeed, some of the book's most shocking examples appear in that chapter. Still, deliberate socialization and repeated group involvement in killing intensified the culture of violence within SS and police circles, Westermann maintains. Also notable is Westermann's focus on sexuality. He does something that remains unusual, which is to incorporate scholarship by women and about gender into a study of war. Toxic masculinity, performance, and spectacle are key concepts here. Paying attention to the ubiquity of rape and humiliation of women and the killers’ pursuit of sexual gratification allows Westermann to explode the tenacious myth of the Nazis as cool, detached machines of destruction.

Drunk on Genocide is a relentless book that nonetheless contains surprises. For instance, the presence in Westermann's account of religion, both Judaism and Christianity, is remarkable. Westermann's descriptions of Jewish communal life, drawn from Jewish sources, counter the tendency in Holocaust history to reproduce erasure of Jews, and offer glimpses of people who sought to express solidarity and find meaning against the most crushing odds. The appearances of Christianity remind readers that the killers, too, were human beings, supported by their families and traditions. A case in point is the men in Lithuania who went straight from massacring Jews to Sunday morning mass (164).

Westermann's innovative study opens many questions to consider. For instance, he depicts Germany's East as a “zone of exception,” but a reader is left wondering what happened elsewhere. Did men accustomed to behaving with absolute impunity transform into loving husbands when they returned to their wives and families? It seems unlikely. Another line of inquiry involves the obvious double standard. Alcohol was prized, yet Germans derided Slavs, particularly Russians, as drunks. Wehrmacht officers and soldiers were punished for drunkenness, and within Germany, alcoholism could be grounds for sterilization. This duality is comparable to Nazi policy toward intimacy between men: castigated under Paragraph 175, it was promoted in the form of homoeroticism and allowed as sexual assault on marginalized men. Hypocrisy was built into a system of control over people and their bodies. What was pleasure for some was punished in others, and that dichotomy added to the euphoria of those on top. Anyone who studies violence should read this book.