The Killing Compartments by Abram de Swann

The hope that Auschwitz would act as a warning to future generations has been dashed by the growing list of subsequent atrocities. Mass murders of local Christians, Yazidis and fellow Muslims, including the Iraqi air cadets whose bodies were unearthed last week, by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) are only the latest in a terrifying roll-call of civilian massacres, including in Rwanda, Bosnia and Communist China. Instead of "never again", we have "again and again".

These events raise the question: who could possibly be a genocidal killer? The standard answer is: you or me. Put into an extreme situation, given orders and put under pressure from peers, most of us could end up doing the unthinkable. This consensus dates most notably from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem , an account of the 1961 trial of "Jew hunter" Adolf Eichmann that emphasised his apparent normality.

Experiments by Stanley Milgram - participants were told to administer electric shocks in response to mistakes by "learners" - bolstered the view that anyone could be a killer. "Ordinary people," concluded the US psychologist, could be "agents in a terrible destructive process." The argument was apparently confirmed by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men , which described how run-of-the-mill Hamburg police unit 101 killed thousands of Jews in eastern Europe.

Abram de Swaan, a University of Amsterdam professor emeritus of sociology, tackles this consensus head on. In The Killing Compartments, he argues that reducing mass murderers to "ordinary men" ignores real life's complexity. He dismisses Arendt, saying Eichmann was an enthusiastic killer who often exceeded his quotas. He warns that trial evidence - as with Eichmann - can be misleading because defendants play down their personal responsibilities and insist they were following orders.

De Swaan argues many influences are at work - including the nature of the regime organising the killing and historical context. He refers to Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, which examined the same evidence as Browning and came to a different view: that Battalion 101 was composed not of "ordinary men" but more specifically "ordinary Germans" - people shaped by anti-Semitism, first world war defeat and the dislocation of the 1920s.

De Swann usefully puts mass murders into four categories: the "conquerors' frenzy", when the killers are intoxicated by victory (like the Nazis in 1941-2, when they launched the Holocaust); the "losers' triumph", when the killers, sensing military defeat, desperately redouble their attacks (the Nazis in 1944-45). Then there is the "rule of terror" (Stalinist Russia and early Communist China); and fourth, the "megapogrom", the wild pursuit of victims, (the expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe in 1944-46).

De Swann says that, in the first three categories, the modern state plays a big role in fomenting and organising death. It divides victims from killers through propaganda, persecution and, sometimes, deportation. These are the "killing compartments" of the title.

He ably marshals historical narratives from colonial genocides, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But there is the odd error. He writes, for example, that the Holocaust mainly took place deep in eastern Europe, far from Germany. But Auschwitz lay in former Polish territory incorporated into the Reich.

De Swaan delves deep into psychology, arguing that researchers should ask why some people and not others joined in with mass murders. Of the 500 men recruited for Battalion 101, 12 opted out: the rest divided into the reluctant, the neutral and the bloodthirsty. Could the difference be upbringing? The author stops at a tantalising point: the evidence on the psychological make-up of mass killers is elusive.

So, the book ends with a question rather than an answer. It is nonetheless a fascinating critique of current thinking on genocide. Some readers may be comforted to learn that killers are not simply ordinary men. But others may be dissatisfied by de Swann's failure to offer a clear alternative. Either way, recent atrocities suggest that we are no closer to stopping genocide than in 1945.

The writer is the FT's Berlin correspondent

The Killing Compartments by Abram de Swaan, Yale (£25/$35)

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