This is the story of the people who caused, carried out, experienced, survived and witnessed the Holocaust. Focusing on the people who fell into the three categories of the title, it reveals who they were, what they did or did not do, and what was done to them. In the factual narrative which reads like a novel, the author relates individual stories, appalling events and terrible ironies. Raul Hilberg has also written "The Destruction of the European Jews".