In a study that compares the major attempts at genocide in world history, Robert Melson creates a sophisticated framework that links genocide to revolution and war. He focuses on the plights of Jews after the fall of Imperial Germany and of Armenians after the fall of the Ottoman as well as attempted genocides in the Soviet Union and Cambodia. He argues that genocide often is the end result of a complex process that starts when revolutionaries smash an old regime and, in its wake, try to construct a society that is pure according to ideological standards.

Murder Most Merciful is a collection of insightful essays that consider Sigi Ziering's play, The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff. In the play, Ziering tells the story of a loving father and his decision during the Holocaust to take the life of his beloved daughter to avoid her deportation. Scholars who have thought long and hard about the ethical implications of the Holocaust continue to grapple with the poignant questions Ziering raised. Commentary from the book's diverse contributors, including Holocaust survivors, scholars, rabbis, philosophers, and historians, results in an insightful and provocative moral and theological exchange. Murder Most Merciful will stimulate further debate on the crucial issues of martyrdom, euthanasia, and the guilt of the innocent. Ultimately, the judgment of Herbert Bierhoff is for the reader to make. The book appears in the Studies in the Shoah series as volume 28.

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Jews in Imperial Germany had survived as ethnic and religious minorities until they suffered mass destruction when the two old regimes were engulfed by revolution and war. Was there a connection between revolution and genocide in those two instances, and is there a relationship between revolution and genocide in general? In this detailed comparative history, Robert Melson elaborates a distinctive conceptual framework that links genocide to revolution and war. He suggests that some instances of genocide are products of a complex process started by the collapse of old regimes and carried forward by revolutionaries who wish to reconstruct society according to new ideological visions. The Young Turks and the Nazis, able to come to power after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Germany, were motivated by Pan-Turkism, on the one hand, and racialist antisemitism, on the other. Desiring to create a Turkish empire free of Armenians and a Third Reich empty of Jews, the two revolutionary movements proceeded to commit genocide on a wide scale. Melson discusses the destruction of the Kulaks in the Soviet Union and the "autogenocide" in Cambodia as comparable situations where total domestic genocide followed on the heels of the Russian and Cambodian revolutions. Moreover, he warns that sweeping changes such as those occurring in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe can also be precursors to massive violence, including genocide.