Genocide was executed with ordinary, untrained, interchangeable personnel
Evidence
The German perpetrator was not a special kind of German… We know that the very nature of administrative planning, of the jurisdictional structure and of the budgetary system precluded the special selection and special training of personnel. Any member of the Order Police could be a guard at a ghetto or on a train. Every lawyer in the Reich Security Main Office was presumed to be suitable for leadership in the mobile killing units; every finance expert to the Economic-Administrative Main Office was considered a natural choice for service in a death camp. In other words, all necessary operations were accomplished with whatever personnel were at hand. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 92
Categorization
- XREF: Key mechanism for how the Holocaust is the product of ordinary modern bureaucratic staffing rather than a specialized killing class. — connects to: Ordinary people can commit extreme brutality under the right circumstances — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 1
Related
- Ordinary, unselected Germans carried out mass killing when asked (similarity 0.81)
- Genocide is mostly committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic contexts (similarity 0.80)
- Most genocide is committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic roles, not psychopaths. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Ordinary people can commit extreme brutality under the right circumstances
#expands(0.92) — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 1