Holocaust perpetrators were ordinary citizens acting without personal anti-Jewish resentment.

Evidence

It is tremendously difficult to square with the one-dimensional world view the fact that in the course of Hitler’s war against the Jews many declared antisemites stoutly refused to cooperate with the perpetrators of the Holocaust; and that, on the other hand, the ranks of the executors were full of law-abiding citizens and disciplined functionaries who happened to be free of any peculiar resentment against the Jews as such and in particular bore no grudge whatsoever against the concrete Jews they shot or gassed … It is similarly hard to come to grips with the fact that ‘the deportation of the Jews’ (as the annihilation of European Jewry was officially defined) derived its meaning in Nazi thinking from the overall, audacious plan of wholesale Umsiedlung – the vision of a European continent in which well-nigh everyone would be transported from their present, contingent site to the place where reason orders them to be13 (and that could entail nothingness; as the Holocaust progressed, even Jewish graveyards were proclaimed out of order and replaced with chimney smoke). Or to accept that the extermination of the Jews was conceived in the framework of a total ‘cleansing operation’ (which also included people who were regarded as mentally deficient, physically handicapped, ideologically deviant and sexually unorthodox) by a state powerful enough, and sufficiently protected and immune from all opposition, to afford such total plans and to execute them without fear of effective dissent. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 682

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s toolkit: bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion, and the banality-of-evil mechanism central to later Holocaust/Islamophobia readings. — connects to: The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 236; Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 89; Organized killers, not popular resentment, are the operative cause of anti-Jewish violence. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 116 (+2 more)

Related

• Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. (similarity 0.88)
• The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them (similarity 0.87)
• Organized killers, not popular resentment, are the operative cause of anti-Jewish violence. (similarity 0.85)
• Nazi ideology encompassed antisemitic views that blamed Germans rather than Jews (similarity 0.82)
• Intense Nazi indoctrination failed to override conventional, nonracial loyalties (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.81)
• Every ingredient enabling the Holocaust was normal for modern civilization (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust’s methods emerged from expert judgments on feasibility, not from Hitler’s orders. (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitism explains victim selection, not the crime’s nature (similarity 0.80)
• Ordinary Germans approved state exclusion while avoiding personal persecution (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust fused antisemitism with social and political mechanisms of an entirely different character. (similarity 0.80)
• Holocaust death rates tracked Nazi control, not local antisemitism levels. (similarity 0.80)
• Popular hatred was insufficient to drive the Holocaust (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 236
• Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 89
• Organized killers, not popular resentment, are the operative cause of anti-Jewish violence. #expands (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 116
• The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 522