Mass murder does not require extreme, demonic emotions in its perpetrators

Evidence

The point to remember is that for every villain of Goldhagen’s book, for every German and non-German who killed his victims with pleasure and enthusiasm, there were dozens and hundreds of Germans and non-Germans who contributed to the mass murder no less effectively without feeling either way about their victims and about the nature of the actions involved. And the point is that, while we know quite well that prejudice threatens humanity, and we even know a little about how to fight and constrain the ill-intentions of the people tainted with prejudice, we know next to nothing about how to stave off the threat of a murder which masquerades as a routine and unemotional function of orderly society. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 693 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Goldhagen’s emphasis on a peculiarly German eliminationist anti-Semitism as the necessary and sufficient explanation for the behavior of German Holo­ caust perpetrators has been questioned on a number of grounds other than the ones emphasized in this chapter. Some have challenged the assertion that anti-Semitism in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century was any more virulent than it was in other European countries (Wehler, 1998). Others have pointed out that much of the persecution, killing, and other violent activity involving face-to-face contact with Holocaust victims was actually delegated to non-Germans (Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, etc.). Although these accomplices of the Nazis were not burdened by a legacy of German eliminationist anti-Semitism, they were by all accounts not distinguished by a lack of brutality in the execution of their duties (Aschheim, 1996; Finkelstein & Birn, 1998). Still another set of critics have cited other episodes of geno­ cide in which behaviors that were arguably as brutal as those engaged in by German Holocaust perpetrators were carried out by people who clearly did not have long-standing or deeply ingrained negative (let alone eliminationist) attitudes toward their victims (Aschheim, 1996; Browning, 1998; see also Smith, 1998). — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 332 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass killing requires ideology to overcome taboos against killing — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 18; Eichmann’s mass-murder participation was careerist, not hate-driven.; Perpetrators performed mass killing with zealous enthusiasm, as if it were their vocation — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 635 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Mass murder is accomplished mostly by indifferent functionaries, not sadists #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 693
• Ordinary bureaucratic indifference, not hatred, enabled mass murder #corroborates (0.94)
• Brutal genocide perpetrators need not hold longstanding eliminationist attitudes toward victims #corroborates (0.92) — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 332