Ordinary, unselected Germans carried out mass killing when asked
Evidence
Goldhagen marshaled quite a bit of evidence to bolster these arguments, but one fact he emphasized more than others is that many of the police bat talions and other groups of people that carried out most of the face-to-face killing in eastern Europe were not made up of men and women who were selected in any careful way for their jobs. They were not assigned their duties because they were known to be especially anti-Semitic, or especially vicious, or especially obedient. They were simply random Germans who happened to be assigned tasks like rounding up all the Jews in a town and shooting them or burning them alive. As Goldhagen (correctly) notes, these people gener ally carried out these assignments when asked to do so. Why? According to Goldhagen, they did so because they were Germans, and the vast majority of Germans at the time subscribed to eliminationist anti-Semitism. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 315
Categorization
- XREF: Bridges to ch5’s bureaucratic-middlemen shift and the situational-deference argument from the same volume, where obedience rather than coercion drove murder — connects to: Situational deference to authority, not coercion, drives obedience to mass-murder regimes — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 46; Ordinary people become destructive agents through duty, not hostility — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 606; Ordinary people administering shocks showed extreme, characteristic distress — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 593 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Mass murder expanded beyond elite cadres to ordinary soldiers
#expands(0.95) - The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing
#expands(0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520 - Ordinary bureaucratic indifference, not hatred, enabled mass murder
#qualifies(0.78)