The 1960s shifted Holocaust explanation from individual psychology to group social psychology

Evidence

In the early 1960s the search for understanding the Holocaust perpetrators turned from explanations focused on the psychological analysis of individ­ ual perpetrators and the exceptionalism of German history to the socialpsychological analysis of group behavior. The impetus for this change derived, in my opinion, from three major events. First, in 1961, Raul Hilberg published his monumental study, The Destruction of the European Jews, which portrayed the Nazi Final Solution as essentially an administrative and bureaucratic pro­ cess. Hilberg argued that the perpetrators “were not different in their moral makeup from the rest of the population. The German perpetrator was not a special kind of German.” Rather, the perpetrators represented “a remarkable cross-section of the German population,” and the machinery of destruction “was structurally no different from organized German society as a whole.” — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 42

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Goldhagen’s Holocaust study is fundamentally a social-psychological analysis — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 308; Holocaust social psychology requires both ideological attraction and conformity obedience — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 851; Early Holocaust research blamed individual authoritarian personalities, not social processes — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 40 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Early Holocaust research blamed individual authoritarian personalities, not social processes #corroborates (0.88) — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 40
• Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological #expands (0.83) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 89
• Holocaust social psychology requires both ideological attraction and conformity obedience #expands (0.82) — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 851
• Group Experiment was the first penetrating postwar analysis of Germans’ inability to mourn #exemplifies (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2037
• Nazi antisemitism derived from existing German social representations #expands (0.76)