Why did ordinary people participate in the Holocaust? The perpetrators were not, for the most part, sadists or obvious fanatics. Most of them returned to normal life after the war. The question of what psychological and social mechanisms allowed people to participate in mass murder is one of the most studied problems in the history of the genocide, and the answers are still contested.
The situational argument
Christopher Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, published in Ordinary Men in 1992, remains the most detailed examination of how ordinary perpetrators came to kill. Browning found that the men of the battalion, middle-aged Hamburg policemen with no special ideological selection, were given the opportunity to opt out of shooting operations and that very few took it. He identified the principal mechanisms as conformity to peer group pressure, incremental normalisation (each step made the next easier), deference to authority, and careerism. Fear of punishment for refusal played a minimal role: there is no documented case of a German being executed for refusing to participate in shootings.
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale in the 1960s provided a laboratory model for what Browning observed in the field. Milgram found that around 65 per cent of ordinary American subjects, with no special selection for aggression or ideology, would deliver apparently lethal electric shocks to another person when instructed to do so by an authority figure. The institutional context, the presence of authority, and the incremental nature of the escalation were sufficient to override normal inhibitions against harming others.
The ideological argument
Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), challenged Browning’s situational emphasis directly. Goldhagen argued that eliminationist antisemitism, the belief that Jews were a mortal threat who deserved to be destroyed, was so deeply embedded in German culture by the time of the Holocaust that ideological conviction, rather than situational pressure, was the primary driver of participation. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, on Goldhagen’s reading, were not reluctant conformists but willing killers who shared the genocidal objective.
The academic reception of Goldhagen’s thesis was largely hostile, primarily because his claim of a uniquely German eliminationist antisemitism sits uneasily with the evidence of mass participation by non-German auxiliaries across occupied Europe. Latvians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Romanians participated in mass killings on a scale that cannot be explained by specifically German cultural formation. But Goldhagen’s insistence that ideology mattered, and that the perpetrators’ beliefs should not be dissolved entirely into situational factors, retains force.
What the evidence supports
The most credible assessment is that both situational and dispositional factors contributed, in different proportions for different individuals and in different contexts. For the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen, operating in the east with explicit ideological framing, antisemitic conviction was probably a more significant driver. For the railway clerks who allocated deportation trains, bureaucratic routine and institutional hierarchy probably mattered more than personal ideology. For the guards of Reserve Police Battalion 101, Browning’s situational mechanisms seem to fit the documentary record better than Goldhagen’s ideological argument, though the two are not mutually exclusive.
James Waller’s synthesis, in Becoming Evil (2002), identifies four factors: the cultural belief systems that defined Jews as outside the moral community; the psychological mechanisms of us-versus-them thinking; the social context of authority, conformity, and diffusion of responsibility; and the specific situational triggers of the killing operations themselves. No single factor is sufficient. The Holocaust required the conjunction of ideology, institution, and situation, and removing any one of them would have made the genocide less likely, though not impossible.
See also
Sources
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, 1996
- Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Harper and Row, 1974
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, Oxford University Press, 2002
- Harald Welzer, Soldiers: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, S. Fischer Verlag, 2011