Why Ordinary Men Kill ? The Case of the Shoah Perpetrators

Conference

Published on

27 October 2014

Updated on

19 June 2017

Colloquia

The Archaeology of Violence

International colloquium organized by Inrap and the Museum of Louvre-Lens.
October 2, 3 and 4, 2104 at La Scène du Louvre-Lens

The archaeology of violence: wartime violence, mass violence
by Christopher Browning, university North Carolina

This paper will briefly outline five different types of Shoah perpetrators--ideologues or "true believers," experts and technicians, managers and functionaries, party activists, and face-to-face killers. It will then examine in greater detail how social-psychological insights are useful to the historian in attempting to understand the self-understanding and motivation of the face-to-face killers.

Christopher R. Browning was the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until his recent retirement. He is the author eight books on the history of the Holocaust, including The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, Ordinary Men, The Origins of the Final Solution, and Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp.

Bibliography :

James Waller, "Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing"
Harald Welzer, "Taeter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmoerder warden"
Gerhard Paul, ed., "Die Taeter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normalen Deutsche?"
Daniel Goldhagen, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust"