Historiography and the Perpetrators of the Holocaust

Perpetrators of the Holocaust: a Historiography

“…The 'Wehrmacht' exhibition in particular sparked off an unprecedented public response because it challenged a collective memory and 'one of the founding myths of the German Federal Republicthe legend of a "decent" army that had steered clear of atrocities perpetrated by the SS.' 56 Whilst the Wehrmacht exhibition was largely concerned with setting the record straight, Goldhagen's aim was to explain the motivation of 'ordinary' killers. Like…”

“…90 Finally, the call by some historians for multi-causal interpretations based on multi-disciplinary approaches has only been partially attempted. However, social psychological explanations which concentrate on group dynamics (but are often ahistorical -i.e., they neglect specific historical conditions and cultural factors, including ideology -and have a tendency to down-play the responsibility of perpetrators) can provide essential additions to historical attempts to find answers to why normal people became mass murderers under Nazism.…”

“Ordinary Men,” Extraordinary Circumstances: Historians, Social Psychology, and the Holocaust

“…This view of perpetrator behavior, based on Milgram's simple question “why do people obey?,” did not find an immediate audience among historians, partly because work on social, psychological, or cultural explanations for the Holocaust were largely absent in the 1960s and 1970s and historians were not in general receptive to psychological explanations for historical events (Matthäus, , pp. 206–207).…”

“…Matthäus shows that political education material supplied for police training contained a central trope of Jewish exclusion and by the war, the idea of rooting out the Jew. One educational publication in December 1941 carried the slogan “A Goal of the War—a Jew‐free Europe.” Once the reserve policemen were engaged in killing, they had few reservations because of the disposition instilled through “anti‐Semitic impressions and a collective image of the enemy.” Matthäus concludes that although the situation was an exceptional one, mass murder became part of a daily service routine informed by a shared ideology in which individual motivation cannot easily be determined (Matthäus, , )…”

‘Soul Destroyers’: Soviet Reporting of Nazi Genocide and its Perpetrators at the Krasnodar and Khar′kov Trials

“…At the same time, the trial's emphasis on Nazi rule as a conspiracy meant that the actual trigger pullers' individual guilt ‘evaporated altogether’. Furthermore, while the murder of the Jews served as important evidence at the trial, Donald Bloxham has argued that as a framework for understanding the Holocaust specifically, Nuremberg was misleading, because ‘crimes against the Jews were subsumed within the general Nazi policies of repression and persecution’. …”