Jewish Essay Perpetrators of the Holocaust

How could ‘ordinary men’ become genocidal killers in the Holocaust?
Memories of the Holocaust are littered with acts of such inhumane cruelty and barbarity that they are almost unbelievable, Hermann Patschmann’s memories are no different.
“One time the German authorities were short of SS matrons, so they recruited them by force from the factories without even giving them enough time to inform their families. They were taken to the camp where they were divided into groups of 50. One day they were put to the test. An internee, chosen at random, was brought before them and they were told – all 50 of them – to hit her. I remember that out of all of them, only three women asked the reason why, and only one woman refused to do it, which caused her to be thrown into prison herself. All the others quickly got into the swing of things as if they had been warming up all their lives to do it.”
How could such acts be committed? Were these people distinctly different to us? If not, how could ‘ordinary men’ and women become genocidal killers in the Holocaust? Two explanations have been put forward to explain how perpetrators were able to complete the acts of the Holocaust. The first argument has been that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were ideological killers. That is to say that the perpetrators were different to other people from different nations at the time and from people today. They were able to carry out genocidal acts against the Jews because of their intense anti-Semitism. This argument is put forward most famously by Daniel Goldhagen. The second argument posits that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not fundamentally different to any human being, that is to say any human is capable of carrying out genocidal acts. This argument does acknowledge the role of anti-Semitism and dehumanisation of the victims in affecting perpetrators actions during the Holocaust. However there were many situational and social psychological forces acting upon the perpetrators of

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