The purpose of this research is to examine theories of how and why the Holocaust, or the mass murder of the civilian population of Jews (about six million) and non-Jewish civilians targeted for extinction by the Nazi regime (perhaps another six million) could have been perpetrated and supported by ordinary human beings as much as by the official state apparatus of programmatic evil. The plan of the research will be to set forth the explanations offered by Christopher R. Browning in Ordinary Men and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Ordinary Men and Hitler's Willing Executioners, respectively, and then to discuss which of the arguments make the most compelling case and whether and to what extent each argument suggests ways of interpreting the human condition and the prospect of future genocides.
As both Browning and Goldhagen argue, and as the evidence of the Holocaust Museum in the U.S. makes clear, the primary target of the Nazi regime was European Jewry. Suppression of the Jews became a primary instrument of policy early in the regime, and their eradication a primary policy focus during the war. In retrospect, the mass murder of several million European Jews by the Nazis in World War II emerges as a fait accompli--something that was part and parcel of Hitler's plan from the moment he rose to power in Germany. While the intent of the Nazis can be seen as murderous from the beginning of the Nazi regime, a clear idea of the way the murder would be carried out was the result of a series of administrative decisions within the German ideological bureaucracy that were implemented with the collaboration of millions of Germans who had highly variable degrees of ideological commitment to Nazism. These were the "ordinary" citizens of Germany.
A complex issue that must be considered as informing the whole process of policy making and policy implementation is the history of antisemitism in Europe, before, during, and after World War II. For Brownin...