Christopher P.

Davey
Holocaust and Genocide
Bullets and Burdens: Radicalization of the Holocaust
During August of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, inspected his first and last
Einsatzgruppen shooting. Standing near enough to the pit and the firing squad to observe the
action, Himmler became very uncomfortable, very quickly. Raul Hilberg tells us that, ‘As
the firing squad started, Himmler, was even more nervous. During every volley he looked to
the ground. When two women could not die, Himmler yelled to the police sergeant not to
torture them.’1 This moment in the Holocaust is pointed to by many historians, as the pivotal
moment when alternative means, most notably gassing, were seriously considered for the
Final Solution.2 The psychological toll of shooting victims face-to-face or even en mass, as
observed by Himmler and other commanding officers, caused them to rethink the
effectiveness of this method of killing Soviet Jews.3 However, taking this moment as a
seminal one in the progress of the Holocaust overlooks the importance of the process
underway amongst the killers themselves. When Himmler made that fateful trip to oversee
the Einsatzgruppen in Minsk, their commander, Erich Von dem Bach berated him saying,
‘Look at the eyes of the men of this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are. These men are
finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either
neurotics or savages!’4 From the evidence of how the shootings were carried out and how
they continued even after this August, 1941 incident, it is clear that Von dem Bach’s men
were becoming both neurotic and savage.
Christopher Browning, in his study of the Reserve Police Battalion 101, stated that,
‘Once the killing began (…) the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the
horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became
progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these
men’s’ behaviour.’5 The brutalization process of these reservists and members of the
Einsatzgruppen alike eased them in professional killing. Attempting to address this
deficiency in Holocaust literature, this paper will argue that the process described by
Browning and experienced by the “ordinary men” of the German police, applies generally to
those who standing in front of their victims, pulled the trigger, making this part of the
1
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, vol. 3 (London: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 342.
2
Hilberg, 344.
3
Christopher Browning, Fateful Months: Essay on the Emergence of the Final Solution (London:
Holmes & Meier, 1985), 29. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1997), 156. Although other reasons here cited here by Browning included the
element of secrecy of the killings and concealing evidence, and the overall effectiveness, the psychological
trauma, dramatically observed here by Himmler was been foremost in the literature.
4
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, 1080.
5
Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 161.

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Holocaust and Genocide
Holocaust a intricate blend of bullets and burdens. Reassessing the evidence of
Einsatzgruppen and police crimes through the lens of situational social psychology it will be
argued that these men, although suffering psychologically, were gradualizaed into some of
the most effective personnel of the Nazi total war machine.
Becoming Killers
Recent research has argued that the shootings performed by the Einsatzgruppen and others
are responsible for more than the 1.5 million deaths they are traditionally attributed with.6
The implication of this cold number, and its possible increase, is that for every Jew killed
there was a bullet and perpetrator. How did these drafted SS and police men become such
participants? Those assigned with this duty were past their prime, middle-aged, educated,
and often middle-class.7 Hilberg describes the officers of such groups as ‘intellectuals. By
and large, they were in their thirties, and undoubtedly they wanted a certain measure of
power, fame, and success (…). They brought to their new task all the skills and training that
they were capable of contributing. These men, in short, became efficient killers.’ 8 The
professionalism that was part of these men’s lives leading up to the war became part of their
participation.
Engineered Reinhard Heydrich, the Einsatzgruppen deployment and the execution of
their role was an integral part of the creating the surroundings for these men to become
killers. Conflicting evidence from during the war and the post-war Einsatzgruppen trials
does not leave a clear statement on the progress of orders from killing political enemies to the
wholesale destruction of Jewish men, women and children.9 Heydrich gave speeches and
various orders to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen which resulted in a varied
interpretation from the systematic clearing out of Jews from the Baltics by Einsatzkommando
3, led by Karl Jäger to the hesitant killing under Martin Sandberger, where mostly only the
male Jews were targeted.10 The intense massacre at Babi Yar, Ukraine in September of 1941
and the detailed reporting show that gradually the killing was expanded to every Jew the

6
Roger Boyes, ‘Holocaust toll with rise even higher, says priest on the trial of Nazi mass-killers,’ The
Times, 23 May 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6346012.ece [accessed 20
May 2010].
7
Browning, Ordinary Men, 1.
8
Hilberg, 288.
9
Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (London: Hodder Education, 2000), 117-118.
10
Browning, Fateful Months, 19.

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Einsatzgruppen came into contact with.11 Quantitative evidence, however, does not
sufficiently explain why these men became killers.
Daniel Goldhagen, in his landmark work Hitler’s Willing Executioners, states that
while there are various explanations for why ordinary Germans became overtly complicit in
the Holocaust, one factor stands out above all, ‘The perpetrators, “ordinary Germans,” were
animated by anti-Semitism, by a particular type of anti-Semitism that led them to conclude
that the Jews ought to die.’12 This type of anti-Semitism, ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’, was
the ‘most significant and indispensable source of the perpetrators’ actions and must be at the
centre of any explanation of them.’13 While his argument to place perpetrators back into the
light of Holocaust studies is shared by this paper, Goldhagen’s priority of an anti-Semitism
approach alienates human nature from the German perpetrators.14 The sentiment that anti-
Semitic German culture predisposed many if not all Germans to be capable of being “willing
executioners” overlooks the complicated nature by which anyone could descend into
becoming a killer, even in the Holocaust, and it also plays down the total state within which
Germans lived and worked.15 Conversely, Browning emphases the group context and
common human traits, ‘Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts
tremendous pressures on behaviour and sets moral norms. If the Reserve Police Battalion
101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?’16 Whilst
anti-Semitism certainly played a role in bringing these men to their membership within the
SS and their willingness to continue their assignments in the East, it cannot overshadow the
psychological processes that turned these ordinary men into professional killers.
The format of Einsatzgruppen operations also helps explain how these men became
faced with repetitive, daily killing. Shooting operations followed a standard procedure.17
Victims were rounded up and brought to anti-tank ditches, or were forced to dig mass graves
themselves.18 Despite problems of keeping civilians and Wehrmacht personnel away from
the actions and thereby concealing the evidence, the main technical problem of the actions

11
‘Kiev and Babi Yar,’ Holocaust Encyclopaedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?
ModuleId=10005421, [accessed 21 May 2010]. Einstazgruppen, police and auxiliary units killed 33,771 Jews
over the space of two days. Over the course of the Holocaust over 100,000 Babi Yar Jews were murdered in
this manner in successive sweeps.
12
Goldhagen, 14.
13
Ibid..
14
Ibid., 6.
15
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People turn Evil (St. Ives: Random House, 2007),
287-288.
16
Browning, Ordinary Men, 187.
17
Hilberg, 328.
18
Ibid..

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Holocaust and Genocide
was the killing method itself.19 Depending on the commanding officer and the execution
training from an SS doctor, the Einsatzgruppen and other shooters were instructed in two
ways of execution. Genickschusspezialisten, or the neck shooting technique, if completed as
intended resulted in a clean, quick death for the victim, if not it would result in a bloody mess
and the need for repeated shots.20 Ölsardinenmanier, or the sardine method, favoured by
commanders like Otto Ohlendorf, involved victims laying down and being sprayed with
machine gun fire. Ohlendorf explained why this method was used as opposed to the neck
shooting, ‘In the Einsatzgruppe D the mass executions took place regularly in the form of
shooting by details. The shooting by individuals was forbidden (…), so that the men who
were to perform the executions were not faced with the task of making personal decisions.’ 21
His preference apparently was to save his men from the strain and accountability of face-to-
face killing.22 The instigation of native pogroms, Selbstreinigungsaktionen, or self-cleansing
actions, was also used by commanders, this practise of involving locals matured into
enlisting mostly willing Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians into auxiliary units.23 Rarely
spontaneous, these local actions would not have occurred without Nazi encouragement or
coercion.24 This first sweep that shadowed Operation Barbarossa was staffed by three
thousand SS officers, police and other security draftees.25 During the period from June to
November, 1941, they committed the murders of some five-hundred thousand enemies of the
state; this created an average of one hundred and sixty victims to each perpetrator.26
The second sweep starting in the spring of 1942, was to repeat the efficiency in an
expanded operation that would also contribute to the rounding up of Jews and others for
deportation to the camps.27 This time operations largely resulted from the need to clear-out
the ghettos that had risen up throughout the occupied territory.28 Shootings also increased
due to the logistical complications in setting-up the camps needed for Operation Reinhard. 29
The expansion of the original Einsatzgruppen included an inflation of German Order Police

19
Ibid., 330-331.
20
Browning, 64.
21
‘Otto Ohlendorf Affidavit,’ Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 3 (Washington D.C: US
Government Printing Office, 1946), 596-603.
22
Hilberg, 329.
23
Ibid., 320.
24
The most infamous and documented case of such self-cleansing actions was the massacre of at least
500 Jews in Jedwabne by local Poles who killed a majority of their Jewish neighbours, Jan T. Gross,
Neighbours (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
25
Goldhagen, 167.
26
Hilberg, 304-305.
27
Ibid.,382-383.
28
Ibid..
29
Browning, 54.

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 Christopher P. Davey
Holocaust and Genocide
and local auxiliaries.30 This period from mid-1942 to the end of the genocide took the
number of victims that died by bullet closer to 1.5 million, and even more if current research
is taken into account.31 Hilberg describes this phase of killing, ‘The manner of killing was
different in 1942 from that in 1941. During the previous year, the Jews had been caught by
surprise; now they knew that there was danger. Accordingly the Germans no longer
employed ruses.’32 The actions of the Einsatzgruppen and police involved more of a routine
approach that used shift patterns, pre-dug pits, the more “humane” Ölsardinenmanier
method, and copious amounts of alcohol supplied to the shooters.33 Expanding the Order
Police and the Einsatzgruppen by 5,500 meant that the average rate of victims increased to
one hundred and eighty per perpetrator.34
The perpetrator’s psychological burden would in modern terms be defined as severe
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Among the most frequent symptoms were the
hallucinations and ‘recurrent distressing dreams.’35 The symptoms of PTSD were
compounded by the repeated killing making their suffering longer and more severe than
ordinary soldiers on the Eastern front.36 Additionally, it was common military practise to
treat symptoms and then return troops to their line of duty. 37 It has been concluded that these
men suffered as a direct result of how they murdered their victims. On the
Genickschusspezialisten method, Jean Steiner stated that,

This personalization of the act was accompanied by a physical proximity, since the
executioner stood less than a yard away from his victim. Of course, he did not see
him from the front, but it was discovered that necks, like faces, also individualize
people (…) these necks came to haunt their dream.38

Through the blood and bullets the Einsatzgruppen and police became endowed with the
burden of serial murderers.

30
Hilberg, 385. Eric Haberer, ‘The German Police in Belarussia, 1941-1944, part I: Police deployment
and Nazi Genocidal Directives,’ Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 1 (2001): 14.
31
Haberer, 13.
32
Hilberg, 402.
33
Ibid., 403-405.
34
Browning, Ordinary Men, 9. This average is drawn from the one million victims killed during the
second sweep. It is significant that although many more were being sent to the gas chambers during this period
that the shootings still increased.
35
Rachel MacNair, ‘Psychological reverberation of the killers: preliminary historical evidence for
perpetration-induced traumatic stress,’ Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 2 (2001): 276.
36
MacNair, 276.
37
Ibid..
38
Jean F. Steiner, Treblinka (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 73.

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Holocaust and Genocide
Compelling men to engage in and overcome what many considered a repulsive duty
was a relatively easy task because men were eased into their roles as killers.39 Commanders
like Ohlendorf and Von dem Bach expressed sensitivity towards their men that resulted in
ensuring their relative comfort, whilst still carrying out these operations. Was their
compliance then more a matter of obedience than natural sadism? Whilst it could be argued
that blind obedience was more an end product of their exposure to killing, scholars find it
hard to justify compliance on the grounds of obedience. Renowned social psychologist
Stanley Milgram, conducted experiments with authority that indicate two principles on
obedience apply here: that the obedient subjects in the experiments were relatively “ordinary
people”, and also that they performed a destructive role by virtue of what they considered to
be their obligation and duty.40 Reducing the role of obedience was the fact that
Einsatzgruppen and police men were permitted to opt out of killing operation if they so
desired.41 However, very few killers did so after the second action, as demonstrated by the
Reserve Police Battalion 101.42 Through what Browning labelled as ‘negative selection’ men
gradually opted in and participated as more of an acknowledgment of group obedience and
duty than individual blind obedience.43 Maintaining group identity and membership in a
foreign, often hostile environment became a driving motive for compliance. Becoming
killers in such an atmosphere was a choice; however, it seemed difficult for the majority of
men to turn from this option.
Radicalizing Killers
Once incorporated into the killing process, during the early part of the summer 1941
operations, Einsatzgruppen and police became further endeared to the perpetration of the
Holocaust. This section aims to address how after becoming initially complicit, these
ordinary men’s actions were radicalized into what Browning referred to as a ‘quantum leap’
in the Holocaust.44 To explain this radicalization of the newly initiated killers the model of
situational social psychology will be employed. Radicalization will be broken down into
four elements: brutalization, “blood cement”, moral conflicts, and character transformation.
39
MacNair, 276.
40
Thomas Blass, ‘Perpetrator Behaviour as Destructive Obedience: An Evaluation of Stanley
Milgram’s Perspective, the Most Influential Social-Psychological Approach to the Holocaust,’ in ed. Leonard
Newman and Ralph Erber, Understanding genocide: the social psychology of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 104.
41
Goldhagen, 279. Allan Fenigstein, ‘Were Obedience Pressures A factor in the Holocaust?’ Analyse
Kritik 20, (1998): 69.
42
Zimbardo, 286.
43
Browning, Ordinary Men, 164.
44
Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of the Nazi Jewish Policy, September
1939-March 1942 (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 245. Browning, specifically, here refers to
the transition of shootings Jews of all both sexes and all ages, expanding the Holocaust significantly.

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 Christopher P. Davey
Holocaust and Genocide
Although the elements of anti-Semitism and obedience were factors that brought the men
into the process, they are not sufficient to explain their further descent into becoming
professional killers. The situational approach mandates that ‘systems of power’ drive
situations, not just individual characteristics.45 How this applies to the men of the
Einsatzgruppen and police is probably best defined by the premise of George Orwell’s
classic 1984. Here a system of power, Big Brother, controls the reality of party members,
thereby manufacturing situations and producing certain actions, whether intended, or
unintended.46 While not as ultimately totalitarian, the Nazis provided a power structure of
ideology that created a situation that did not determine actions, but the choices with which
the killers were faced.
The brutalization element is best summarized by the story of the reserve Police
Battalion 101 as described by Browning. Without prior indoctrination or training, beyond
that of normal policemen, these five-hundred men were thrust into their first killing action in
Josefow, Poland. One policeman described his involvement in these terms,
The shooting of men was so repugnant to me that I missed the fourth man. It was
simply no longer possible for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and ran
away from the shooting site. I have expressed myself incorrectly just now. It was not
that I could no longer aim accurately, rather that the fourth time I intentionally
missed. I then ran into the woods, vomited, and sat down against a tree. To make
sure that no one was nearby, I called loudly into the woods, because I wanted to be
alone. Today I can say that my nerves were totally finished. I think that I remained
alone in the woods for some two hours or three hours.47

Despite his opting out, even after this traumatic experience this reservist along with many
others continued to their next assignment. Browning concluded about the following
assignment in Lomazy, that
psychological alleviation necessary to integrate Reserve Police Battalion 101 into the
killing process was to be achieved through a twofold division of labour (with
auxiliaries from the Trawniki training camp). This change would prove sufficient to
allow the men the Reserve Police Battalion 101 to become accustomed to their
participation in the Final Solution. When the time came to kill again, the policemen
did not “go crazy”. Instead they became increasingly efficient and calloused
executioners.48

Through use of the shift strategy of the second sweep of killing, these reservists were
gradually eased into their roles as killers. The continual exposure to the violence of their

45
Zimbardo, 10.
46
Ibid.. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classic, 1981).
47
Frank K. quoted in Browning, Ordinary Men, 67.
48
Ibid., 77.

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 Christopher P. Davey
Holocaust and Genocide
own actions and that of the auxiliaries assisting them in Lomazy brutalized their earlier
revulsion.
Turning again to PTSD findings, Rachel MacNair asserts that this type of exposure
led to the acceptance and addiction of such acts, ‘As part of the numbing and disassociation
that goes with PTSD, it may be that the casual direction is that those that suffer from it are
more likely to get into, or tolerate and remain in, those situation in which killings are ordered
(…). Modern research does show that the accumulation of traumas has an addictive effect in
making PTSD more likely.’49 This situational addiction produced a cycle of structural and
direct violence, making it increasingly easy to continue killing.
“Blood cement” was a term used by the Nazis that uncovered in the post-war
investigations of psychiatrist Leo Alexander, where he interviewed former commanders of
the Einsatzgruppen. Specifically referred to in the SS as bludkitt, “blood cement” suggests a
criminal gang element of mass complicity through performing the murders deemed necessary
by the leadership.50 Interviewing Ohlendorf, Alexander, was made aware of how officers
and men were dragged into the SS through combinations of bribery, deceit, and violence.51
Before joining the Einsatzgruppen, Ohlendorf fell out of favour with Himmler and other
leading Nazis. He argues that as a result, he was pressed into accepting the assignment of
leading an Einsatzgruppe.52 Von dem Bach shared a similar experience of suffering
consequences for coming in and out of favour with the leadership. After commanding his
own Einsatzgruppe, he was given charge of an anti-partisan division that, because of a short-
fall in trained SS men, incorporated known criminals into the group, causing significant
murder and mayhem on the Eastern front.53 When asked about the existence of the policy of
blood cement, he replied that it was explicitly encouraged by the likes of Goering and
Hitler.54 Blood cement provided a further level from which the Nazi power system
constructed a violent and intentionally complicit situation; committing criminal acts ordered
by the leadership mid-level officers and lower ranking troops became bound to the Nazi
organization through the blood they shed.
Throughout the process of escalated involvement in shootings the men were
continually faced with a succession of moral conflicts: choices that either led them further

49
MacNair, 279.
50
Leo Alexander, ‘War Crimes and Their Motivation: The Socio-Psychological Structure of the SS and
the Criminalization of a Society,’ Criminal Law Criminology 39, (1948-49): 300
51
Alexander, 308.
52
Ibid..
53
Ibid., 311-312.
54
Ibid., 318.

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 Christopher P. Davey
Holocaust and Genocide
down the path of so-called blood cement, or away from such complicity. Henri Zukier
described these unique choices as such, ‘The shaping of the murderous mentality required
moral conflict. Nazism cultivated a new philosophy of heroism: it was designed to overcome
not external adversary (…) but the internal psychological inhibitions against atrocities.
Nazism expected the perpetrators to feel bad about their actions and harnessed these feelings
to fuel the murderous course.’55 The most pertinent example of such situation control by the
Nazi power system was the speech Himmler gave to the Einsatzgruppen men he had just
watched shooting down their victims in Minsk, 1941. Making an appeal to jungle theory,
Himmler likened their shooting actions unto the savage ways of nature.56 He added two
further points: it was he and Hitler that bore ultimate responsibility and that they were
performing their duty; a duty that was grizzly but necessary.57 Zukier continues to describe
this moral conflict process, ‘Through this invisible progression, the individual passes a moral
point of no return but does not realize it until several steps later.’ The conception of what is
moral and what is not is blurred and skewed by prior actions. Hilberg adds that, ‘One’s own
act was not criminal; (…) the next fellow’s action was the criminal act (…) the most
important characteristic of this dividing line was that it could be shifted when the need
arose.’58 The result of using moral conflicts to make decisions was that prior actions were
justified and morality became subjectified to the situation as defined by leaders like
Himmler.
The end product of these elements of brutalization, blood cement, and moral conflicts
was that the perpetrators underwent a character transformation. Philip Zimbardo, creator of
the Stanford Prison Experiment, states of Reserve Police Battalion 101 that, ‘By the end of
their deadly journey, up to 90 percent of the men (…) were blindly obedient to their battalion
leader and were personally involved in the shooting.’59 This journey’s end was itemized by
active ‘Jew hunts’ and making trophies of out of their victims.60 Zimbardo describes
character transformation in these terms,
Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in an evil way.
They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and
mindless ways when they are immersed in “total situations” that impact human nature

55
Henri Zukier, ‘The Twisted Road to Genocide: On the Psychological Development of Evil during
the Holocaust,’ Social Research 61, no. 2 (1994): 450.
56
Hilberg, 1103.
57
Zukier, 450.
58
Hilberg, 1110.
59
Zimbardo, 286.
60
Ibid.. Browning, Ordinary Men, 123.

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 Christopher P. Davey
Holocaust and Genocide
in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual
personality, of character, and of morality.61

Through subjecting themselves, albeit incrementally, to the Nazi system of power the men of
the Einsatzgruppen and police and units became situationalized by routine killing. The
majority of those who chose this path suffered massive psychological burdens, but were able
to adapt through the process of character transformation.
Conclusion
The total amount of death inflicted by the Einsatzgruppen and police units’ has been
overshadowed by the industrialization of the Holocaust and the introduction of gassing by
assembly line. The assertion, while true misses the consequences of having situationalized
and loyal shooters on the front line of the genocide. If research continues on its current
trajectory of uncovering more of the mass murder committed in the East by bullets, the
burden placed upon these men cannot be dismissed as merely providing a path to alternate
means of death. The process of becoming killers and the subsequent radicalization by
repetition of exposure and trauma professionalized these ordinary men into systematic killers
that were a fundamental element of the Holocaust. The chilling effectiveness of these killers
was that they learned obedience through their complicity and were bound to process that had
driven them to becoming perpetrators. Their subjection to the Nazi power system through
the situational choices they made brought them to this point more than any immediate blood
lust or anti-Semitism. Zukier states that the ultimate accomplishment of the Holocaust was
not the horrors of Auschwitz, but ‘the millions of ordinary people who were transformed into
ardent followers and the process of psychological manufacture of evil (…). In one sense, it
did not happen (in Germany) but in a systematically altered psychological environment.’62
Through bullets and psychological burdens the perpetrators have taken their place along side
the Jews and the other undesirable elements as the final victims of the Holocaust.

Works Cited

61
Zimbardo, 211.
62
Zukier, 441.

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Holocaust and Genocide
Alexander, Leo. ‘War Crimes and Their Motivation: The Socio-Psychological Structure of
the SS and the Criminalization of a Society.’ Criminal Law Criminology 39. (1948-
49): 298-326.

Blass, Thomas. ‘Perpetrator Behaviour as Destructive Obedience: An Evaluation of Stanley

Milgram’s Perspective, the Most Influential Social-Psychological Approach to the
Holocaust.’ In editors, Leonard Newman and Ralph Erber. Understanding genocide:
the social psychology of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Browning, Christopher. Fateful Months: Essay on the Emergence of the Final Solution.
London: Holmes & Meier, 1985.

_____. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New
York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

_____. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of the Nazi Jewish Policy,
September 1939-March 1942. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Fenigstein, Allan. ‘Were Obedience Pressures A factor in the Holocaust?’ Analyse Kritik 20.
(1998): 54-73.

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
London: Abacus, 1997.

Haberer, Eric. ‘The German Police in Belarussia, 1941-1944, part I: Police deployment and
Nazi Genocidal Directives.’ Journal of Genocide Research 3. No. 1 (2001): 13-29.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of European Jews. Vol. 1-3. London: Holmes & Meier,
1985.

Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship. London: Hodder Education, 2000.

USHMM. Holocaust Encyclopaedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005421 [accessed 21 May
2010].

MacNair, Rachel. ‘Psychological reverberation of the killers: preliminary historical evidence

for perpetration-induced traumatic stress.’ Journal of Genocide Research 3. No. 2
(2001): 273-282.

Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Vol. 3. Washington D.C: US Government Printing Office,
1946.

Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classic, 1981.

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Holocaust and Genocide

Steiner, Jean F. Treblinka. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967.

Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: How Good People turn Evil. St. Ives: Random House,
2007.

Zukier, Henri. ‘The Twisted Road to Genocide: On the Psychological Development of Evil
during the Holocaust.’ Social Research 61. No. 2 (1994): 423-455.

12