“In short, the fundamental problem is not to explain why ordinary Germans, as members of a people utterly different from us and shaped by a culture that permitted them to think and act in no other way than to want to be genocidal executioners, eagerly killed Jews when the opportunity offered. The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men––shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions––under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in history.

Why does it matter which of our portrayals and conclusions about Reserve Police Battalion 101 are closer to the truth? It would be very comforting of Goldhagen were correct, that very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice and necessity. We would live in a safer world if he were right, but I am not so optimistic. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being able to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

–– Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 222-223