On Killing and Morality: How Normal People Become Mass Murderers

Abstract

In this chapter I would like to deal with the question of how it is possible for perfectly normal and average people to decide, in certain situations, to kill. In order to answer this question, I recently attempted to reconstruct the murderous career of a reserve police battalion, devoting special attention to the situative dynamics and the procedural aspects of the work of killing.1 This analysis placed the process leading to mass killing within the context of the establishment of a ‘National Socialist’ morality, which began in 1933 and created a reality in which categorical differences between people became accepted as a condition of perception, interpretation and action. I would like to sketch out this social process in the first part of this chapter. Second, I will attempt a brief, process-oriented description of the first killing operation by Reserve Police Battalion 45. This shows that for the perpetrators killing was, in many respects, hardly such an abnormal procedure as it seems to us today, in view of the consequences of the Holocaust.