General Discussion

Historians have long struggled to understand the psychological makeup of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, some of whom were well-educated, prosperous professionals in early middle age, as opposed to fanatical young men. In postwar trials, they claimed that they harbored no antisemitic sentiments.

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…Imbued with years of propaganda and discouraged from independent thought, many of them committed genocide out of what they perversely believed to be professional obligation.