Board: Edexcel Topic: The Holocaust Debate: Cumulative radicalisation, willing executioners, ordinary men
See also: Holocaust historiography · Hannah Arendt
The question
Evaluate the interpretations in the following extracts and use your knowledge of the issue to explain which you find more convincing.
Interpretation A (adapted from Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, 1992): ‘The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not hardened killers. They were middle-aged Hamburg policemen, too old for military service. They were given a choice not to participate in the killing operations if they found it too difficult. Most did not exercise that choice. Their behaviour cannot be explained by ideology or prior conditioning; it must be explained by conformity, peer pressure, and the situational pressures of finding themselves within a system that normalised killing.’
Interpretation B (adapted from Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 1996): ‘The perpetrators were not ordinary men placed in extraordinary circumstances. They were ordinary Germans, shaped by a political culture of “eliminationist antisemitism” so deeply embedded in German society that the killing of Jews did not require coercion, peer pressure, or special conditioning. They killed willingly because they believed the killing was right.’
The debate in brief
Both Browning and Goldhagen studied the same historical case — Reserve Police Battalion 101 — and reached radically different conclusions about why ordinary men participated in mass murder. The debate between them is one of the most significant in twentieth-century historiography, because what is at stake is not just the Holocaust but the broader question of human behaviour under extreme conditions.
A strong answer
Both interpretations illuminate something real about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but Browning’s account is the more historically persuasive, while Goldhagen’s captures a dimension that Browning’s situational explanation risks obscuring.
Browning’s strength lies in its empirical precision and its explanatory power beyond the German case. His analysis of Reserve Police Battalion 101 is grounded in the men’s own post-war testimonies, and his finding that most had a genuine choice to opt out of killing operations but did not take it is corroborated by the evidence. The situational factors he identifies — conformity to group norms, deference to authority, the gradual normalisation of violence — are consistent with the social psychology literature (notably Milgram’s obedience experiments and Zimbardo’s work on situational behaviour). Crucially, Browning’s framework can explain perpetrator behaviour across different national contexts and different genocides: the same situational pressures operated in Rwanda in 1994 as in Poland in 1942.
Goldhagen’s interpretation is analytically weaker because it is too culturally specific to bear the explanatory weight he places on it. If ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ was uniquely and deeply German, it does not explain why the Holocaust required extensive non-German participation — from Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, from French police, from Hungarian gendarmerie. Nor does it explain why antisemitism in Germany itself varied significantly by region, class, and generation. The cultural explanation, taken alone, is too blunt an instrument.
Yet Goldhagen is right to resist the risk in Browning’s account of washing away ideology entirely. The men of Battalion 101 were not ideologically neutral agents placed in a killing machine by circumstance alone. They operated within a specific ideological context — Nazi racial ideology, the dehumanisation of Jews, the wartime framing of killing as legitimate — that shaped what felt possible and permissible. Browning’s revised preface to later editions of Ordinary Men concedes more to ideology than his original account allowed.
Interpretation A is more convincing because it offers a more generalisable and empirically grounded explanation of perpetrator behaviour. But it is most persuasive when read alongside the ideological context that Goldhagen correctly insists upon — not as an alternative to situational explanation but as the specific conditions within which that situational logic operated.
Why this answer scores well
- It evaluates both interpretations rather than simply preferring one. The answer identifies the strengths of Browning’s argument and the genuine insight in Goldhagen’s — while explaining why Goldhagen’s overall framework is less persuasive.
- It uses contextual knowledge to test the interpretations. The reference to non-German perpetrators, the regional variation in German antisemitism, and Browning’s revised preface all demonstrate knowledge of the debate beyond the extracts.
- It reaches a clear, qualified verdict. The answer commits to Interpretation A as more convincing but qualifies that judgement — acknowledging what Goldhagen adds rather than simply dismissing him.
- It knows what the debate is about. The answer frames the Browning/Goldhagen debate in terms of its wider stakes — situational vs. ideological explanations of perpetrator behaviour — showing genuine historiographical understanding.
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