ABSTRACT
Perpetration in state-ordained and state-sanctioned violence raises distinctive issues concerning guilt, agency, and a sense of responsibility. Focusing on the division of labor in the Nazi system of persecution, this chapter sketches approaches to perpetration and argues for a structural and interpretive analysis of complicity in collective violence and its legacies. Analyzing ways in which people became involved “on the perpetrator side,” it explores how individuals can be mobilized to engage in behaviors that a few years earlier would have been unthinkable and how, in enacting new roles that entailed the ostracism and oppression of others, many persecutors nevertheless retained a sense of an inner self that was somewhat at odds with their outward actions. This analysis has significance both for interpretations of the impact of Nazi rule on German society and for broader explanations of racial persecution and genocide. It contributes to debates around historical, sociological, and psychological explanations of how people become “perpetrators” in a system of collective violence and suggests ways of understanding long-term cultural and personal legacies of persecution and genocide under differing post-conflict circumstances.
