Such as any other genocide, the war of extermination as well as the holocaust needed a lot of people that had to make the decision to kill others. A question that still remains to be clarified is this: how is it possible that people turn into mass murderers who - even a couple of months before - would not have believed that they themselves might ever be able to do such a thing. The lecture examines how a readiness to kill is generated, what kind of social and professional dynamics develop based on the division of labor of the killing and how killing - within a few weeks -can become work that has to be done like any other duty.
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Prof. Dr. Harald Welzer is head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at Essen and Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Witten/Herdecke. His main fields of research and teaching are memory, group violence, and research methods. |
