Some of the most important parts of The Reader in terms of critical analysis are the central questions of why Hanna did what she did, whether or not she understood what she was doing and the moral implications attached, whether or not her actions could be justified, and as a metaphor for her generation, what it meant to be a perpetrator within the context of those principles. This Lecture I found, Revisiting the Holocaust Perpetrators: Why Did They Kill? (delivered at UVM by a history professor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), addresses some of these questions, in an interesting categorization and analysis of different types of holocaust perpetrators. The lecturer focuses primarily on his last category, what he calls "ordinary men," of which I think Hanna would be a part, and tries to analyze and explain their actions in different ways. Interesting to read while considering this part of the story and some of the conversations we've had in class.
This lecture has an extremely interesting take on the question “why did they kill” due to the fact that a lot of it focuses on the psychological side of this killer mentality. When Browning talked about these “ordinary men,” in an extremely intriguing quote he stated that they claimed they were “forced to obey orders, their actions were not their own; they were merely the instrument of others.” In my class on self-determination we have talked a lot about the concept of primordialism which deals with the basic need for humans to belong to a specific group. When people have the comfort of conformity in them, they can feel a sense of national identity which Browning would argue would lead them to continue on with the killing of innocent people even if given the chance to opt out (like when he referred to Major Trapp). I wonder if this truly does explain why these regular people could commit such horrific acts in cold blood. Does this mean that if any of us were in this situation we would not recognize our actions as wrong and simply continue to commit these human rights violations?
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