king a moral sense, lacking the ability to make decisions and take stances. They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills, but as beings moved solely by external forces. The conventional explanations have two other major conceptual failings. They do not sufficiently recognize the extraordinary nature of the deed: the mass killing of people. They assume and imply that inducing people to kill human beings is fundamentally no different from getting them to do any other unwanted or distasteful task. Also, none of the conventional explanations deems the identity of the victims to have mattered. The conventional explanations imply that the perpetrators would have treated any other group of intended victims in exactly the same way. That the victims were Jews - according to the logic of these explanations - is irrelevant.The author maintains that any explanation that fails to acknowledge the actors' capacity to know and to judge, that fails to emphasize the autonomous motivating force of Nazi ideology, particularly its central component of anti-Semitism, cannot possibly succeed in telling us much about why the perpetrators acted as they did. Any explanation that ignores either the particular nature of the perpetrators' actions - the systematic, large-scale killing and brutalizing of people - or the identity of the victims is inadequate for a host of reasons. According to the author, the perpetrators, "ordinary Germans"3 were driven by a particular type of anti-Semitism that led them to conclude that the Jews ought to die. The perpetrators' beliefs, their particular brand of anti-Semitism was a significant and indispensable source of their actions and must be at the center of any explanation of them. Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say "no."It is my belief that the author presents a very contro...
