How Did Ordinary Citizens Become Murderers?

What prompted average people to commit extraordinary crimes in support of the Nazi cause? In the Holocaust era, countless ordinary people acted in ways that aided and hindered the persecution and murder of Jews and other targeted groups within Nazi Germany and across Europe. On September 13, 2017, the Museum hosted a discussion to answer one of the most vexing questions of the Holocaust: How Did Ordinary Citizens Become Murderers? Former New York Times reporter and award-winning author Ralph Blumenthal moderated this program with two noted scholars: Dr. Christopher Browning, Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Dr. Wendy Lower, Acting Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and author of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields