Ordinary Men: Genocide,Determinism,Agency,and Moral Culpability

1. “Functionalism” versus “Intentionalism” in Holocaust Historiography

The Holocaust stands as a monumental challenge to historians and social scientists. Its occurrence in late modern history and its execution by a sophisticated modern society of actors and institutions demands explanation and understanding. But it was also a monstrous moral and legal crime, and there is an equally powerful demand to respond with due moral appropriateness to its perpetrators. Very often these demands have seemed to be in conflict and tension. This is manifest in the overarching historiographical dispute over effective and proper modes of inquiry into the Holocaust. The historiographical standoff was seminally brought into focus by Tim Mason in 1979 (Bessel 2003). Deploying the dichotomy of “functionalism” versus “intentionalism” (closely synonymous with that of structure and agency in the social sciences), Mason (1995) adumbrated two purportedly antagonistic stances that orientate and condition inquiry into the Holocaust. ¹

Mason aligned the functionalist stance with “modern social science” (Mason 1995, 219) in virtue of its theoretical and methodological commitment to the identification of social structures and forces, and collective processes, that act as causes and conditions of individuals’ action. In particular, he championed the explanatory power of theories that purport to disclose the effects of the chaotic, fragmentary, and competitive structure of Third Reich governance, the transpersonal dynamic of “cumulative radicalisation” (Mason 1995, 214), and the unintended and unforeseen consequences of various policy commitments.

Those that adopt what Mason calls the “intentionalist” stance, by contrast, take it to be transparently obvious that the Holocaust issued directly from “the distinctive murderous will of the Nazi leadership” (Mason 1995, 218). Seeking to explain the actions, motivations, and decisions of these key players by way of super- and supra-individual processes, structures, forces, and pressures, as functionalists do, is therefore otiose according to intentionalists, and it serves only to divert attention away from their self-conscious intentionality. Such modes of explanation lead inexorably, albeit unwittingly, to “trivialisation” of the diabolically criminal character of the Nazi regime and diminishment of the moral responsibility of its active members (Mason 1995, 213). ² The reason for this alleged effect is not specified, but the idea is something like this: explanation yields understanding, and understanding makes actions “understandable.” If one understands how someone else could perform a particular action one thereby can envisage oneself performing it, which inexorably nudges one into judging the actor’s culpability more leniently (“there but for the grace of odds go I” [Alford 1997, 27]).

The explanatory and ethical issues that divide “functionalist” and “intentionalist” historians are revealingly exhibited in a public exchange of letters between the eminent historians Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer in 1987 (Broszat and Friedländer 2005). The occasion for their exchange arose out of the critical controversy surrounding Broszat’s earlier published “Plea for a historicisation of National Socialism.” Broszat was one of the historians that Mason invoked to exemplify the functionalist perspective. His concept of historicization implores historians to bring the standard methods of modern historical and social scientific inquiry to the study of the Holocaust, and to approach it as a historical, not an untouchably sacrosanct, phenomenon.

Broszat insisted to his intentionalist correspondent that the historicization he advocated was wholly compatible with taking “a stance of resolute political and moral condemnation” (Broszat and Friedländer 2005, 266). Because of the maintenance of “critical distancing” that he declared to be integral to his concept of “critical, enlightening historical understanding” there was, he avowed, “no danger whatsoever of relativizing the atrocities of National Socialism.” As examples of concepts, methodologies, and perspectives that exemplify the aim of historicization, he mentioned Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil,” the micro-history of everyday life in the Third Reich, along with “the vantage of a longer-range historical perspective” (Broszat and Friedländer 2005, 276, 278).

Friedländer was unconvinced. The alleged banality of many perpetrators and their leaders is belied, he rejoins, by their “expression of a Rausch, the feeling of an almost superhuman enterprise” in “accomplishing something truly, historically, metahistorically, exceptional” with their genocidal program (Broszat and Friedländer 2005, 284). He also rejected the legitimacy of the history of everyday life under such a regime—widespread “knowledge of ongoing massive crimes committed by one’s own nation and one’s own society,” he insisted, “is not so normal after all” (Broszat and Friedländer 2005, 284). The exchange closes with Friedlander’s plaintive counter-plea that the seduction of historicization be resisted. He concedes, though, that historicization will inexorably occur at some point, because “the human mind” naturally “prefers to dwell on the normal rather than the abnormal, on the understandable rather than on the opaque, on the comparable rather than on the incomparable, on the bearable rather than on the unbearable” (Broszat and Friedländer 2005, 298).

Although the functionalist-intentionalist dichotomy was concerned from the beginning with how to explain (i.e., via social structure or individual agency) and the ethical implications of explanation, subsequent discussion has concentrated almost entirely on the former. ³ Up to the 1990s, central points of contestation concerned divergent conceptions of the authorship, genesis, shape, structure, and developmental drive of the Holocaust as a whole. This trained scholarly focus on the ideas, motivations, and actions of political leaders and managers in government and administration, and the mechanics of political office and the state bureaucracy.

This focus changed with the publication of two landmark studies by Christopher Browning ([1992] 2001) and Daniel Goldhagen ([1996] 1997), both of which investigated the actions of the German Order Police, which was “at the core of the Holocaust” (Browning 2001, xiii). These studies shifted scholarly attention from policy-makers and order-givers (the so-called “desk murderers” whose actions Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil” was constructed to explain) to policy implementers and order followers (Browning 2013). Browning’s study is seen to fall largely on the “functionalist” side of the functionalist-intentionalist dichotomy, and Goldhagen’s on the “intentionalist” side (Moses 1998). Thus Browning invokes social-structural and situational causes to explain the actions of the Order Police whereas Goldhagen grounds his explanation in the personal agency of its members. However, while the moral implications of different kinds of explanation and the unequivocal attribution of moral responsibility are primary concerns for Goldhagen, which aligns him with intentionalist historiography, he evidently does not think that explanation as such blinds one to the moral reality of perpetrators’ actions. Browning (1992) himself identifies as a “modified functionalist,” partly because he does not want to suggest that individual agency played no significant role in the events, nor that the perpetrators should be excused from full moral responsibility. Goldhagen might then be called a “modified intentionalist” (though Roth [2003, 320] refers to him without qualification as “a strong [and broad] intentionalist”) in that he embraces both explanation and steadfast moral judgment.

Goldhagen’s Hitler’s willing executioners quickly became an international bestseller and subject to ferocious criticism. Most of the criticism emanating from professional historians was extraordinarily hostile and dismissive. ⁴ It has often been observed that this reaction contrasts with the generally laudatory reception of the book by the journalistic media and wider public. What seems to have passed unnoticed though is that most philosophers that have discussed Goldhagen’s work have found it worthy of serious engagement and importantly insightful. ⁵ As will become evident, I count myself among this latter group.

This essay focuses on a fundamental criticism that has frequently been leveled at the internal coherence of Goldhagen’s explanatory theory. The criticism charges that Goldhagen is oblivious to a subverting contradiction emanating from the incoherent conjunction of a “functionalist” (social-structural) account of the perpetrators’ belief formation with an “intentionalist” insistence on their autonomous agency and moral responsibility. After outlining the explanatory problem posed by the actions of the Order Police, and presenting Browning’s and Goldhagen’s contrasting explanatory responses to it, I proceed to defend Goldhagen’s explanation against the “incoherence” charge. I go on to explore the implications of Goldhagen’s and Browning’s explanations for the moral culpability of the perpetrators. The principal aim of this essay is to probe more deeply into the relation between explanation of perpetrators’ actions and attributions of moral responsibility and culpability to them than participants in the functionalist-intentionalist dispute hitherto have ventured.

2. Reserve Police Battalion 101: Why Did They Do It?

Goldhagen’s and Browning’s studies both focus on the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the Order Police, though they take their explanations to apply not just to this particular group, but to countless others who participated in the Holocaust in a variety of ways. Both also argue that most other “ordinary Germans” (Goldhagen), ⁶ or “ordinary [not just German - N.P.] men” (Browning), would have acted in just the same way as the men of Battalion 101 did, had they been in their situation, for the reasons specified by their respective explanations.

The 500 men of Battalion 101 were reservists whose average age was 39. They had been conscripted to serve on policing duties in occupied territories. There was a low rate of Nazi party membership among them (circa 25%; Browning 2001, 48), and they had no bespoke “ideological” preparation for genocidal killing. In short, these people “would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers” (Browning 2001, 48; Goldhagen 1997, 468). Yet in the course of their 16-month posting to Poland, they proceeded to execute 38,000 Jews and deport a further 45,000 to the Treblinka death camp.

Typical killing operations involved entering a town, seizing all the Jewish inhabitants from their homes, separating men fit enough to work for despatch to forced labor camps, then guarding the remainder (babies, children, women and the sick, disabled and elderly) who had to await their turn for execution. Rotating groups of policemen then marched the victims to the killing site in outlying woods and fields where they massacred them by close range rifle and pistol fire.

Why did the policemen do these things? The answer may seem obvious: they were members of a state security force, serving under a supposedly “totalitarian” regime, and were simply following orders that they dare not refuse. It is commonly believed that failure to follow orders under the Third Reich automatically incurred harsh, very likely lethal, punishment. This assumption is exhibited, for example, by Jan Narveson (2002, 188), who asserts that “it is very clear that most German participants in the evils of the holocaust did so under orders from superiors, and that those superiors had extreme powers, typically that of life and death, over those subordinates.” Thus, Narveson continues, “A murders B because C has given A his choice between that and being murdered himself” (Narveson 2002). But this is a myth, largely fabricated by the perpetrators themselves at postwar criminal trials (Browning 2001, 170). Browning (2001, 170) and Goldhagen (1997, 379-81) are in agreement that the policemen could, and knew that they could, have avoided participation in killing operations without suffering any serious consequence.

The absence of punitive duress on the policemen is dramatically illustrated in the case of Battalion 101 by the way that their first operation was presented to them by their commanding officer. When revealing to his men their first day’s genocidal mission (the execution of a town’s 1500 Jewish inhabitants), the major confessed that he personally found it “frightfully unpleasant” and “highly regrettable,” but nevertheless, he said, his orders came from “the highest authorities” (Browning 2001, 2). He then announced that if anyone “did not feel up to the task” they could step aside and be exempted from killing duties. ⁷ Browning reports that 12 or 13 of the 500 men stood down at this point. More found ways of desisting at various points after the killing was underway. Browning (2001, 74) estimates that in total around 10% to 20% of the Battalion either declined participation from the beginning, or extricated themselves from killing operations after they began.

The stand-out feature of the behavior of the men of Battalion 101 that demands explanation is the following: why did they comply with their orders to kill when they knew that they did not have to? A substantial minority (some 50 to 100 out of 500 men) did evade participation; why did not more do so? Drawing on classic studies in situationist social psychology, Browning argues, in “functionalist” manner, that a range of factors in the policemen’s social and interpersonal circumstances impacted invasively on their decision-making capacities. They included such things as normative pressure to comply with the Battalion’s orders and not to step out of line with their comrades, aversion to looking “weak” or “cowardly” to comrades and leaders, the sudden escalation of events (from police training and experience to genocidal killing) leaving little time or space to deliberate on what to do. These factors, according to Browning, had the effect either of impeding the policemen from engaging in critical reflection on what to do, or making it hard for them to choose their preferred option, namely, nonparticipation in killings that were moral anathema to them. But Goldhagen contends that Browning assumes, without evidence, that what needs explanation is the following question: what made the men who killed act so egregiously against their moral conscience? ⁸

However, if, as Goldhagen (1997, 394) claims, the policemen not only did not find genocidal killing of Jews morally wrong but also actually believed it a “just and necessary” cause, then Browning’s explanation misidentifies the explanandum. The question “Why did they kill when they knew they did not have to?” is then straightforwardly answered. The policemen understood it to be their duty to do their part for the good of the nation. But this brings forth the more demanding question: Why did, and how could, they believe the killing just and necessary? Goldhagen’s answer to this is that it is because the policemen were born into, and grew up in and lived in, a society in which “eliminationist antisemitism” was an integral part of its people’s way of life. The core content of eliminationist antisemitism was the fervent belief that Jewish people constituted a race that posed an existential threat to the German people. The policemen therefore conceived the killing of Jews in occupied territories as an important component of their nation’s legitimate war-aims (which is how their commander presented the genocidal campaign to them in his initiating oratory [Browning 2001, 2; Goldhagen 1997, 212-13]).

Goldhagen thinks that Browning’s explanation of the policemen’s behavior (along with other “functionalist” explanations of various kinds of perpetrator behavior) makes them look like mere puppets of external social-structural and situational forces and pressures. To avoid this caricature, he says, we have to see and acknowledge that the perpetrators were “agents, moral beings capable of making moral choices” (Goldhagen 1997, 392). They were “people who had beliefs and values about the wisdom of the regime’s policies, which informed the choices that they made” and “were ultimately the authors of their own actions” (Goldhagen 1997, 477, 482). Unsurprisingly then, given Goldhagen’s emphasis on the moral agency of the policemen, moral condemnation of their actions and attitudes appears to suffuse his book. ⁹

Having summarized the central points in Browning’s and Goldhagen’s contrasting and competing explanations of Police Battalion 101’s behavior, I turn now to frequently iterated criticisms of the overall coherence of Goldhagen’s explanation. I will defend his explanation against this criticism, but will not adjudicate on whether his empirical claims on the pervasion, intensity, and content of eliminationist antisemitic beliefs and values in German society are historically accurate.

3. A Fatal Flaw in Goldhagen’s Explanation?

4. Explanation and Culpability

I have not sought to defend the factual correctness of Goldhagen’s diagnosis of the nature and incidence of eliminationist beliefs. This is an empirical matter, and my aim was conceptual, namely, to show that his claim that the policemen of Battalion 101 were culturally determined to acquire beliefs that played a dominant causal role in the generation of their genocidal actions does cohere with his claim that those actions were freely and responsibly performed. This leaves to be addressed the question of the moral culpability of the policemen according to Goldhagen’s (and later, according to Browning’s) explanation of their actions.

Notwithstanding Goldhagen’s disavowals to the contrary, it certainly seems that he holds the policemen individually morally culpable for their willful participation in genocidal killing. But his moralistic and condemnatory manner of writing could be read as just an expression of abhorrence and outrage at the events, the perpetrators’ actions and the suffering inflicted on the victims. One could speak or write in this way while deliberately leaving open and unaddressed the question of the perpetrators’ moral culpability. ²⁵ In support of this possible reading one might note that in the thick of his characterization of the men’s actions as gratuitously cruel, brutal, sadistic, etc., he (Goldhagen 1997, 245) is solicitous to assert, and to emphasize, that with regard to their participation in genocidal killing, “they did not conceive of themselves as having been engaged in crime.” Rather, he says, they considered it “justified extermination” (Goldhagen 1997, 254). They believed this because of the eliminationist antisemitism that they almost inevitably acquired from the eliminationism-ridden society in which they were raised and lived. Moreover, Goldhagen says nothing to indicate that he judges the policemen to have been culpably at fault for believing the illusory things about Jews and Jewishness that he says they inveterately believed.

I do not actually think that the foregoing reading is what Goldhagen intended, ²⁶ but it does cohere with his (Goldhagen 1997, 481) insistence that “issues of guilt and responsibility are never directly addressed” in Hitler’s willing executioners. Geoffrey Scarre (1998) and Richard Kamber (2000) argue that if Goldhagen is right about the eliminationist beliefs that he attributes to the policemen then their culpability is thereby substantially diminished by virtue of their factual ignorance (false empirical beliefs about the nature, powers, and danger of Jewish people and Jewishness). But whether or not such ignorance is possible, and if it is, whether it can serve to excuse or diminish the culpability of wrongdoers for their wrongful actions, is a hotly disputed issue in moral epistemology and psychology.

Some philosophers have argued that perpetrators of actions and practices that inflict terrible suffering on innocent victims may nevertheless be excused, or judged leniently, if they nonculpably believe that they are behaving morally permissibly. A frequently invoked example is that of institutionalized slavery (which bears comparison with the institutionally administered genocidal killing of the Holocaust). Historians tell us that for most of the history of institutionalized slavery (prior to the emergence of the abolition movement in the 18th century), nearly everyone who lived with it simply took for granted that it was permissible to treat certain people in the ways that slaves were treated. They acquired these assumptions through processes of cultural determination. In the light of this historical scholarship, Gideon Rosen (2003, 66) asserts that it “would have taken a moral genius to see through to the wrongness of chattel slavery.”

But other philosophers assert, with equal assuredness, the polar opposite. Alexander Guerrero (2007, 71-72), for example, rejoins that it is not “particularly complicated to figure out that slavery is morally wrong,” due to “the relatively simple and apparently a priori nature of the reasoning required.” On this basis, Guerrero argues that it is not possible to nonculpably hold beliefs that apparently seem to the holder to license the infliction of such palpable suffering and injustice on innocent people as slavery did. Elizabeth Harman accepts that such beliefs might have been held, even nonculpably so, by those that were implicated in slavery, but argues that this does not diminish their culpability (because they “inadequately car[ed] about what is morally significant” [Harman 2011, 460]).

This dispute shows that there are strong arguments that would support the attribution of culpability to those policemen of Battalion 101 that participated in genocidal killing, while acknowledging that they acted as they did because of their culturally determined beliefs. This, I think, is probably the stance that Goldhagen himself takes. But one could accept Goldhagen’s explanation without having to adopt this condemnatory stance (for the same reasons that some philosophers invoke in support of the judgment that those who participated in slavery are diminished in personal culpability). Thus it remains an open question what kind and degree of moral blame the perpetrators deserve. ²⁷

In addition to one’s philosophical stance on whether and how factual (and moral) ignorance might excuse wrongdoers to varying degrees, how one ultimately judges culpability is also a function of what kind of judger one is. One might, that is, be someone that seeks to judge culpability on the basis of strict desert and justice, or mercifully. A merciful judger is one who judges people “less harshly than they deserve” (Markosian 2013, 269). Martha Nussbaum (2006, 42) argues powerfully that “while judging the wrong to be wrong,” still we can and should aspire to a more humane, lenient, and merciful mode of judgment of the wrongdoer than that which emanates from strict adherence to the principle of general and impartial justice. She finds grounds for this merciful outlook in coming to a detailed appreciation of the difficult circumstances in which wrongdoers are often embedded (in terms of luck, opportunity, contingency, constraint, ignorance, a “socially taught scheme of values” that is “diseased” [Nussbaum 2006, 17], etc.).

Nussbaum argues that the merciful attitude toward judgment can be nurtured and cultivated through the appreciation of literature and drama, which makes one sensitive to the situational detail of characters’ lives and enhances one’s capacity for empathetic identification with them. I will shortly consider some empirical evidence that suggests that contemplating historical and social scientific explanations might have a similar “softening” effect on one’s judgment of culpability. For now, I want to reiterate that I am not arguing for, or commending, any particular standpoint on the spectrum between the merciful and the juridical judger of wrongdoing. The point that I do want to press is that acceptance of Goldhagen’s explanation of the policemen’s actions does not thereby prescribe the kind or degree of moral blame that they are due.

5. Conclusion: Excusing the Inexcusable?

Some readers may be sickened by my entertaining even the possibility that one could have a mitigatory view of the culpability of the genocidal policemen. An underlying assumption of the Incoherence criticism is that Goldhagen’s explanation entails that the policemen must be excused from moral blame for their actions. But this is normatively unacceptable to Incoherence critics (and, indeed, to most scholars), for whom it must follow from any viable explanation of the policemen’s behavior that their culpability is unmitigatedly upheld. ²⁸ However, Browning’s opposing explanation (which virtually all of Goldhagen’s critics endorse) is no more unequivocally able to meet this condition than Goldhagen’s is.

Browning’s explanation does not say that the policemen were literally forced to act as they did, but it does claim to identify social and situational forces and pressures that made it hard for them to have chosen to act otherwise. Even so, he is adamant that they “not only had the capacity to choose but exercised that choice in various ways,” as is evident, he says, in the fact that “some refused to kill and some stopped killing” (Browning 2001, 221, 188). Because of this fact Browning (2001, 188) insists that “those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did.” Browning might mean either (i) even if it were true that anyone in the same situation would act as the killers did, this fact would not absolve the killers, or (ii) that this fact would absolve the killers, but it evidently did not pertain, so it is not true that anyone in the same situation as the killers were in would act as they did (the evaders did not). It is clear that he means (ii). But it is of some significance that Browning thinks that if it were the case that anyone in the same situation would act as the killers did, this fact would absolve the killers.

According to Browning’s explanation, the policemen acted as they did despite being aware that it was morally wrong to do so. The key question for assessing their culpability then is as follows: How forceful were the social and situational pressures that bore upon them, and how difficult would it have been for them to choose what, ex hypothesi, they knew was the morally correct course of action? Browning must think that the forcefulness of these pressures was very substantial indeed, for he candidly confesses: “I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader” (2001, 188). Given that he reports an 80% to 90% participation rate in the killing, and that the killers were essentially no different from him (in virtue of being “ordinary men”), he must think it highly likely that he would have been a killer in that situation. Thus Browning deems the pressures so forceful that he thinks even someone like himself (an “ordinary,” but evidently intellectually sophisticated, morally sensitive and humane man) would probably have succumbed to them in that situation. And what goes for Browning surely goes for all of us and all the people we know too (“there but for the grace of odds go we”). ²⁹ So, while it is not quite the case that anyone in the same situation as the killers would do what they did, it is true (if Browning’s explanation is correct) that anyone in that situation might very well, to a high degree of probability, do what they did. And this does look like the basis for a strong claim for mitigated culpability, if not absolution, of the policemen.

While Browning and Goldhagen would no doubt protest vehemently against the idea that their explanations license any significant degree of diminished culpability for the policemen, both explanations afford just that possibility. One might well ponder the following questions, the answers to which I do not profess to know: Which, if either, of Browning’s and Goldhagen’s explanations licenses the strongest mitigatory claim for the policemen? And more generally, which people are the more culpable: those that succumb to extreme (but not irresistible) pressure to knowingly do terrible things, or those that willingly do these terrible things whilst erroneously believing they are justified in doing so? Or are they equally culpable (or equally non-culpable)?

Perhaps mindful of the original intentionalist denunciation of the allegedly extenuating effect of social-structural explanation, Browning is solicitous to disclaim “the old clichés that to explain is to excuse.” “Explaining is not excusing,” he insists (2001, xviii). ³⁰ Goldhagen makes no such explicit pronouncement, but evidently concurs. However, experimentally informed research conducted by Arthur Miller, Anne Gordon, and Amy Buddie (1999) calls such confident denials into question. These social psychologists devised experiments to examine the effects of entertaining “explicit [“causal”/“situational”] explanations” of wrongdoing on observers’ judgment of the perpetrator’s culpability. They concluded that there is a strong tendency for people to take up “a more condoning attitude toward perpetrators” subsequent to doing the cognitive work of engaging with explanations of the perpetrator’s actions, compared with those that judge independently of explanatory mediation (Miller, Gordon, and Buddie 1999, 254).

Browning can quite reasonably assert that to explain the policemen’s behavior is not thereby to excuse them from culpability, and that he himself does not excuse them. But the explanation that he produced might well exercise a powerful influence on its audience, inducing them to excuse the perpetrators (or judge them leniently). In the light of evidence on the effects of explanation on observers’ judgment of culpability, Browning might want to warn his readers that they should be aware of this phenomenon and try to guard against it. Whether the phenomenon is susceptible to willful conscious control, on being forewarned, has not, as far as I am aware, been investigated yet. If it is not susceptible to willful conscious control (it might be like, or a form of, implicit bias in this respect), and one agrees with Browning that one’s instinctively condemnatory judgment of perpetrator culpability should not become toned down, that would be reason to take seriously the original intentionalist injunction against social-structural explanation of the Holocaust.

However, one might be persuaded by some of the contributors (including Nussbaum) to a book on “judgement and understanding” (Tabensky 2006) who argue that it is right and good that one’s natural inclination to pass condemnatory judgment is diminished upon gaining insight into perpetrators’ circumstances of action. If one agrees with them that it is a good thing, then not only would one not be troubled by the intentionalist claim on the excusing effects of social-structural explanations on judgments of culpability and the experimental findings that support this claim, one would embrace them. Conversely, if one thinks this a lamentable corruption of sound and just judgment, then one has reason to be wary of social scientific and historical explanations of the Holocaust and other evil or wrongful events.

Intentionalists, it seems then, were right all along to warn that social-structural (“functionalist”) types of explanation inherently carry the capacity to extenuate judgments of culpability, even when the purveyor of the explanation disavows any such intention. However, as we have seen, it is not just social-structural types of explanation that have this capacity, but “intentionalist” ones—as exemplified by Goldhagen’s—too. Although such explanations are focused on the free agency, intentionality, and motivations of the individual perpetrators, and hence agreeable to the intentionalist standpoint, they still appeal to something external to the perpetrators’ consciousness. With Goldhagen’s explanation, the external factors are the sources and modes of transmission of perpetrators’ beliefs, values, and desires. Indeed, without the identification of something external to the consciousness and agency of the actors there would be no explanation. What this observation shows is that the original intentionalists should perhaps have been opposed not just to social-structural explanations but to any social scientific or historical explanation of the events of the Holocaust. Whether this opposition is justified depends on whether one thinks it good or bad that judgment of wrongdoers’ culpability may be susceptible to moderation by explanatory insight into the causes and conditions of their actions.