The winter of 1941–1942 was tough on the German troops employed in the Demyansk Pocket, but it was still worse for the Soviet civilians who suffered from the extremes of hunger, cold and lack of shelter. This, however, made no impression on Theodor Eicke, the general-officer-commanding Division Totenkopf. In January 1942, in one of the division's journals, he encouraged his soldiers to see the locals the way Heinrich Heine's forlorn grenadier did in a poem: ‘What do I care for the woman, what do I care for the child. I have higher aspirations. Let them go begging if they are hungry.’ Being a Nazi Altkämpfer, Eicke undoubtedly represented the most ideologically committed segment of the Waffen-SS but there is no doubt that Nazi ideology played a central role in the justification and rationalization of the crimes committed by many an SS soldier. However, other factors were also at play, including, for example, career ambitions, peer pressure, dispersal of responsibility and the general brutalization of war. The present chapter offers an analysis of how these various components may help us understand how the monstrous atrocities described in the Chapter 11 could take place.

The early research of Nazi crimes tended to demonize the perpetrators, and portray them as deviants, psychopaths and sadists with a particular proclivity for authoritarianism. Later research tended to emphasize structural explanations such as, for example, Bauman's famous interpretation of the Holocaust being a product primarily of bureaucratic and dehumanizing decision-making in a modern rational state. Detailed empirical historical accounts have since clearly demonstrated how face-to-face killings and executions committed by soldiers and guards in German uniforms remained a central genocidal practice throughout the war and throughout the Nazi territories, something which cannot be explained solely by looking at bureaucratic procedures and mechanisms. Furthermore, a number of sociological, psychological and historical studies have demonstrated how all the perpetrators of mass violence and killings during the Second World War were generally quite ordinary people and not deviants in any particular way. Their deeds were not a product of pathological personalities, but were rather the results of the extreme environment and culture within which they operated. Important factors were conformism and loyalty to their co-killers, the role of authority figures and careerism as well as – not least – acceptance and internalisation of Nazi ideology and the consequent dehumanisation of the victims.