This debate has long suffered from the one-sided emphasis on psychological accounts of dehumanization. Although many authors mention the political and ideological embeddedness of social situations which involve psychological dehumanization, this broader context has not been considered sufficiently.5
5 See, e.g. Lang, ‘Questioning Dehumanization’, op. cit.; Weißmann, op. cit.; Smith, ‘Paradoxes of Dehumanization’, op. cit. For the earlier debate see, e.g. Kelman, op. cit., pp. 37–38, 50; Sabini and Silver, op. cit., 67, 74.
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Only some social-psychological studies on mass violence have recently followed the (re-)turn to ideology in the historical research on National Socialism.6
6 See, e.g. Harald Welzer, Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2005); Alan P. Fiske and Tage S. Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Lang, ‘Explaining Genocide’, op. cit. For the (re-)turn of ideology in the historical research on National Socialism see, e.g. Frank-Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie. Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1998); Michael Mann, ‘Were the Perpetrators of Genocide “Ordinary Men” or “Real Nazis”? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographies’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 14:3 (2000), pp. 331–366; George C. Browder, ‘Perpetrator Character and Motivation: An Emerging Consensus?’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 17:3 (2003), pp. 480–497; Claus-Christian W. Szeynmann, ‘Perpetrators of the Holocaust: A Historiography’ in Olaf Jensen and Szeynmann (eds) Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2008), pp. 25–44; Szeynmann, ‘Nazi Economic Thought and Rhetoric During the Weimar Republic: Capitalism and Its Discontents’, Politics, Religion & Ideology 14:3 (2013), pp. 355–376; Lutz Raphael, ‘Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung’ in Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (eds) Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 73–86. Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014).
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I embrace the rediscovery of the role of ideology in the context of National Socialism and argue that the significance of dehumanization can be understood only if its ideological dimension is taken into account.7
7 Already early interpretations of National Socialism have emphasized the role of the racist ideology for the understanding of its dehumanizing mechanisms. See, e.g. Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1938); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1951).
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I will develop a complex picture of the racist core of Nazi ideology and derive a new understanding of the involved strategy of dehumanization.
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