This semester, HERC has been hosting a monthly seminar discussion group for college students engaged and resulted in two thought-provoking discussions centered on the articles “Making a Killing: The Economics of the Holocaust” by Richard J. Overy and “Stone-Cold Killers or Drunk with Murder? Alcohol and Atrocity during the Holocaust” by Edward Westermann. The discussion was facilitated by TSC history professor, Monte Finkelstein. Together, these readings illuminated distinct but interconnected dimensions of the Holocaust: the economic structures that sustained genocide and the human psychology and social behavior that enabled ordinary men to become perpetrators.

The first seminar, based on Overy’s “Making a Killing,” examined the Holocaust as not only a political and racial project but also an economic enterprise. Overy’s analysis situates the Holocaust within the broader context of Nazi exploitation, forced labor, and profit-driven collaboration. He reveals how the machinery of extermination was deeply entwined with material gain—through the seizure of Jewish property, the economic mobilization of concentration camp labor, and the participation of private industries that profited from the Nazi war economy. The seminar discussion focused on the moral complicity of bureaucrats, businessmen, and economic planners who rationalized genocide as a means of economic efficiency. Students debated whether the drive for profit was a secondary outcome of Nazi ideology or a coequal motive that fueled the genocide. The conversation underscored that the Holocaust, while ideologically rooted in antisemitism, was also sustained by pragmatic and economic incentives that made killing profitable and bureaucratically routine.

The following month, Westermann’s “Stone-Cold Killers or Drunk with Murder?” shifted the discussion from structural and economic systems to the psychology and culture of killing. Westermann explores the pervasive role of alcohol among German police battalions and SS units, arguing that drinking both facilitated and reflected the socialization of violence. Alcohol became a ritualized mechanism of bonding, numbing, and celebrating atrocities. The seminar’s conversation grappled with Westermann’s central question: were perpetrators acting out of cold-blooded ideological conviction or under the influence of intoxication and peer pressure? Students examined primary accounts from perpetrators and survivors, considering how alcohol operated as both a literal intoxicant and a symbolic tool of moral disengagement. The discussion highlighted how social dynamics, conformity, and dehumanization, combined with physical intoxication, blurred moral boundaries and normalized mass murder.

The two seminars offered a multidimensional understanding of the Holocaust that moved beyond traditional political or military histories. Overy’s economic analysis exposed the bureaucratic and financial complicity that made genocide sustainable, while Westermann’s cultural-psychological lens revealed how everyday human behavior and social rituals enabled atrocity. Students concluded that the Holocaust cannot be fully understood through ideology alone—it must also be studied through the economic systems and social practices that made genocide possible and, disturbingly, ordinary.

By juxtaposing these two works, the seminar series encouraged participants to confront the complexity of evil in modern society. The Holocaust emerges not as an inexplicable rupture in civilization but as a convergence of ideology, economy, and human behavior—where profit, policy, and psychology all contributed to one of history’s greatest crimes. Such discussions challenge students to reflect critically on the mechanisms of complicity and to recognize how ordinary structures of work, leisure, and social life can become instruments of atrocity when moral restraint is lost.