' According To Browning, The Men Were Motivated By A Raft Of

'
According to Browning, the men were motivated by a raft of socio-psychological aspects not by simply being German. This should illustrate that talking about Germans as a collection of individuals who feature that same preternatural anti-Semitic disposition makes little sense. It fails to acknowledge the variance of opinion on Nazi ideology and policy as well as cannot explain why some become inhibited murderers and others do not. Their ethnic identity (being German) does not add up to be a plausible explanation of their allegedly eliminationist anti-Semitism since it cannot take account of the fact the Germans frequently intermarried with Jews since their emancipation in 1867. German had long ceased to be a homogenous ethnic group, tied together by 'purity of blood lines' as Nazi ideology suggested.
IV
Now let us proceed to the last issue, the forms in which Germans may have expressed their support for anti-Semitic policies. Again, a methodologically difficulty lies at the heart of this issue. How to distinguish between those who gave their tacit support and those who engaged in demonstrative actions of support? Which form was a more accurate reflection of endorsement for Nazi policies? Historians have pointed out that about half a million Germans were actively involved in the Final Solution, the physical extermination of Jews after 1943. This included administrative work as well as the actual killings. Important sections of the economy and government were directly involved in the killings by providing crucial assistance in terms of resources, material and time to the Holocaust. Interestingly, we do not have to engage in a flight of fancy guess work but have some hard facts that may shed some light on the forms and extent of support for anti-Semitic policies amongst the German population. Nazis as well as the victorious armies conducted extensive surveys that were supposed to demonstrate the extent to which anti-Semitism messages were favourably received by the German population. Kulka sums up the evidence:
'the post 1945 surveys give [us] a reliable indication of attitudes amongst Germans: twenty percent were supportive of Nazi policies towards Jews; nineteen percent were generally in favour [of anti-Semitic policies] but said that Hitler had gone too far. Overall the surveys found that identification with the Final Solution was quite widespread among the public in the Third Reich.'
The question however remains whether the silence on the Holocaust was due to indifference or reflected endorsement of physical elimination of Jews. Norbert Frei argues that the extent to which workers had been won over by Nazi policies may give us a reliable clue as to the amount of support.