In Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (1993), Fred E. Katz begins where Hannah Arendt’s examination of the banality of evil ended. Katz tries to apply the techniques of sociology to the question of how ordinary people, without deliberate evil intent, commit horrendous deeds.
Katz himself narrowly escaped the massacre of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. When he returned to his former village after the war, he heard the villagers explain their passivity or collaboration during the Nazi persecutions by using the same language they used at the time: “There is nothing we could do about it. We are just little people. It’s the government.”
But he noticed that the village had erected a plaque in honor of the boys and men who had died fighting for the Axis, and remarks that it was just this loyalty and willingness to serve that doomed the victims of the Nazi era.
