This book discusses the rationale of Nazi ethics and the moral conditioning of Nazi perpetrators aimed at developing a kind of "ethnic conscience" which restricted moral obligations to members of their own race community. It reconstructs how the universal ethics of humanism got turned upside down and replaced with the particularistic selective racial ethics and the pragmatics of eugenics and racial exterminatory politics. It shows how ordinary Germans became willing executioners of criminal and immoral deeds. Neither did they act without any moral orientation nor in the awareness that what they were doing was morally reprehensible. As perpetrators with a clear conscience they were convinced that the humiliation, persecution, deportation and, finally, killing of the Jews was the right thing to do.

PD Dr. Wolfgang Bialas ist als freiberuflicher Dozent und Übersetzer in Berlin tätig.