The Citizen as Perpetrator: Kurt Blanke and Aryanization in France, 1940–1944

The question of how "ordinary men" became killers has long exercised the scholarly imagination, but much recent scholarship has focused on mass killing in the "East." The present study returns our gaze to Western Europe to ask how a middle-class professional with little earlier anti-semitic animus could turn into a "desk perpetrator" who worked conscientiously to destroy the Jews' livelihood and thereby contributed to the realization of the "Final Solution."¹