No theory forbids me to say "Ah!" or "Ugh!", but it forbids me the bogus theorization of my "Ah!" and "Ugh!" - the value judgments. - Theodor Julius Geiger (1960)

Kühl, S. (2016), Ordinary Organisations: Why normal men carried out the holocaust, Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.

Stefan Kühl recognizes the legal, political, scientific and economic circumstances behind the Holocaust as well as the inherent dynamics of interactions between those who use violence and those who have experienced violence during eg deportations and executions. His thesis is that without basic knowledge of organizations one cannot understand the involvement of ordinary people in the holocaust.

During the Holocaust, there were normal organizations, meaning that the organizations that were involved in the holocaust worked with programs, communication channels and personnel.

Kühl successively describes the target identification of organizational members, the relationship between coercion and freedom in these organizations, the operation of camaraderie and the building of informal norms, the dehumanization of the victims through which an organizational culture of brutality was formed, the legalization of murder and the enrichment by the expropriation of the Jewish population, and the management of self-image.

With his analysis, Kühl counterbalances the soothing reflex of dismissing the actions during the Holocaust as "the actions of a few fanatical Nazis, morbid sadists and highly engaged eliminatory anti-Semites".