It Takes a Village

...to turn a garden variety musicologist into a mass murderer.

During World War II, the famous German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht belonged to the Feldgendarmerie division 683, which committed horrific murders on the Crimean peninsular [sic.]

You’ll likely not fail to note the “social cohesion measure” required to defeat the natural morality of formerly capable independent thinkers:

Various units were assigned to the operation. The process, which was at once collective and based on the division of labour, and in which all positions were in constant rotation, was obviously intended to vindicate the perpetrators. Feelings of individual guilt and responsibility could potentially be made to disappear within a large collective of perpetrators.