How did "ordinary men" become mass murderers? The debate about the perpetrators of the Holocaust was fundamentally reshaped by Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men". Controversies over collaboration, space, and gender dynamics are hardly topics exclusively debated in Germany, but more intensely debated across the European continent, Israel and the US than ever before. Browning's impulse was not only focused on historical research, but also on debates about responsibility in the present. The analysis of democratic collapse can be the starting point for processes of recognition of such vulnerabilities today.