Raul Hilberg (1992) argued that the moral principles of the people involved in the massacre of the Holocaust were not different from the actual victims. The Germans who carried out the Holocaust where not specially trained people for these kind of situations, they just represented a "remarkable cross-section of the German population" (Newman, 2002). Though they were not different from the others, the question stands in what were the push factors for them to commit such atrocities. Following Hilberg (1992), various concepts and theories have been developed in order to understand the mentality behind these massacres, which start with law abiding citizens and turning them into perpetrators. Part of these theories and concepts are supported more from a historical point of view, though most of the theories result in having one cause. The main cause is represented by anti-Semitism or peer pressure, without taking into consideration other ulterior motives. The Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust are one of the most complex cases of genocide where a multi-causal explanation has to be portrayed in order to attempt to explain the reasoning behind these atrocities.
The Rwandan genocide took place in 1994, when part of the Rwanda's ruling party, together with the military, organized one of the most instantaneous annihilation movements (Straus, 2006). All this took place in the middle of a civil war, right after a presidential assassination, when part of Rwanda's ruling party took control over the state and managed to eradicate their political rivals, and declare war on Tutsis (Straus, 2006). They have managed to deploy armed forces and demanded that every man needs to join one cause, to abolish the Tutsis. After one hundred days, Rwanda's ruling party has lost the civil war, but nonetheless the violence inflicted has managed to claim more than half of a million civilian casualties (Straus, 2006).
