Hey Reddit, so just as the title asks, do any of you all know of any good books similar to Browning's, Ordinary Men, and Goldhagen's, Hitler's Willing Executioners? I am trying to get a better understanding on what made the Nazi party so okay with the mass murders that were commited in such a small window of time.
There are two books you should be looking for.
First is Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying - The Secret WWll Transcripts of German POWS (apparently also released under the translated title "Soldiers"). It is conversations amongst German POWs that were secretly recorded by their Allied captors, and provides quite the unique window into the mindset of the German soldier during the war, and their engagement with the casual brutality of the Holocaust and larger German war machine. That's for the macro view though.
For a much narrower perspective, get ahold of "A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944" by Willy Peter Reese. Reese was just a German grunt on the frontlines to the east, and during his time, he kept a diary of everything, including the atrocities committed by Germany, and his own involvement with them. While most German post-war memoirs are, to say the least, whitewashing of the soldiers' experience - "Sure, there were bad apples but I was an honorable soldier" - Reese is brutally honest about what went on, and lays out his own demons and his attempts to reconcile his own complicity. It is made possible by the fact that, well, Reese died before the war was over, and his papers alone survived to be published many years later.
So if you are looking for the German persepctive, those two books should be your first stop in my opinion.
Nick Stargardt also has a recent publication about everyday life in Germany during the war, called The German War.