This is an examination of the motives of twenty-two perpetrators of the Jewish Holocaust. Each served as an officer of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units which beginning in June 1941, carried out mass execution of Jews in the German-occupied portion of the Soviet Union. Following World War II the subjects of this study were tried before a U.S. Military Tribunal as part of the thirteen Nuremberg Trials, and this study is based on the records of their trial, known as Case IX or more commonly as teh Einsatzgruppen Trial. From these records the thesis concludes that the twenty-two men were shaped politically by their experiences during the Weimar Era (1919-1932), and that as perpetrators of the Holocaust their actions were informed primarily by the tenets of Nazism, particularly anti-Semitism.