State violence on a mass scale requires the active involvement and collaboration of a large number of state agents. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors affecting the civil servants’ decision to collaborate in, or subvert, the implementation of inhumane policies. I explore this issue by examining the role played by French Police in the deportation of Jews from France between 1942 and 1944. Neither ideology (anti-Semitism) nor coercion can adequately account for the French police officers’ collaboration in the implementation of anti-Semitic policies. The key problem is to explain how individuals agreed to perform acts including acts of violence, which they initially found repellent. To analyze this process, I examine the ways in which civil servants at various levels of the administrative ladder interpreted, and reacted to, measures of mass scale persecution.