The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

ERNST KLEE, WILLI DRESSEN, VOLKER RIEES
anything but horror, perhaps shame, possibly curiosity, but hardly any sense of
the humanity of either side. Rather, I chose a far less directly horrifying account,
yet one whose ultimate effect appears to me to be far more chilling and more
conducive to some understanding of the mind of the perpetrators. For what we
see here is the humanity, potential for true affection for another human being,
curiosity about different peoples and cultures, devotion to work and duty,
capacity for hard work and pleasure at a job well done, along with a deep
ideological conviction and powerful prejudices, of a man who is a cog in the
mass murder of the Jews. This man is no monster, and his capacity for indifference
and compassion is probably not much different from any other average person’s.
Yet he is one of hundreds of thousands of little people who made the machinery
of genocide tick. Had we erased the lines in his diary that mention the
brutalization of the Jews, it would not have been very hard to identify with him.
What makes his diary so revealing, and so terrifying, is that there is no gradual
transition from one to another. It is the very same man who is both just like us,
and a mass murderer.
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