I'll never forget the story about the bunch of guys with Doctorates and double Doctorates in things like Humanities and Psychology who sat around a table together and planned the systematic slaughter of ~ 11 million Jews. Not one of them stops to say, "Does anyone think maybe this is wrong?" The thought has always boggled my mind.
I thought that, at first.
But then I realized it wasn't really that shocking that the governing clique of a totalitarian empire could think like that.
What I think is far more disturbing is when you consider that it would all have come to nothing, without the thousands and thousands of other people who willingly went along with it, or stood by and did nothing.
But what shocked me most of all was to learn how many of the victims had, for example, turned up on time at the railway stations to board the trains that they knew were taking them to the death camps. (And I mean knew. I'm not talking about at the start, when no-one knew what was really going on, and could conceivably think/convince themselves that they were just being resettled. I'm talking about later, when it was well known what was happening at the end, and huge numbers of people still let themselves be taken away without a struggle).
