Not to speak for samtheman but there has long been an effort to remind the public and people like us that while Nazi Germany was indeed a grave evil it didn’t spring up out of nowhere like some phantom or demon-seed.
Rather it was made step by step, often by ordinary (or ordinary-seeming) men who brought the movement and the nation with them, a bit at a time, speech at a time, law at a time, lurch at a time, into full-blown horror.
A philosopher named Hannah Arendt coined the phrase in a books she wrote about Eichmann back in the early 60s, I believe; and I think part of what she meant was that Eichmann and perhaps some of his compatriots weren’t anything special when you saw them alone, up close, without the vast machinery of Nazism around them.
They were small, dull, defeated, weak. They had wrought great evil but, in and of themselves, they were banal.
(We can see the same incremental damage being caused by the same kind of people—the Obamanation—around us now.)
Yes, in an effort to understand how the Jews got into the tragedy of the National Socialist Germany, I struggled through her ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism”. Hardest read I ever experienced. Still do not think I got the full meaning of the book. Came to the conclusion that the difficult sentence structure was a product of language barriers. Not sure, but suspect she was primary in something other than English.
I was quoting Hannah Arendt, and I was also thinking of the documentary called Shoa, that contained an interview with a former official of the German railroad who explained that during the war there were civilian trains, military trains and then something called “special trains”.
When the interviewer pressed him on the content of the “special trains” the railroad official explained in the most dry and banal words imaginable that the SS had certain special transportation needs that had to be handled by special trains. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was on those trains — who was on those trains — it was that his bureaucratic brain allowed him to “compartmentalize” it completely.
It was one of the most chilling interviews I’ve ever seen, precisely because the rat appeared quite “normal”.