I want to turn now to the moral contest which lay at the heart of a conflict often described in terms of good and evil. It is quite erroneous to believe that the Nazis abandoned morality as such. Law, which in liberal societies is supposed to protect our rights against the state, was redefined as the will of the racial collective, renouncing "its claim to be the sole source for deciding what is legal and illegal". On a less technical level, they stripped away what they reflexively called sentimental humanitarianism, in favour of a more limited ethno-sentimentality, themes already put into practice in pre-war campaigns to sterilise the disabled, mad or feckless. War enabled this to turn murderous, starting with the elimination of "ballast existences" in asylums and concentration camps. A modern nation's ethics were supposed to revert to those of the Spartans. This was extended into a genocidal assault on European Jews once US participation made the war global as well as total, bringing as it did the shadow of possible defeat. Speaking to his inner circle a day after declaring war on America, Hitler said: "The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence."

Perverse though it may seem, retention of a sense of right and wrong was as essential to that process as the scrupulous legal documents and receipts which accompanied expropriation, ostracism and deportation.

The retention, and redirection, of a sense of right and wrong was essential to the commission of appalling crimes. This was not just a matter of prosecuting individual SS men who stole the watches, jewellery and gold teeth of their victims, even though the entire Holocaust involved systematic theft. The existence of what SS courts called "excess perpetrators" was essential to the majority who killed in a more robotic fashion. What else is one to make of the ten months' sentence received by a member of the Dortmund Gestapo who lurched drunkenly through Bialystok shouting that "he was Lord of life and death....if he was ordered to shoot 300 children, he'd shoot 150 of them himself". 

Essential too was the belief that this generation of Germans had been given an historic opportunity and mission to purify the world of a cosmic evil in human guise. As one perpetrator exclaimed after shooting 200 people: "Man alive, damn it, a generation has to go through this, so that things will be better for our children." By the same token, criminalising their innocent victims was integral to these events. Jews were responsible for the scenes of torture and murder which German troops encountered in Latvian or Ukrainian jails the NKVD had vacated. They were partisans. Indeed, on December 18, that is what Himmler wrote after a meeting with Hitler: "Jewish Question: to be exterminated as partisans." In a further twist of logic, might not even an infant grow up to visit that sort of vengeance on the people who had killed its parents? And don't forget that the word "Anständigkeit" (decency) is as easy to find in the annals of the major perpetrators as "Ausrottung" (extermination).