When I was young and in school and learning about the holocaust and other genocides, I wondered how it could ever have been allowed to occur.

For me, it was more how they could pull it off in practice. I saw the pictures from Mengele's laboratory, the endless piles of shorn hair, the mass graves, and i wondered "how could they find that many people to do these things?" These where atrocities as depraved as the deeds of the worst serial killer, but how many serial killers are there? Clearly not enough at any given time to run Auschwitz, let alone an entire country full of Auschwitzes. I looked at old men on the street, those old enough to have been in the SS, wondering if that frail, kindly septuagenarian could be a psychopathic killing machine deep down inside. If my grandparents' old friends, cheerful people in their sunday clothes, smelling of Kölnisch Wasser and mothballs, had been among the killers. It couldn't be that they had been born that way. Something had turned them. Not just a few, but millions of them. And many millions more to enable it. I wondered what that thing could have been, wondered what it took to make a man a monster and a state a slaughterhouse. And like you, i don't wonder anymore.