If it helps, you can think of it not as a statement about the value we give to the Nazis, but the value we hold ourselves to.

A buddy of mine had a relative who was in Germany for the occupation. He was one of the guys I was talking about, miming tiny violins. He fucked a lot of German girls who were half starving. He had money and food and all the armaments of the occupation behind him, so they didn’t really have a choice. He would go into people’s houses and just take stuff, if it looked like something cool he wanted. My friend said he thought that having that experience, having this guy over there in his formative years having all his darkest instincts catered to and amplified, basically ruined him as a person. His whole life he wasn’t able to really be right because of it. But at the time, I guess he thought something along the lines of, “What’s the difference?”

After all, they’re Nazis. Or basically Nazis. Anyway, their lives have no value.

Like I say, I do get what you’re saying. But also… what do you do, when you have a whole population, millions of people, who have all given approval in some way large or small for some kind of monstrous crime?

Some of them deserve to die. Some of them are redeemable. In general, for most of them, I think that kind of question is mostly just not anyone else’s business to get involved in. Whatever they did or didn’t do is going to have to be something that they live with, maybe square up with their maker after if you think of it that way, and nothing you can do can tip the scales of it in any direction. But what about their kids? What about the society they’re now trying to build in the aftermath? It’s so easy and satisfying to say they all have no value, not look at them as human people with all the potential and all the evils and failings that entails, not examine the factors that tipped all so many of them over into taking part in what they did. Not try to make sure you really understand it, try to work it out, so you can see how to work so it doesn’t happen again.

There is an easy answer to all of these questions, of course: “They’re Nazis. Fuck 'em.” In combat, that’s the answer. But out of combat, what future are you building when you write off a whole population because they all took part in a culture that started excusing or committing terrible crimes? Maybe they were confused by propaganda. Maybe they were scared, or just went with the herd. Maybe they had that darkness inside them. Maybe they were creative instigators. How are you going to look into every one of them, and decide what the answer is? Choosing one universal answer is easy, but that doesn’t make it right. And like I say, you are going to lose something of yourself when you start looking at other human beings that way. That’s part of why a lot of people who’ve been in combat come back with bad bad problems.

This whole set of questions about how to relate to that whole population of evil is about to become (or has become) a pretty fuckin’ relevant question in America.