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But in any case, despite the interdictions, the promises of secrecy and Globocnik’s threats, the men of the Einsatz remained talkative. You just had to wear an SS uniform and frequent the bar in the Deutsches Haus, occasionally buying someone a drink, to be quickly informed of everything. The obvious discouragement caused by the military news, clearly decipherable through the optimism radiating from the communiqués, contributed to loosening people’s tongues. When they proclaimed that in Sicily our courageous Italian allies, backed by our forces, are holding firm, everyone understood that the enemy had not been driven back into the sea, and had finally opened a second front in Europe; as for Kursk, anxiety increased as the days passed, for the Wehrmacht, after its initial successes, remained obstinately, unusually silent: and when finally they began to mention the pla
There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity: and that Döll is a good example. What else was he, Döll, but a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his i
But now I’ve strayed from my first reflections. What I wanted to say is that if man is certainly not, as some poets and philosophers have made him out to be, naturally good, he is not naturally evil, either: good and evil are categories that can serve to qualify the effect of the actions of one man on another; but they are, in my opinion, fundamentally unsuitable, even unusable, to judge what goes on in the heart of that man. Döll killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities? And how many philanthropists, throughout the world, made famous by their extravagant generosity are, on the contrary, monsters of egotism and harshness, greedy for public glory, full of vanity, tyra