Evil

This weekend I started watching the Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. I was obviously drawn to it because of the war now unfolding in the Middle East and the demented, soulless, brainless orange golem currently controlling the levers of power in the White House who appears to be steering the world toward ruination and catastrophe. Play with fire and get burned.

History rarely repeats itself in the neat and tidy ways we imagine, but it does have an unsettling habit of echoing when political systems grow fragile and grievances become political fuel.

“Evil” is a word I dislike and very rarely use. It has too many religious connotations. It belongs to a universe of absolutes, and we don’t live in absolutes — or at least we shouldn’t.

Through archival footage and dramatizations, interspersed with commentary from historians, the series tells the story of the failed Austrian painter Adolf Hitler, his rise to power in Germany, and the world’s attempt after the war to seek justice at the Nuremberg Trials, where twenty-four of the regime’s most senior surviving figures — including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop — were prosecuted.

The story is told in part through the eyes of the American journalist William L. Shirer, who had a front-row seat to events. Shirer reported from Berlin during the Nazi period, covered the trials, and later wrote the monumental history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The question at the heart of the story is whether there is such a thing as evil.

The answer, I think, is no — at least not as something distant, mythical, and grandiose. Its source is far more mundane. It lies in ordinary human weaknesses: resentment, humiliation, ambition, cowardice, opportunism. Not even as interesting, perhaps, as the word “banal” that Hannah Arendt famously used when writing about the bureaucratic mediocrity of Adolf Eichmann.

Watching the series, what strikes you most is how ordinary and unremarkable Hitler himself appears as an individual. His character was shaped by grievance, humiliation, and resentment — hardly unique qualities in politics.

His rise from a marginal extremist with a radical agenda and a relatively small following to someone holding the balance of power in parliament was enabled by conservative and moderate politicians who believed they could control him, harness his popular support, and neutralize his more dangerous attributes.

They miscalculated.

In the fractured political landscape of the Weimar Republic, elites who feared instability more than extremism opened the door to him, convinced that the institutions of the state would ultimately contain him. They opened a door they later discovered they could not close.

Hitler understood how to exploit the situation. His nativist and romantic vision of German greatness appealed to a population humiliated by defeat in the First World War and by what many perceived as a feckless political class who had accepted the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Once in power, Hitler’s first objective was to avenge that humiliation. The symbolism of forcing France to accept surrender in the Compiègne Forest — inside the same railway carriage used for the 1918 armistice — was no accident. It was revenge made theatrical.

The regime’s genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews did not emerge all at once as a single master plan. It radicalized over time, particularly during the war, after the Blitz failed to defeat Britain, and the military campaign against the Soviet Union in the east hit a brick wall. Military success emboldened the regime, while later desperation hardened its brutality, codified at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

If evil exists at all, it is not the product of some diabolical plan, like in the movies. It's a more organic  process, and often improvised. It flourishes in weakness and grievance, is opportunistic, and feeds on cowardice. It festers and spreads like an untreated disease.

And it hides in plain sight - in words like patriotism, security, loyalty, greatness.