I have been to the German concentrate camps still accessible for public visit (select parts have been kept to give a pretty good idea of fencing, guard quarters, barracks, assembly area, gates, crematorium, gas chambers). I have deliberately stood on a cold December morning sitting coat and gloves aside to get a little idea of the horror. I’ve read Frankl, Wiesel and have had friendship with two Jewish Holocaust prisoner survivors — numbers on arms.

I believe it is perhaps dangerous to say 1930–40s Germans, Nazis or SS should be considered something other than totally human. They were just like you, me, gypsies, Jews and many others they exterminated. They, I believe, were altogether human. As the freed Roman slave Terence turned playwright wrote: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”

To think otherwise about myself or anyone, to think there is a line exempt from human behavior I believe is very thin ice invitation to lose the defense against repeating the horrors, genocide and incomprehensible tragedy of what we humans are are capable of.