I agree with the comments of Shannon Box and I will go farther. While there were sadists, and many ended up in the Einsatzgruppen or as SS camp guards, the men who caused the Holocaust of the European Jews, Polish Catholics, and others, were psychologically normal, in the sense in which we use that term to describe everyday human behavior. The film distorts the truth about the Holocaust of the European Jews by portraying a principal character as a twisted and evil man-- someone who would put a cat in the oven, knife an innocent man, etc. In truth, Hoess, Eichmann, and other KZ or death camp commandants and architects of the Holocaust were not different psychologically than you or I. Read their own writings-- read the accounts of Himmler's getting sick watching 200 Czechs machinegunned in Prague-- Heydrich had to hold him up to keep him from fainting-- the next day he issued orders for "humane" executions ... Hannah Arendt's comments on Eichmann come to mind, or those of the U.S. Army psychiatrist, Gilbert, who examined Eichmann-- "the personality of a common mailman"-- "more normal than I am, after having examined him." This film does a fundamental injustice to the truth by portraying the Nazi murderers as mentally sick people, not as the same people we can find in any government or military, including our own. The lesson from history and research is not that there are evil and sick people and that we should look out for them. The lesson is that the people who staffed the death camps for Hitler were normal people, not different from those we find in business, industry, government, and the military, today. Vernon R. Padgett, Ph.D., Social Psychology, Ohio State University, 1985.
