Just finished:
Hannah Arendt (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem, A report on the Banality of Evil
The historical complement to Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority. Like Primo Levi said,
They were made of the same cloth as we were, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces…
The thing that stood out was the the way the final solution was resisted by a few couragous individuals and by a handful of countries (Denmark particularly) that found the strength to say ‘no’. And in those countries where dissent was expressed more or less openly, the majority of the population – even anti-semites and Nazi soldiers – could be carried along with the resistence to the holocaust
… “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere