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Title: The Banality of Evil
Review: It is chilling and eye-opening to read these reports written from the Eastern front. The violent work of the special death squads is chronicled in such a casual manner that the authors might just as well have been sending to Berlin a litany of materiel needs or a laundry list. The report from Kiev in late summer 1941, listing the tens of thousands killed at Babi Yar, remind one how casually these Nazi "supermen" seemed to go about their grisly business, at least at the outset of the mass killings. It also reminds one of how efficient the Germans were in keeping records--even of some of their worst genocidal atrocities. Good thing too, because these documents were instrumental in convicting a good number of these ordinary men who in the end persuaded themselves to commit extraordinarily horrific acts.
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