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"The Mind of the Mass Murderer:
The Nazi Executioners—and Those Who Stood By"
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Abstract –
THE author remembers very clearly the time when, some years younger than he is now, he played at hide an seek with the German and Vichy police, as did the large majority of the Jewish population of France.. Humiliating imprisonment, painful forced labor, misery without end-this was what he saw as the terrible price of capture. But that he was fleeing a gruesome death in huge factories of extermination-that simply did not cross his mind.
Such an attitude was the usual one: Cassandra voices were rare; and the warnings sent out by the British radio were generally considered to be the inevitable exaggerations of wartime propaganda. The mind resists what exceeds its experience; the existence of an industry of death for death's sake was difficult to accept. Among the Jewish masses in Poland there was the same tendency to resist the evidence, notwithstanding the proximity of the death camps. As for the free world, in the United States and England, in spite of much and widely diffused information, numerous doubters could be found up to the very day that the advance of the Allied armies laid bare the complex workings of the machinery of Maidanek and Auschwitz.
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