I don’t know how many times I read it. Angrily, compulsively, at first, then more calmly, finally with an increasingly anxious serenity. I was looking for the key, the spell that had persuaded intelligent, able-bodied men like my father to shed their humanity and become killing machines. There is nothing in this book, nothing but dishwater, the ramblings of a hick from the sticks, the pretentious claptrap of tinpot chiefs who dream of being immortal dictators, slogans for election posters in a slave republic – God helps those who kill the Jews; An Aryan in the hand is worth all the Jews in the world; Preserve the bloodline, beware of contamination; Is your neighbour sick or handicapped? kill him – if this was all it took for evil to sway the Germans and turn them into Nazis, you had to hand it to Hitler. I had been expecting some irrefutable line of reasoning, an alchemy of complex arguments, devastating revelations about a worldwide conspiracy against the German people, a chain reaction linking one chapter to the next, extraordinary circumstances skilfully orchestrated, I had expected Satan to have penned certain passages, supplying the ink and the details for the rest of it. But there was nothing. All it had taken for evil to triumph was a beardless, blustering soldier, a depressive, syphilitic housepainter, a few well-turned phrases, a muscular title – My Struggle – and a socio-economic context that fostered grievances, condemnations, recriminations and hyperbole. There were, of course, other factors: the history of the country, its roots in centuries-old sects, in age-old myths filled with vague esoteric ideas, echoes of this or that, far-fetched theories, rediscovered mythology, new philosophies born in the heat of action, dreams of glory that might have come from an inmate of the local lunatic asylum or a drunk at the bar next door, and the lust for power that technical progress and scientific advancements inspire in a society desperate to reassert itself. You didn’t have to look too hard. What country doesn’t have demons locked up in its ancient cellars, what country doesn’t have warmongers, dreams of immortality, what people doesn’t have a few genes damaged by history, what people is not exposed to life’s slings and arrows, what religion hasn’t been shocked by scientific discoveries? There is but one humanity and evil lurks within us, in our very marrow.