Till Armageddon no shalam no shalom

When I was a freshman in college back in the eighties, I took an introductory survey course in the humanities. One of the books we read was Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny's biography of Franz Stangl. This was, of course, at the height of the canon wars, so I suppose that Bloom and Hirsch would have been scandalized to see that book on the reading list. Truth be told, I probably would have sympathized with them. As much as I enjoyed the book, the central question it posed seemed faintly ridiculous. Could the Holocaust happen here? Could decent people, step by tiny step, lose all human moral sense? Of course not.