The Lives of Others
How much did World War II German soldiers know about the Holocaust? Publicly, many of them denied knowledge. But a long-lost cache of secret recordings that the British intelligence service made of German prisoners of war show that, in private, they chatted openly and casually about mass-murdering Jews, demonstrating what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Read some of the most chilling conversations, collected in Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, who rediscovered and analyzed the transcripts.