So said Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade. And who could disagree with him? I would certainly struggle to find ten people to put their hands up and say there were rooting for the Nazis in the Indiana Jones films, Downfall or Inglorious Basterds. The Sound of Music is a different matter, but I think that is more a case of my enemy's enemy...
The good thing about Nazi villains is they are one of the few groups no one will object you killing in a variety of horrible ways. Like the Stormtroopers of Star Wars (who of course took their name from the First World War German Stoßtruppen or Shock Troopers), Nazis represent disposable people. They can be gunned down by the hundred and no one will write in and complain.
As seen in this hilarious sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, they even have the good grace to look evil.
But are we making things too easy?
Last year I saw The Boy In Striped Pajamas, which aroused a deal of controversy. Part of this had to do with the assertion of some that the whole premise is flawed as Schmuel would not have survived the initial selection process and that Else, the wife of the SS Officer running the death camp, could not have been ignorant of what was going on there. I'm too ignorant to comment on the validity of these claims, but I was struck by the accusations that the Nazis had been portrayed "too sympathetically".
Just quash any rumours before they start, I am not talking about ideological sympathy, but the recognition that some Nazis were ordinary people. They did not all look like this:
Something that Downfall managed to do wonderfully was show a Hitler you could emotionally engage with. Yes, he was a terrible monster, but we could see he was a human who had gone wrong. He was not the devil.
So what's all this driving at? Well, as Nazis come to be represented in more and more extreme ways, I worry we are at risk of losing what was truly horrifying about the Nazi movement. Even more terrifying than the events of the Holocaust is the fact that they were perpetrated by ordinary men and women. Men and women who either viewed their victims as sub-human or were able to devolve responsibility to a higher authority and tell themselves that they are "just following orders".
As the events of the Second World War recede further from us, and our portrayals of the perpetrators of the atrocities committed there become more fanciful we are at risk of convincing ourselves that there was something fundamentally different about the Nazis. "We could never do those things," we reassure ourselves. "And if someone tried to make me, I would see right through him, because I would know evil if I saw it."
Such was the horror at the acts of premeditated inhumanity carried out so coldly in the death camps that psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted his famous Obedience to Authority experiment, where he demonstrated time and again how little encouragement people needed to deliver what they believed were fatal electric shocks to "volunteers". Fundamentally all it took for a man to become a willing accomplice to torture and murder was a uniform and the assurance that someone else "would take responsibility" for the repercussions.
As our representations of Nazis become more and more extreme, we at risk of forgetting that this is not how they started. In fact they never looked like this. The face of evil is a mundane family man eating dinner with his wife and children.
We like to think the horrors of the Holocaust could never be repeated, let alone that we might be part of it. How short our memories are, how high our opinion of ourselves, and how deaf we are to the warning bells.
We are just as prone to the scape-goating impulse as were the people of 1930s Germany. To them it was the Jews who were responsible for Germany's loss in the Frist World War, who were holding it back, who were responsible for all their woes.
Who is responsible for our woes in the world today? Pick a tabloid newspaper. They will happily tell you why you should blame the immigrants, the Muslims, the working class, the teenage mothers, youngsters in general, bankers. The Holocaust began with the demonising of a minority and the people getting swept up in it.
Okay, I'm not saying we are at risk of deporting half the population of the Square Mile, though I can imagine how few people would object. Nor that we are at risk of gassing long-term benefit claimants with Zyklon B.
What I am trying to point out is that all the instincts (however irrational) that conspired to create one of (if not) the worst crimes against humanity ever committed are alive and well in each of us, and in our culture in general. They would just need to be harnessed and channeled by an appropriately malevolent individual. And as we are compliantly rounding people up into ghettos we can look at our portrayal of Nazis, check ourselves against them and say, "Oh, it's okay. I don't look, sound or behave anything like that. What I'm doing can't be evil."
It is also easy after the fact to stand up and say "I would never have done that!" Without wanting to sound too cynical, are you sure? I like to think I would never have been an active collaborator, but I'm certainly not brave enough to have joined the resistance. I expect I would have kept my head down, my mouth shut and tried to make the best of a bad situation. It's not that I'm a monster, I just value my own existence and comfort.
Retrospective bravado aside, I imagine the same is true of most of us.
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