The Decent One

In order to be really monstrous, evil people need good qualities. Being psychopathic will only get you so far. But,combine a psychopathic personality with a twisted moral compass, a functional but shallow intelligence, and the ability to work at a given task ceaselessly, and you have a Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler was a socially awkward young man. These days we would probably call him a nerd. Through his self studies, he converted to that hotch-potch of false science and false history, which later crystalised into Hitlerian Fascism.

He saw Germany as a once great country, which had become degenerate. He wanted to return to this mythic past, and, like Hitler, thought that progress required an increasing population, destroying populations to the East, and taking over their territory. He and Hitler made a diabolical double act.

The Nazis held themselves to be racially superior, and held that inferior races, while appearing human, were lower than animals because they had the capacity to corrupt higher races, both culturally and genetically. The lower races were like a disease which had to be eradicated. For a while, if they were useful, these peoples could be enslaved, but they would not be allowed to reproduce.

Himmler was an idealist, who wanted a better world for himself, his family, and his countrymen to live in. He was also a mass murderer with an evil ideology. That conflict is the subject of this excellent documentary.