When I first learned who Hitler was (at a rather young age), I pictured him looking something like a cartoon villain. I imagined someone who looked disheveled and unkept, with violent facial features and crazy eyes. Maybe even with an evil moustache. (If you’ve seen Harry Potter, I imagined him looking something like Sirius Black on all of those wanted posters.) But then I saw what he actually looked like, and I was completely shook. He looked quite normal. In many pictures, I saw him smiling. Appearance-wise, he was unremarkable, and looked like the kind of person it would be easy to pass by on the street (if you ignored the uniform). He didn’t even have an evil moustache: in fact, he only really had half of a moustache, and that was probably the most memorable thing about him. That you could look at him and miss what was an obvious insanity that lurked behind his visage was what struck me. For where I had expected to see someone visibly insane, I saw someone who looked typical.

This is what fascinates me the most about the Nazis. In our media, they’re often depicted as people who were laughably antagonistic. Like the Red Skull from Captain America, they ooze the cartoonish insanity and megalomania of a Bond villain. I’m not disputing that they were these things underneath. However, it is likewise important that we don’t credit them with too much: they were, in many ways, ordinary people like you or I.

Recently I saw a film called The Zone of Interest, which tells the story of an SS officer and his family as they build their dream life together. The twist? The SS officer is in charge of running Auschwitz and their new home is right next to the camp. In this movie, you never see the actual violence, but you are kept aware that it is happening. You’ll see the furnaces burning, hear screams in the background, the shouts of guards and the laments of prisoners. Moreover, you will hear these despicable acts talked about so casually as though it were just a part of business rather than the awful genocide that it was, so much so that it can be easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. I say this because you very well might stop paying attention at points: the film is rather bland and boring in many respects, just as ordinary life is bland and boring. When I exited the theatre, I joked that this was the tragic story of a man who put his career above his family precisely because those aspects drove the plot more than any atrocity of war. However, this was precisely the point that the film tried to make: evil is not always cartoonish or easy to spot. Sometimes the worst acts of cruelty imaginable are committed in such dispassionate, bland, and bureaucratic ways by people who are either desensitised or simply unmoved by such violence. In other words, the Nazis were not a cabal of Bond villains: they were a gang of bureaucrats, driven by a sick and twisted ideology.

Many have researched how the killing of more than six million Jews in the Holocaust was able to happen. In doing my own research, I came across one account that described how even Himmler was troubled by the killing, and so, to lessen the psychological burden upon those doing the killing, tasks were spread out among multiple people so that no one person was carried out the Holocaust’s cruelty in its entirety. I’m not a historian, so I cannot vouch for how accurate this is. Simply, I believe it points to the idea that evil can often seem benign as its happening. It is, in truth, often quite banal. In the film, this point is further reinforced by a cut-scene depicting the staff who clean the Auschwitz museum in the modern day. They wipe down the instruments that were used to execute countless individuals as well as the displays that showcase the scale of this horror. They, too, are focused on their assigned tasks, not showing any emotion about the great waste of life that confronts them at their workplace. (I should add that I’m not suggesting that they are unmoved. I am merely remarking upon the resemblance.) And this raises some interesting questions about man’s inhumanity to man and privilege in the modern day.

In a world like our own, which is interconnected like never before, we hear about tragedy all the time, albeit from a distance. Many of us—certainly not those of us who would read this—could not imagine the plight of some in our world who endure far harder circumstances than our own. When we, for example, go out shopping, and buy clothing or some other thing, do we really consider the conditions in which these items were made? It is certainly true that it is practically impossible to live in our society without participating in some unethical system that exploits the less fortunate, but even so, it is worth noting how this fact often goes unnoticed. These are problems that exist far away from our everyday lives, even for those who make the decisions that reinforce these systems. To them, it is likely that these are merely decisions that affect someone else somewhere else, and there is little more affection than that. In the Bible, it is written that “those who do not love a [person] whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen,” (1 John 4:20) but what happens when one cannot see this person? I believe we have our answer. It becomes all to easy to make decisions that will affect them negatively, or even treat them inhumanely. People are not seen as people, deserving of dignity, but rather a number or worse still—a factor of production, an asset, or a liability.

What, then, am I suggesting? I’m not telling you to beat yourself up, nor am I telling you that you’re a Nazi or some other villain. I’m also not suggesting that the Nazis were unexceptional in their cruelty: they were quite exceptional, and every time I’m confronted by the consequences of their actions, I am horrified. What I would suggest is that we, since it is impossible to make the world smaller than it is, increase the size of our own world, as it were. By encountering many kinds of people, we can develop a broader sense of empathy, and in doing so, hopefully bring about a better, kinder world for us all. Evil is banal, as I’ve said, but compassion is not, and that’s what makes it truly exceptional.