What the Auschwitz memorial gets wrong

In 1982, to the shock of almost everyone who knew me, I began a two-year training programme designed to turn me into a competent prison governor. It was a largely unmemorable experience but with a singular exception. I read an article about the commandants of the Nazi death camps called ‘A curious absence of monsters.’ It was and remains the most troubling thing about the Holocaust I’ve read, and it encouraged me to read a great deal more about the individuals who industrialised barbarism. 

In all the 23 years I worked in and around prisons in England and Wales, including seven years leading the Prison Service, I never stopped fretting over the possibility that some of my staff might abuse prisoners. Not because they – largely ordinary decent men and women – were inclined to cruelty, but because the evidence from the Holocaust suggests, uncomfortably, that the most extreme cruelty, torture and murder could be, and was, carried out by people who appeared also to be ordinary, decent men and women.