This interview was not only informative and emotionally moving, but was thought provoking as well. This album really illustrates how the capacity to de-humanize others lies within us all. To compartmentalize our lives to the point where we can help facilitate mass murder one minute, and lounge around the next, is an ability that if truly realized and understood would terrify us all. It is much easier for us to classify people who do bad things as evil and seperate ourselves from them. The truth, as this album and interview show, is that we are much more similar to those SS soldiers than different.  When we call out to the world to “remember”, we refer to the lives lost, the injustice, and the suffering endured. However, I think that all the research done, all the testimonials captured, every photography recoverd, etc. should be thought of as another call to the world to “remember” that we are all capable of an atrocity such as this, and its imperative that we never allow ourselves to get to that place again.
I admire, respect, and appreciate your work. Thank you for reminding me of something I should never forget.

The album and the interview reaffirm an important point made by Hannah Arendt back in the 1960s about the banality of evil:  Horrendous acts and heinous crimes are perpetrated by very “ordinary” people, who are operating as “normal” within the accepted values paradigm of their societies.  The Nazis began actively inculcating race hatred in the German people against the Jews immediately upon assuming power in 1933, and elevated to highly esteemed positions (like the SS & SD) those men who “took” quickly to the ideology of demonization.  The essential lesson to be learned from this aspect of the Holocaust, I would aver, as well as all the unrestrained genocides that have happened since 1945 (like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia) is clear: Only by instilling fundamental moral values that affirm the sanctity and preciousness of all human life, and enforcing them with clear, consistently applied civil and criminal sanctions in every sphere of human activity (like schools & professional sports) for their violation, can people rise above the innate, dark, reptilian side of human nature. 

In other words, avowedly moral education in our schools is key.  The cultural relativism to which people in our own country are being increasingly acculturated is thus a step in the wrong direction and must be opposed and reversed.  For it is only when people are untethered from their consciences that horrors like genocide can occur.  Even here in America.