An SS officer confesses about his experience ushering Jews to the death camps during the Nuremburg Trials, 1945:
"I could tell you each and every part of that journey from memory. I could tell you where the tracks wind and bend, where the wind blows due to a break in the trees....the first corner you turn when you see it; miles away and covered in fog, but unmistakable: the tower. I felt like I didn't have any agency - just being forced back and forth along that hellish track to damnation. The worst part wasn't the screams, but the silence, because in that silence I only had myself for company; me and my thoughts left to bask in an eternity while we contemplated my place in hell."
"Each and every day I told myself that I'd do something, that I'd quit, leave, never look back. I never did. I kept getting paid and I kept going home. And that's what the worst part is - living with yourself. It's not the knowledge that you're having a hand in the murder of so many people, it's the fact that you can still sleep at night. I close my eyes and all I can see is that tower of ash, floating skyward against a red sky. Then, the raining down of a thousand souls, dancing in the wind. I'll never forget the way it burns your throat as you try and breathe a taste of the hellish sulphur that's to come. The way it forces tears in your eyes. There comes a point where the faces of the people you've wronged become too many to recognize in a dream; they merge and they change and they become all consuming."
"No longer recognisable individuals, but an entire consciousness within your thoughts. I was once on the path when it began to snow, and from behind me I heard the laughter of a child as she reached her hand out and let a snowflake fall onto her hand, melting into nothing within a few seconds. Amidst all the screams, the curses, the cries... the sound of that laughter was the most haunting thing I have ever known. I won't beg for forgiveness. I don't want it. I don't deserve it. Whatever is coming for me after I die, I embrace as inevitable and just."
Judge: ".....do you have any final words?"
"Take what I did. Learn from it. Spread it so far and wide that to deny it is lunacy. But, most importantly.....never, EVER think you are not capable of it."