In 1940, as Adolf Hitler’s armies bombed and tanked and slaughtered their way across western Europe, the exiled German journalist Sebastian Haffner questioned whether these soldiers and their leaders “are still to be called men”. After all, he wrote, the Nazis were “innocent of religion, morals and aesthetics”, they were “absolute parvenus” with “nothing, absolutely nothing, that they recognise as a law above them”. Nazism was “nihilism in action”; there was no Nazi ideology. Rather, “to be a Nazi means to be a type of human being”.
Haffner identified a paradox. The Nazis could not be men, not in the sense that man is a moral creature. Yet the Nazis remained recognisably human. Haunting that paradox was another question: what type of human being is
