I am quite touched by your obituary of Richard Sonnenfeldt, chief interpreter at Nuremberg, who got to know the likes of Hermann Göring and Rudolf Höss rather intimately (October 21, 2009). In his early twenties at the time, he had much to learn about his fellow humans. In spite of all the horrors committed against the Jews, and he was a German Jew himself, he found that he did not hate the Germans. They were destitute in the wake of World War II. He did not hate the Nazis individually, either. “What chilled him was the ordinariness of these men,” you point out. When he asked the commandant of Auschwitz, whether he was ever tempted to enrich himself from the inmates, Höss replied: “What kind of man do you think I am?” Truly wonderful. I remember similar discoveries in the Fifties, when I was still a teenager eager to understand recent history. The monsters of the war started surprising me by their ordinariness. It took me a couple of years to realize that there actually are no monsters. Just fellow humans.