And the Answer is...

      Can a man be both sane and inhumane? Can reason and chaos coexist?

      

     These were just two of the questions one man wrestled with for the rest of his life. That man, Douglas Kelley, was the American psychiatrist sent to Nuremberg in 1945 to evaluate the twenty-two surviving Nazi leaders of the Third Reich.

     Yes, I went to see the movie Nuremberg over the weekend, the movie in which an almost unrecognizable Russell Crowe played the part of Herman Goring, Hitler’s chosen successor. This movie had many disturbing moments, not least of which was a film shown in court of what was found in the concentration camps after they were liberated: an endless succession of starved and skeletal bodies.

     I had seen these images before. Not as a film but as pictures I found in my youth in a copy of Life magazine I discovered in the basement of my home. 

     I dare anyone not to find this movie and the questions it asked disturbing - the most central of which are these: Can it happen again? Can it happen here?

     And the answer in the movie, the answer that was so subtle it almost went unnoticed, is this: Only if we allow it.