Below - you are looking at images of Jews milling around a field at Auschwitz.

They think they are waiting to be taken to the showers.

Little do they know these showers are gas chambers:

Now - imagine they have been marched into this gas chamber. Totally naive. The doors have been sealed. Above them, a soldier is standing on the cement roof, wearing a gas mask. He has loaded Zyklon B pellets into a capsule above that chamber.

He nods up his superior that it is ready.

His superior turns to you and gives the nod. You look down and see a Nazi military uniform on you.

In front of you is a large lever, which when you pull will release the gas, killing women, children and the elderly in that room. They will scream, claw at the walls, and suffer for minutes as they die from the inside.

Could you do it?

If you are like me, feeling like a total keyboard warrior, it's a definitive no.

But we aren't actually there. It isn't real.

Consider the logic:

→If I don't pull this lever it will get me killed →If I don't do it - someone else will just do it and I'll be killed anyways.

--> I'm actually not killing them. Someone else made the decision to kill them. They are dead already.

→I'm just following orders.

Hitler served us, on a giant terrifying silver platter, a full course on our capacity for terrible actions.

Fueled by survival instincts, people just like you and I, did terrible things by diffusing responsibility to someone else.

Through Hitler we learned, via damning results, that far fewer people than one would hope were willing to die on the moral high ground.