A lethal bureaucracy

We have just left the small Polish town of Oswiecim, the site of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps.
The scale of the massacre at Auschwitz – between 1.1 and 1.5 million men, women and children were slaughtered there in five bloody years – is so inhuman that it is impossible to fully comprehend it.
What I have always found one of the most chilling aspects of this most disgusting of human acts is the bureaucracy behind it.
Display after display case at Auschwitz show the documents the Nazi regime used to organise their final solution.
Forms to give permission to compulsorily sterilise women or conduct medical experiments on children.
Forms that list the names of Polish men and women executed because they did not meet their Nazi masters quota for food production.
Forms, no doubt many in triplicate, to justify the calculated, cold-blooded massacre of millions of European citizens.
I have never understood how any government official could have coldly drafted those terrible forms, apparently with the same objectivity and precision they drafted run-of –the mill paperwork.
And I hope I never do.