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From the book The Nazi Doctors. Fascinating dialogue: Also at issue for us here is the relationship of Nazi doctors to the human species. Another Auschwitz survivor who knew something about them asked me, 'Were they beasts when they did what they did? Or were they human beings?' He was not surprised by my answer: they were and are men, which is my justification for studying them; and their behaviour -- Auschwitz -- was a product of specifically human ingenuity and cruelty. I went on to tell this survivor of the ordinaries of most Nazi doctors I interviewed. Neither brilliant nor stupid, neither inherently evil nor particularly ethically sensitive, they were by no means the demonic figures -- sadistic, fanatical, lusting to kill — people have often thought them to be. My friend replied, 'But it is demonic they were not demonic'.