I seemed more aggressive, not in the bully-boy way of the street thugs who had driven the imam from his suburban mosque, but in the more cerebral style of the lawyers, doctors and architects who had enlisted in Hitler’s elite corps. For them, the black uniforms and death’s-head emblems represented a violence of the mind, where aggression and cruelty were part of a radical code that denied good and evil in favour of an embraced pathology. Morality gave way to will, and will deferred to madness.
