Hannah Arendt, the influential cultural critic who documented the perverse excesses of Nazism, would later write about the “banality of evil” that permeated German culture during the Nazi era. But equally pervasive, it seemed, was the credulity of evil. That “Jewishness” or “Gypsyness” was carried on chromosomes, transmitted through heredity, and thereby subject to genetic cleansing required a rather extraordinary contortion of belief—but the suspension of skepticism was the defining credo of the culture.
