I know it's dumb to focus on the personal merit of individuals who are caught up in a great evil machine like the Nazi Party, but I think this is an interesting window into how people view "evil."

I assume it's a cultural thing reinforced by the myths that surround us, but I think a lot of people expect "evil" to be like the Emperor from Star Wars or Snidely Whiplash: bad people doing bad things with no real justification beyond the fact that it feels good to do bad. Now, I actually do think that sometimes people are capable of being precisely like this. I recently read the book Kill Anything That Moves and it's clear that the US soldiers carrying out atrocities in Vietnam were motivated by personal greed (which was reinforced by US Army ideology/practices). The kill counts looked good on their record. The ones killing innocent civilians didn't usually seem to have any justification beyond that and racism.

But I think the far more commonplace, and therefore greater, evil is that of carelessness. Of looking away from the plight of the global south, at best wringing their hands and giving money to a do-nothing non-profit to soothe their conscience. Of, say, voting for Joe Biden and then doing nothing else rather than working hard at any kind of political action. The evils of the White Moderate MLK warned of, or for instance the Northerners who knew something had to be done about slavery but passed the buck for nearly a century. The carelessness of being a cog in a machine and never once stopping to examine that machine as a whole, your place in it, or what you grinding to a halt might do to said machine.

I don't know, maybe trying to draw a distinction between active, malicious evil and a passive, careless evil ultimately doesn't matter? Whether or not you're personally executing jews or just stamping papers in an office, it all amounts to the same thing in the end. When Luz Long chose to serve in the Whermacht he chose to support Nazi ideology, so maybe it doesn't matter that the guy apparently didn't hate black people. By not fighting back and accepting your place in the machine, surely you are complicit in the crimes of the machine? So it doesn't matter if you are personally honorable and just or a raving homicidal lunatic if the end result is still the holocaust.

It's a complicated thing, I suppose, the nature of evil.