6 November 2025

As we make our preparations to remember those who died in time of war and to pray for the peace of a troubled earth, we reflect on the atrocities of the day and of the past and wonder why our acts of remembrance have not been able to eradicate such grotesque violence as we witness today.

In his book, ‘The Nazi Mind’, Laurence Rees makes it clear how ordinary people can become animalistic killers if the right circumstances are created to encourage these traits to manifest themselves. His book is replete with examples.

Consider Martin Weiss, a heating engineer from Karlsruhe in south-west Germany. Before his wartime service, people who knew him said that he was a model citizen with ‘a sense for everything noble and good’.  However, in his  treatment of Jews, he behaved with great cruelty.

‘At his post-war trial it was revealed that he shot half a dozen Jews merely because he thought they didn’t ‘behave properly’.’ writes Rees. ‘He remarked during the war that if he didn’t ‘see blood every day, I would be thirsty’’.

However, when he returned home to Karlsruhe between these barbaric assignments, he became the respectable citizen whom his friends had always known. It is a remarkable volte face. How do you explain it? Was he a monster or a human being who made the wrong choices?

Rees argues, ‘Weiss presumably had brutal tendencies that did not manifest themselves when he was working as a plumber, but that were triggered by the opportunities offered to him by the war in the east.’ God forbid that we should be placed in such circumstances but if we are, pray God strengthen us to make the right choice!