I agree with Amos on this one. In watching the movie "Der Untergang", for instance, which brilliantly dramatizes the last 10 days of madness, chaos, and despair in Hitler's Berlin Bunker...and all the people both great and small who were caught up in those events, I couldn't help but feel a few moments of pity and empathy here and there for even the worst of them (such as Hitler himself and Doctor Goebbels, for instance or Frau Goebbels who poisoned her own children because she couldn't bear the thought of what lay in the future for them). This doesn't mean I felt any sympathy for those individuals' crazy political ideas or their terribly bad decisions which caused death and suffering to others. I despise the political ideas and social theories they espoused. But....when I see them in moments of utter despair as everything they fervently believed in collapses around them, then I can imagine how anyone else might feel if placed in the same position. And that's what I empathize with.

What if the Germans had successfully invaded the UK in 1940, and Churchill had died trapped in a bunker under London? Would he not have felt similar desperation, defiance, and despair? Would he not have wanted to die rather than surrender? Would the Germans ever have taken him alive? I doubt it.

That's how people feel in such a circumstance when they have poured every last drop of themselves into a failed cause and met utter disaster.

I can imagine how that would feel. Therefore, I have empathy for it, no matter who it happens to, and even if that person is utterly mistaken...because if they are they simply don't get it. They obviously believe that what they're doing is right. If they didn't, they would not have done it.

Now, on the other hand, I also felt a great sense of relief when Hitler and Goebbels died, because it left the ordinary people under their command (the ordinary soldiers and nurses, etc) free to do the sane thing, surrender, and finally end the damn thing and save their own lives! So one had to be glad that the kingpins were finally dead. They were better off dead than being taken prisoner anyway, because being held prisoner would have meant many months or years of being caged like an animal, subjected to trial, and finally executed by your conquerors. Far better to die right away and get it over with.