Otto Schindler, as well as being a lecher and a crook, was a paid up member of the Nazi party and on very good terms with other Nazis up to their eyeballs in innocent blood.

And he saved a lot of people from the gas chambers, and risked his life to do so.

You couldn't have told him apart from the other Nazis he rubbed along with. Making judgements about people isn't easy, and you can be surprised how people turn out.

That's an encouraging thought. Someone like Schindler can turn around, even while still being what most people would reasonably consider a pretty dodgy kind of character. (In fact if he hadn't been, he'd never have been able to carry it off.)>P>

But it's also a chilling thought, because it goes the other way. Seemingly upright loving fathers who were the soul of honesty can turn into agents of mass murder, in Germany, in Russia, in Yugoslavia - and a lot nearer to where most of us live. The people who prospered from the slave trade are revered people in our history, on both sides of the Atlantic. Priests of my own religion who tortured and burnt living people.

None of us know that if we were pitched into a different time and place we wouldn't be capable of doing the most horrible things to innocent victims. The evidence from history is that very few of us would in fact resist. Our job is to do whatever we can to increase the likelihood that we would be ready to do so.