As I said, one shouldn't try to stretch analogies too far. Putin isn't Hitler, and the Chechnya isn't the Holocaust.

The point is, the demand that terrorists were making was in fact an essentially just demand - being demanded in an unjust and terrible way. And that would have been the case in an even more extreme way in the imaginary scenario that I painted, with innocent German civilians being held hostage by desperate Jews. And in both cases those making the demand would have known that there was no real possibility of it being accepted, and that the most that could be achieved would be to make more people aware of what was going on out of sight.

The latest death toll is 117 hostages (BBC News Website. And 116 of these were killed by the "rescue" gas, with one dying from gunshot wounds. It's unclear to what extent those figures might have been lower, if the Russian authorities hadn't refused to tell the medical people what poison gas it was that they used.