#nicholson baker

“Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it. The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: ‘In a healthy society they look healthy, in a sick one, like ours, they look sick. And really they are neither one nor the other. They are mere filler.’” – Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization