...for a terrorist with a totalitarian ideology. Why looks can be deceiving:

One clue to this phenomenon may come from jazz musician Tarek Shah, who recently pled guilty to providing martial arts and hand-to-hand combat with weapons training to Al-Qaeda operatives. In 2004 Shah told a man he thought was a fellow jihadist but who turned out to be an undercover agent, “I could be joking and smiling and then cutting their throats in the next second.”

Or they may be genuinely decent fellows. It was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders: “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet -- apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written…”

Were these SS mass murderers really decent fellows? To their friends and family, they probably were. After all, they weren’t interested in undifferentiated mayhem. They were adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational and good, and the murders were a means to that goal. It was not just a noteworthy achievement, but a necessity, for them to remain “decent fellows,” for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society. That their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble them, for it was all for – in their view – a goal that remained good.

I worked with a woman in the early 80's who was from Austria and had been one of a group of young Austrio/German girls who were "invited" to spend the summer with the Hitlerian elite at Bergtisgarden (spelling of that name is wrong).

She was 12 years old at the time and spent time with Eva Braun and many of the other infamous ones. Her only response when I asked them what they were like was "well the seemed like decent people to me at the time".

Evil often wears a kind face.

And sometimes people enable evil just by doing their jobs. A friend of mine spent 3 months in Buchenwald courtesy of the Gestapo back in 1944. He pointed out that camps like Buchenwald and Auschwitz didn't happen by accident. No, those camps were carefully engineered to enable mass murder and slavery to take place with the greatest possible efficiency. One has to wonder what the German architects and engineers were thinking as they helped design and build those instruments of genocide.

It's scary to think about it unless one realizes that one has actually never been able to tell just by looking at someone except for in extreme circumstances, nor by knowing someone, no matter where they're from or what they profess of personal values (and even if they actually have those values). If one thought one could (or still thinks so) one is simply deceiving oneself as a human (but that is always popular).

But if you have gotten as far as at least realizing the above and remembering it once in a while then one is also likely to recognize that anyone including oneself is able of similar acts. Personally I'm less worried by those who admit to having an unlimited potential of evil inside them and who regard it as evil and something to be chained down rather than the multitudes who proclaim they could never ever do anything so wrong. I know which of those character traits is more likely to break when push comes to shove and it's not the fake halos. They get caught by surprise and will do their best to avoid admitting anything to themselves even as they continue.

That is how simple it is to explain the behaviour of a majority of germans during Hitler's atrocities or anything similiar anywhere for any population or group.

This is not in any way an attempt at moral equivalence. Too many try to twist it into being "all about circumstance" and it isn't, too many also try to manufacture illusions about "their" people also operating under such "justified" evil without sufficient facts (but sometimes it actually does happen), no it is simply about recognizing fundamental human nature below the thin veneer of civilization.

Nor is this anything to be outright afraid of: the world is still the same and has always been the same. Every single human is still the same, the only thing that changed is the awareness of the bad part of being human.