My parents grew up in Nazi Germany.

[MaryMagdaline]

1. This hits home for someone like me who grew up in the South

Lynching was so common in the generations right before mine where ordinary (sadistic) men and women attended public lynchings and even sent post cards with photographs of the victims.
I was very uncomfortable around Southerners and suspected that many of their parents and grandparents participated in atrocities.
That said, mine was the generation that desegregated the south, and for the most part, we complied lawfully with the SC’s “integrate now” mandate. Our principals kept order and kept racial scuffles (sometimes lockdowns) from hitting the papers so that KKK chapters didn’t get riled up. I came to realize that a lot of good Southerners were horrified by the sadism of their fellow Southerners and that strong hand of the federal government was a blessing to them.
As a daughter of WWII soldier, I felt that Germans were uniquely sadistic, but today, see Germans as an enlightened group of people, much as they were seen in the late 1800s.
I guess I finally came to see that brutality and sadism can arise anywhere, and a small group can terrorize the much larger group.