There’s a story I heard recently that has really stuck with me. It happened in the Sobibor Extermination Camp during WW2. Basically the camp was structured so that captured Jews would be selected to be Kapos. A Kapo was a disciplinarian that kept the rest of the Jews in line, usually with a whip. A lot of the times the Kapo would repeat Nazi propaganda because the Nazi guards were watching too. The rest of the Jews could understand their predicament. But there was one Kapo named Berliner, nicknamed because he was born in Berlin. The rest of the Jews hated Berliner because he truly bought into the propaganda. Imagine, a Jew… in an extermination camp… talking about how Hitler was a misunderstood savior of the Jews right before he started beating his fellow Jews to keep them in line.

It’s no surprise that Berliner’s end comes in the form of a lynching by the rest of the Jews he was keeping in line.