In a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt about the Nazi war crimes trials, written in October 1946, philosopher Karl Jaspers told her that he was uneasy with her view that the very boundaries of crime had been exploded by the Holocaust: that line of thinking might offer a streak of “satanic greatness” to the Nazis, a hint of “myth and legend”. “It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterises them,” he wrote. “Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they...