To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.

I recently read 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland', Christopher Browning.

My takeaway was the same as yours; the Germans (and everybody else) were (are) just like us.

This is my problem with a lot of literature and movies. The Nazis are always unfathomably evil, when in reality, most of them were just people doing their jobs.

I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.