Last night for just under three hours, I watched the film made in around 2000 about the Nuremberg Trials of the leading war criminals in 1945-46. I found the acting brilliant, especially the psychopathic manipulation and evil “aura” of Herman Goering.
The American Army appointed a psychologist, Dr Gustav M. Gilbert, to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants. As he was portrayed in the film I saw, Gilbert told the Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson:
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Empathy is the capacity to recognise and venerate the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself in other persons. This principle features in all religions and in the works of many philosophers and scientists. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself – as Jesus said.
Empathy implies recognition of human dignity and worth in others that one recognises in oneself. This is often what lacks in comments written, less so in this blog than certain others, by some people otherwise claiming to be Christians.
Empathy is surely the yardstick by which we can judge all morality, goodness or evil.
The Blue Flower 
May I also recommend the film entitled, in English, ‘Downfall’? It rather controversially portrays Hitler as a sad, ill old man who as well as being a wicked and despicable despot also was fond of children and animals. It makes the evils perpetrated by him, with his knowledge and in his name, all the more horrific.
Der Untergang. I watched the film in German with French subtitles to help me. I wouldn’t have liked to have been one of the Generals who got chewed out by Hitler’s ranting and raging!
We can be thankful that his orders to destroy Germany and the occupied countries completely were not obeyed! The more I learn of the history of the Third Reich and the war, the more horrified I am about what humans are capable of!
Der Untergang! That’s it. I couldn’t remember the German title for the life of me, and I speak German (albeit badly). It’s a superbly-acted film and, as you say, horrifying. And yet, the protagonists were by and large quite ordinary. I think that it portrays the “banality of evil” very well indeed – particularly the endnote by Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary (paraphrased): “It’s true that we did not know what was going on. But we could have found out if we had wanted to.”