Morbid Curiosity?

I have this strange, morbid interest in the Holocaust. I think a lot of people do, but I'm not totally sure why, and I'm not really all that OK with it.

I find it so horrifying and awful it literally makes me sick sometimes. I can give you a pretty decent list of Historical Fiction novels I have read that involve the Holocaust (Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth, Sarah's Key, The Kommandant's Girl, Those Who Save Us, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas... those are just the ones I though of as I sit in front of this computer, I know there are probably a dozen more), as well as a few Non-Fiction titles. The Diary of Anne Frank is the standard, and one that a lot of people have read. It was the first one I ever read, as I'm sure it is for many, and I learned of the desperation of the Jewish people. Elie Wiesel's Night is a particularily good one; It's a short read, but no less devastating. This one is more first hand accounts of what happened to him in the camps, whereas Anne Frank wrote about trying to avoid going to them in the first place. One I particularly found enlightening is Auschwitz: A New History (seen below). I liked this one because I learned so much more about it. Things like the companies that benefited from slave labour or experimentation on people, and the racism that still exists in Germany to this day.

I am also a sucker for documentaries. I went to one at the Broadway a couple of years ago called A Film Unfinished that was a mixture of the devistation of living in the Ghettos in Poland as well as propoganda that was made for distribution about the Ghettos. It was a strange mix of reality as well as complete fiction. Very strange. I just watched one on Netflix the other day called The Last Days which was all about when Hungary was invaded and the Hungarian Jews were moved swiftly to the camps for extermination in the last few months of the war.

After having read so much and seen so many documentaries about the Holocaust, I didn't think there was much more that I could learn, but I was proven wrong. In the first few minutes of this documentary it is stated that even when the Nazis had realized that they were going to lose the war, instead of stopping the extermination of Jewish people in order to save face with the Allies or make more funds for the war effort, they doubled their efforts in an attempt to complete the Final Soloution before the war was over.

Let me just let that sink in for a minute. Because I needed it to...

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WTF! That BLEW MY MIND! I had never thought of it that way before. Why the hell didn't the Nazi's just stop!? Because, they were more concerned with their war on Jewish People than the war they were fighting the Allies. What. The. Hell.

Is this why I am so interested in an event that killed so many people in such a (relatively) short time? Because to me it is completely unfathomable that people can be SO EVIL? How people can be SO BLINDED by hate? How people can find ways justify murdering people for absolutely no reason?

I am not searching for understanding of why the Holocaust happened. Because I think something like that is beyond anyone's understanding. But I am interested in figuring out why I find it so intriguing.

Thoughts? Anyone?