Men have a prodigious capacity for hiding from the past -- and the present -- even if they have suffered in their own flesh. They practice a sort of damnatio memoriae: memory is condemned, for the past is perceived as dangerous, since knowledge of it allows them to judge the present.
Thus we make it difficult for ourselves to take into account that it was under the pretext of obedience to the laws of the Third Reich and to the orders of superiors that Nazi doctors and other torturers executed innocent masses. And we further fail to take into account that we were saved from Nazism precisely because the enemies of Nazism disobeyed the laws because they were evil. And lets us face the fact that, by a macabre return of history, some who survived that Nazi horror thanks to this resistance, are today endeavoring to restore evil laws entirely similar to those the liberators refused to obey in order to save them.
Now, just as these facts of contemporary history have been hidden, it is also the fact that history can repeat itself or, if you prefer, can be prolonged. And just as clearly, this is manifest through laws, no longer imposed by tyrants, but voted in by parliaments, in which the innocent are executed.