The rotten apple defense

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed … were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."

Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz.


Courtesy Scott Horton in the LA Times.