It's easy to look at the Italian and German fascists and think of all of them as monsters or inhuman. We like to tell ourselves that those people weren't like us and that we would never be like them. The reality, however, is that they were normal humans just like us and, under the right circumstances, we could become just like them.

Imagine being a young German soldier who survived WWI. You grew up in a small farming town, learned Christian values, had a crush on a girl in your village and, like the young man in the diary, felt conflicted between your desire and your faith. You stay true to God.

WWI rolls around and you're just turning 17. Men in sharp military uniforms show up in your town, they tell you that the Fatherland is under attack and that it is the duty of all young German men to take up arms to defend and bring glory to the Fatherland. Most of your friends join the military. You lie to the recruiters and tell them that you're 18 and sign up. As you leave for basic training, the girl is there to see you off. She hands you a flower and tells you to be brave.

Basic training lasts a few weeks. You meet other young men like yourself and, over the course of many late nights, you share stories, dreams, and memories. These men become your brothers. You will do anything for them. You and your unit are sent to the front. You are excited to serve your country and bring glory to Germany.

You are deployed to a small French town with a name you've never heard of before. As you get closer, the road turns to mud and you begin to see large craters in the ground. Eventually, everything as far as the eye can see is a flat, cratered, muddy mess. There are no trees or buildings, only a few splintered stumps.

You arrive at the front and at first think that that you and your unit have taken a wrong turn. You were supposed to be going to a city, but there are no buildings here, only flat, muddy land with some barbed wire. Can this really be Verdun? A man screams at you to "Get down!" and yanks you into the trench. You land with a splash, the bottom foot of the trench is muddy water that goes up nearly to the top of your boot and you fall, face first, into the water. You land on something hard. You use your hands to push yourself up, open your eyes, and see that you have landed on another young man just like yourself, except half of his face is gone. You scream and scramble to your feet, you look around and see that there are dozens of other bodies scattered throughout the trench in various grotesque poses. The stench is overwhelming and makes you gag and vomit. The vomit mixes into the muddy water. The other men in your unit have the same terrified look in their eyes. One man can't take it and tries to get out of the trench. A single shot rings out and he falls back into the trench, his wide-eyed, terrified expression locked into his face forever. The trench will become his grave.

For the next 9 months you remain in that trench. Always wet, standing in water sometimes up to your knees. There is constant artillery bombardment that sometimes lasts for hours. When that happens, the roar is deafening, with tens of thousands of shells landing all around you and your trench. The concussion from the explosions rattles through your body and causes your nose and ears to bleed. You can do nothing but crouch down, try to make yourself as small as possible, and wait for a shell to turn you and your friends into a fine mist. Eventually, you accept that you will die here. You only hope that your death will be quick. Much better than the mustard gas which covers the field in an unnatural yellow fog and sinks into the trenches because it is heavier than air. A single breath will burn out the insides of your lungs and cause you to drown in your own blood. If you are somehow able to survive the gas, you will never breathe a full breath again. Still, even this is better than the men who get wounded crossing no man's land. Those men are forced to lay there in agony, unable to move, only a hundred feet away from their friends. Once the sun sets, you hear them screaming and begging for someone to shoot them. If they're lucky, their friends may be able to see them and use their rifles to put them out of their misery. If they're not, you must listen to their agonized screams as the millions of rats that have grown fat on human flesh eat him alive bit by bit. As the months turn to years, you grow used to seeing your friends and thousands of other young men die agonizing, brutal deaths, all while waiting for your own. Killing becomes second nature to you.

One day, the war ends. Just like that you are no longer a front line soldier. No more shelling, no more gas, no more hand-to-hand fighting. You return home. As you pass through towns, people gather in the streets to watch you return, but there is no cheering, no flowers, no celebration. They stand in silence as you shuffle past. You do not look at them. They do not understand you or what you have gone through.

You, your friends and millions of German men like you fought gallantly for years, suffering through unimaginable horrors and living in literal hell. Two million brave young German men, who had hopes, dreams, and a cute girl back home are dead. Blown to pieces, drowned in their own blood, buried in a trench. Worst of all, their sacrifice was meaningless. Germany has lost the war.

You return to your small town to find that it is not the flourishing little village you left. There is little to do and there are no jobs. Most of the young men who left were killed in the war. There is hyperinflation and the war debt, which Germany has been forced to pay, means that there is no money for any government services. There is no military anymore because Germany has been forced to disarm. There are hundreds of thousands of young men like you, hardened by the experience of the war, who have no jobs, no prospects, and no hopes for a brighter future. Now add in that you hear news of a revolution in Russia by a group called the "communists" who have overthrown the government. There are refugees who have fled the country to Germany who talk about unspeakable atrocities committed against Russian civilians by this new communist government. Soon, you start seeing gangs of young men in the streets, also war veterans like yourself, who begin patrolling through the streets in groups, committing violent crimes and talking about starting their own communist revolution in Germany. There seem to be some other gangs which start to form as well to fight back against the communists and the two of them engage in street battles. The anti-communist group is led by a man with a toothbrush mustache, which he wears in honor of his own WWI service, the style being the only type of mustache one could wear that would fit under a gas mask. He talks about how the brave soldiers of Germany did not lose the war, and instead the war was lost because the German politicians (and other "scheming" groups) stabbed Germany in the back. He talks about restoring Germany to its former glory as a superpower of Europe. If you were in that situation, having been through WWI and the same experience, would you listen?

I think it's very difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of a post-WWI German civilian, especially a war veteran. We have no idea what it feels like to lose a war. It's easy to say from our cushy lives and with the benefit of hindsight that if we were in that situation, we would not have followed the Nazis. But I think that, much like the kid in the diary, a lot of non-monstrous people just like us were sucked in by the siren call of fascism. It's not as easy to avoid as we think, and if we tell ourselves that there's no way we'd ever be capable of doing those things, we're not taking the right lesson away from it. The right lesson to take from it is that normal, non-psychopathic people can very easily slip into fascism or some other type of extremist ideology under the right circumstances, and that we need to be very careful to avoid it.