Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy society, they look healthy, in a sick one, like ours, they look sick. And really they are neither one nor the other. They are mere filler.”
It was November 8, 1941.