QUITE the most harrowing documentary clip I’ve seen this week featured a reunion between a group of people in rural Germany who had lived in the proximity of an extermination camp for Jews and one of the camp survivors.

The guards had spared him because he sang and entertained them and the local community greeted him and jostled him like an old friend.

What emerged and horrified however, as the local community talked to the camera, is that they knew full well what had happened at the camp.

One said: “We could hear the Jews screaming throughout the night."

Another admitted: “We could not sleep," and “We knew they pumped gas into the trucks.”

They carried on and one without hesitation or any sign of remorse, while the survivor simply smiled into the camera.

The real psychopaths were those who planned this, but the final horror is that they transferred their shame and guilt onto the innocent and made them complicit in their inhumanity.

VJ Connor, Bishop Auckland.