To attempt to show the humanity of perpetrators of great wrong, indeed of the kinds of crimes for which we still have no adequate substitute characterization than that provided by the word 'evil', is a thoroughly worthwhile enterprise. To humanize them in this sense is to remind anyone who needs reminding that such is what human beings are capable of. It is not an aberrant behaviour pattern of humankind that people betray one another, exhibit cruelty, accustom themselves to killing the innocent, and so forth. More - even those who do this are capable of love, can admire natural beauty and good music, be kind, generous, self-sacrificing. The vicious, the killers, the torturers, are of our kind. Do not ever forget it.
But if to humanize means to lighten the moral burden of such people, to draw attention away from what they make themselves the agents of, that is something else. Their human qualities, both the good ones and the bad, do not exonerate. On the contrary, their very humanity shows, by way of a million and more counter-examples, that they could have acted otherwise, need not have tormented and wrecked the lives of others.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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