[frereubu]

The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great read on that subject. (It's very long, but the abridged versions are fine as long as you get a good translation). Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny is also great - a biography from a series of post-war interviews with the commandant at Treblinka concentration camp, who wasn't any evil genius, just someone who didn't have any particularly strong moral feelings and went with the zeitgeist. The Lives Of Others is a great film about the Stasi in East Germany too.

[Akasazh]

Into that darkness is pretty grim, to be honest. Great read but gut wrenching

[frereubu]

Totally grim, but it put to bed any queries in my mind of "how could anyone possibly end up doing that?" It was really clear how easily unremarkable people just go with the flow until they find themselves doing horrific things without batting an eyelid.

Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is really interesting (although pretty heavy going - I didn't finish it) on how bureacracy enabled the Holocaust by reducing it to a long line of people taking orders from their superiors and giving orders to their subordinates so they could compartmentalise their actions to inputs and outputs, until it got to the people who actually carried out the atrocities, which even the Nazis realised not everyone could do.

There's also a great book called transcript by Heimrad Bäcker, where he uses cut-up bits of the bureacracy (as it sounds like you'll know, the Nazis were sticklers for record-keeping) of the Holocaust in a kind of poetic form, where sometimes the things are identifiable, such as numbers of clothing items taken from people at the extermination camps, and others are just lists of numbers or words leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.

[sitkack]

I think most large bureaucracies are susceptible to this. They form of an overlay psychosis.