I recently had a conversation with some classmates where I made the claim, to a stunned audience, that Adolf Hitler wasn't a monster.

"But he had six million Jews killed," one of them said, taken more aback when I responded with, "11 million if you count non-Jews."

Now upon this claim, many of you should be wondering how I could possibly justify Hitler's "monstrosity." Am I a Nazi sympathizer? Have I never picked up a history book? Do I think it was all some conspiracy? These questions were posed to me, and I decided upon giving these answers.

"Hitler had a German Shepherd named Goldie that he loved dearly. He was extremely fond of children; he cried when his mother died; he liked to paint, he was a vegetarian; he was awarded medals for his bravery in World War I; he invented animal conservation; and he spearheaded one of the biggest anti-smoking campaigns in human history. Until the very end, he genuinely believed what he was doing was right. Do any of these things sound monstrous?"

When people look back at history, specifically towards men like Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini, we tend to demonize them. We portray them as monsters and sadistically twisted beings whose only purpose was to inflict misery on those unlucky enough to have been born in the same generation. However, there is an error to this way of thinking.

A monster didn't order the deaths of 11 million people, a human being did. A fellow member of the human race ordered the deaths of 11 million people. Hitler wasn't a sociopath, he wasn't a demon, he wasn't a one in a century fluke—he was a human being like you and me. When we forget or ignore this very painful reality, we put ourselves in a dangerous position because thinking that men like Stalin or Hitler were flukes is how we create more Stalins and Hitlers.

We as a human race are capable of great evil, and the sad fact is, we will achieve great evil. However, the way to stop such evil from happening again is to own up and accept it instead of writing off our mistakes as happenstance.