Children constitute 30 per cent of those killed … Gaza is ‘the most dangerous place in the world to be a child’.

IT IS NOT EVERYONE who keeps a photograph of a mass murderer on their desk. Yet Professor Colonel Gerald Draper OBE (1914-1989) kept on his a photograph of himself interrogating the camp commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, shortly after his capture on 11 March, 1946. Major Draper, as he was then, had been seconded from the Irish Guards to the Adjutant General’s office to help with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. In the photograph, Draper, in battledress, is inches apart from Höss, who is looking into his eyes, not with fear, but with trustful trepidation; Draper succeeded in extracting an eight-page signed confession from Höss. Draper cherished the picture not as a trophy of success, but as a reminder that this man who had committed such heinous crimes was an ordinary human being for whom killing people automatically had become normalised. 

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