Bernhard Losener joined the Nazi Party in 1930. Until 1935, he worked in a series of bureaucratic jobs. Then he was picked for a special task: drafting the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which made Jews second-class citizens.

In 1941, Losener heard something that disturbed him. Some 1,000 German Jews had been transported to Riga and summarily executed.

Losener claimed he was so disgusted he wanted to quit his job. But he was persuaded to stay on by a colleague, who told him they needed to trust the process.

Three years later, Losener was arrested for harbouring an anti-Nazi rebel, Ludwig Gehre. He was kicked out of the party, but the regime fell before he could be punished more severely.

Losener died in 1952. But seven decades later, he is at the heart of a new debate over the right thing to do in evil times.

Gehre, the man Losener harboured, had been secretly plotting to overthrow the Nazi regime since 1939. In the last month of the war, he was executed in a concentration camp.

Next to such martyrs, Losener looks quite shabby: a cynical careerist who went along with the most evil regime in history for much of his life, took few risks to oppose it, and ultimately escaped with his life.

But some are not so sure. They point out that Losener was able to use his inside knowledge to testify against the regime at the Nuremberg Trials.

Others ask if many of us would really have done differently. Many of those who worked for the Nazis, like Losener did not like Hitler, but thought Germany needed stronger leadership to stand up to French bullying and deal with the Great Depression.

They might have told themselves that if they quit their jobs, they would just be replaced by a Nazi zealot. Or that they could do more good from the inside.

Yes: There is no way of working for an evil regime without doing evil yourself. Even if you can do a small amount of good, you are still personally contributing to the far greater amount of evil.

No: If the evil will be done anyway, your highest responsibility is to restrain it as much as possible. This can sometimes be done more effectively from the inside than the outside.

Or... You might think you can shave off the edges of an evil regime. But you will find it exerts more influence on you. It will normalise things that were once unthinkable and destabilise your moral bearings.