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, and ultimately led to their mass murder.

In 1941, Losener heard something that disturbed him. Some 1,000 German Jews had been transported to Riga and summarily executed, along with 25,000 Latvian Jews.

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 the decision had been made by someone more senior than them, and 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.

In 1935, while Losener was drafting anti-Semitic legislation, Helmuth James von Moltke turned down the chance to become a judge because it would have meant joining the Nazi Party. Drafted into the army in 1939, Moltke tried to halt the rampant human rights abuses he saw in Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1945 he was arrested and hanged.

Next to these 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 claim Losener used his position for good, by defining people with two Jewish grandparents as "Mischlinge" rather than Jews. The Mischlinge were subjected to fewer restrictions and most were not deported to the camps. It is estimated Losener's decision may have saved up to 107,000 lives.

And he was able to use his inside knowledge to testify against the regime at the Nuremberg TrialsHeld in the German town of Nuremberg, this was the first time in history that leaders were tried and convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide..

Others ask if many of us would really have done differently. Many of those who worked for the Nazis, like Losener, were mainstream conservatives who disliked the liberal governments of the Weimar RepublicThe government of Germany from 1918 to 1933. . 

Although they did not like Hitler, they thought Germany needed stronger leadership to stand up to French bullying and deal with the Great DepressionA severe worldwide economic depression that started in the US in 1929. When Roosevelt was elected, the US unemployment rate stood at over 20%..

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.

There are more recent examples. Many aides in the Trump White House have given damning testimony to the Congressional inquiry into the 6 January violence at the US Capitol.

And UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace defended his decision not to resign from Boris Johnson's cabinet earlier this month, arguing that he had a duty to maintain the UK's defences.

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 duty 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.