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Warning sign at Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland

The centre¡¯s origins stem from a speech by the then Observer editor David Astor in April 1962, in which he argued that since most Nazi leaders and supporters were ¡°not mad in a medical sense¡±, we had to confront something ¡°deeply alarming and disturbing¡± about human nature - namely ¡°the pathological possibilities of the normal mind¡±.

This led him to call for a centre to study what he called ¡°political psycho-pathology¡±.

Mr Astor was approached by the historian Norman Cohn, who had worked as an army intelligence officer in occupied Austria and was preoccupied by similar themes.

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After discussions, he later recalled, ¡°David Astor made me an offer such as can seldom have been made to any scholar: he gave me an undertaking that if I would resign the professorship I then held in the University of Durham and devote myself to implementing the suggestion contained in his address, he would see to it that I would not suffer financially.¡±

After research convinced him that ¡°the official killings of alleged witches in the 16^th and 17^th centuries¡± offered the best parallel to the Holocaust, Professor Cohn began work on what became two major books: Warrant for Genocide, The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Europe¡¯s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt.

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From 1966 to 1980, he also served as the one and only director of what became the Columbus Centre at the University of Sussex.

Others scholars went on to examine ¡°the authoritarian personality¡±, leadership, ideology and the way groups stereotype outsiders, and applied such insights to the persecution of the gypsies and the ¡°psycho-dynamics¡± of racial prejudice.

Professor Cohn¡¯s PhD student Albie Sachs produced a major study on Justice in South Africa for the centre.

¡°Fathoming the enigma of that all too human thing, inhumanity, became a great quest of the post-war years,¡± explains Daniel Pick, professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, in the radio documentary The Roots of Extremism.

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Through interviews with the main participants, their children and some of today¡¯s leading experts in the darker aspects of ourselves, he reveals the important role the Columbus Centre played in that ¡°quest¡±.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com