When, finally, you have read through all the records of the inner workings of Hitler’s circle — the Speer memoirs, the various secretaries, Trevor-Roper’s gripping tale of the last days of the Führerbunker, the records of diplomats from the late 1930s as war moved onto the horizon — you come to one conclusion, melancholic or consoling depending on your politics: the Nazis were a pack of gangsters and lunatics for whom things got well out of hand.

Though one of their first acts in power was to close down Berlin’s notorious cabaret scene, labelling it decadent and degenerate, they were in fact its final and most successful act, a mad brew of paranoia, pseudo-scientific racism, and every obsessive foible of the early century’s fringe cults, from astrology to Zyklon-B. The logorrohaic hack artist Hitler, the cynical coke-hound chancer Goering, failed novelist Goebbels writing his new work on a whole nation, the virulent maniacal anti-semite Streicher — Nazism came together as an expression of their shared obsessions, magnifying and transforming each other.

Separately, each might have been noxious but harmless. Had Adolf Hitler boarded a boat for the US in 1920, he may well have ended up as a hack film director — like that other bad artist-racist DW Griffith — grousing about the Yids he had to work for. You don’t have to read far into a whole range of writers of the 20s and 30s to find sentiments as murderous as Hitler’s popping up constantly, hysterically, obsessively.

Without Goebbels, Hitler would never have understood how to project his personal paranoia into a whole web that could draw in an entire nation; without Hitler, Goebbels’ chaotic mix of medieval yearnings, neurotic introspection and quest for purity would never have fused into Nazism’s iron-purpose. The final element was added by Goering, whose father had been the colonial administrator of Namibia, a pore-WW1 German possession. There he had overseen the genocide of the Herrero people, a development on from the chaotic murder of around 8 million in the Belgian Congo in the scramble for diamonds and rubber.

The Herrero extermination was pure, focused, deliberate and of-itself. From a Eurocentric perspective it could be seen as a rehearsal for the Holocaust; from the other end, the Holocaust — whose remembrance day it is in the UK — is simply an extension of end-stage colonialism, the point at which Europe turned on its alleged non-Europeans, Jews and Roma chief amongst them. It was Goering — a man almost universally liked at a personal level by the guards, prosecutors and others who had to deal with him — who provided the final nudge to Nazism, the determination to go beyond talk.

Hitler talked a lot about the extermination of the Jews, but hell, so did a lot of people. It was Goering who provided the final arming pin. The nearly unbearable truth about the Holocaust is that at the base of it is not merely alien beliefs of ancient racial suspicions schmicked up with pseudo-science, but also the rather closer sentiment of “f-ck it, why not?”

So it was a hell of a day. Hell of a day. Hell of a day for the Chilcot inquiry to continue its slow unwinding of a half-decade of lies and evasions — as if the whole country had reached down to pick up a rock and found the scurrying insect life beneath. Hell of a day for the release of the iPad, a minor technical variation on existing machines, being treated as if it were delivering the future itself. Hell of a day to get, on your iPad, news reports that Haiti, a week out, is still without food, water and shelter, and that the weak and the old are beginning to die afresh.

Hell of a day, and before I go any further, I better clarify that no, I am not suggesting that the events in Iraq or Haiti are comparable with the Holocaust, its intent or application. Indeed, it’s quite the opposite — it’s the undoubted uniqueness of the Holocaust that has given it its contemporary historical role for the western political elite, functioning as alibi. Beneath the shadow of the Shoah, every other evil can look merely procedural by comparison.

Kill half a million people through some delusional farrago of lies, narcissism, sycophancy, and demented search for political meaning — that’s Iraq in case you were wondering — and you can always say, when the full horror of your casual wantonness is revealed, “well hey it’s nothing compared to the Holocaust, you shoulda seen that, man you want evil….?” Let thousands die off your coast, in a nation gutted by the tender mercies of the Bush doctrine and the IMF, while you coo over a new device whose minor innovations are a substitute for genuine human advancement, and “yeah but you should have seen the Holocaust wooahh….”

So the caveat against odious comparisons made it was impossible to watch the live broadcast of the Chilcot report — will the ABC’s News 24 channel run stuff at this length, or is it going to be all jam recipes and slices of life from the Whyalla local radio weatherman? — and the sinuous evidence of Lord Goldsmith, attorney-general at the time of the conflict. Famously, Goldsmith — he was just plain old Pete Goldsmith from Birmingham until made a Labour peer, the honorific (Baron Goldsmith) turning him from man to DC comics supervillain overnight — initially advised the government in early 2003 that an alleged material breach of UN resolution 1441 by Iraq (one allowing complete access by UN weapons inspectors) would not be sufficient of itself to make the war legal.

What was required was a second resolution, re-invigorating resolution 687, made in 1990 to authorise the first gulf war. Around a month later, and on the eve of the invasion, Goldsmith had changed his mind, advising the government that a breach of 1441, judged as such by the British PM, was sufficient to let slip the dogs.

That much has always been known, and Goldsmith’s memos were released in 2005. What’s never been clear was what happened in the interim to make him change his mind, knuckle under whatever. What the inquiry made clear was the key event between these two memos — Goldsmith went to America, where he was clearly worked on like a Black & Decker bench, before coming back to the UK for more of the same.

The journey of his advice on 1441 and the war — from telling defence minister Geoff Hoon in 2002 that the war would clearly be illegal without full backing — is less that of a jurist trying to get at the truth, than an ambulance chaser trying to find some angle by which he can keep a dodgy damages claim in play long enough to save his own neck.

Put simply, Goldsmith simply removed everything from his earlier advice that suggested doubt — everything in effect that made it legal advice — and rubber-stamped US/UK intentions. Though never a member of the Commons (the UK attorney-general is an appointed position, existing halfway between government and civil service) Goldsmith was part of the extended cabal of lawyers who identified themselves with the New Labour project, after the death of then-leader John Smith in 1994 left the party in utter chaos. Plucked from the bench by Tony Blair, he repaid that service with his abject knuckling under over Iraq. He is now an adviser with US law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, whose clients include JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, the NY Times and Coca-Cola among many others — so that US trip really hit the jackpot too.

But his greatest service to us remains his six hours of evidence today, if only for shading and hatching the picture of a UK government desperate to square off the idea of legal war, undertaken with, not against, international, multilateral rule — and to silence any high-profile critic who might insist on the plain truth, that 1441 of itself, did not authorise anything.

In a post-evidence debate on BBC news, one government shil was reduced to saying that the UK and US allies had gone to the UN for guidance, reserving the ultimate decision for themselves — a measure of the magical thinking that seems to have permeated the elite at the time of the war, together with a near-panic that attended the war’s commission, and its aftermath.

Thus, though thousands of planes and tanks could be mobilised for the war, fewer could be found to enforce the peace — nor could adequate body armour be found for the troops Blair and Brown were sending to war. This omission — hardly the most lethal of their sins — will be sufficient to sink their reputation finally and utterly because it will reveal them essentially as spivs, sharp faced men who did well out of the war.

And there will be nothing, now, to save the Haitian people. At a time when the sky should be dark with planes dropping pallets of bottled water and ration packs instead of bombs, no-one is coming, save for troops to ensure that Haitians remain sequestered behind their own borders, and die there.

No radical evil here or anywhere. But plenty of scurrying, panic, and the petty actions of gangsters and fantasists over-reaching themselves, enabling each other to do things none of them could do apart, mission-ready like bombs loaded for priming, with a resolution, or a legal opinion. Let history record that nothing they did detracted from their essential decency. Make a hell of a movie.