It can’t be a coincidence that Netflix chose this moment in time to stream the 2022 German TV doc “Ganz normale Männer – Der ‘vergessene Holocaust,'” “Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust.”

The Internet is overrun with videos of masked goons attacking, roughing up and “arresting” people who may or may not be immigrants — almost entirely “brown people” — and may or may not be documented.

They’re doing this on the payroll of a totalitarian regime put in power by hate and run on hate. American mainstream news organizations are cowed and under-covering or even normalizing the crimes and the assault on due process and the ways this violence is being used to change the subject from the corrupt regime and its leader’s deep ties to pedophilia.

The film airs at a time when the word “Holocaust” has been reduced to a “brand” that’s being tarnished daily by a “final solution” underway in the Middle East, following decades of land-grabbing and apartheidist disenfranchisement backed up by Jewish/Zionist state violence. The phrase “Never Again” is losing all its meaning thanks to an Israeli regime bent on ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

So yes, maybe the Germans still have something to teach us.

“Ordinary Men” takes its title from University of North Carolina academic Christopher Browning’s book about a Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101 and how mature, often academically accomplished “ordinary men” were recruited and thrust, with little training, into carrying out the early days of the mass genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and Slavs to create “living space” for the Third Reich.

Browning, psychologists and sociologists discuss specific “ordinary men,” and the general process of peer-pressuring these untrained recruits, many of whom weren’t Nazi fanatics who joined up just to “police” occupied territories and avoid being conscripted into the army, into unspeakable acts.

Millions of victims were killed in death camps during the “Final Solution.” But those doing the rounding up and transporting of the doomed had already been carrying out mass killings — from shooting men, women and children to “bashing” babies heads in — in Poland and anywhere else they were posted.

The film, narrated by Brian Cox, focuses on that Hamburg battalion, whose commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, showed shock as he told his charges of the “terrible” orders they were given that day they were told to slaughter 1500 Polish Jews, some of them Germans who’d fled to Poland after Hitler’s rise to power.

German “efficiency” and cost-cutting didn’t yet figure into the machinery of the Holocaust. They escorted victims one by one into a forest, chatting with them (one recognized the owner of a cinema he’d attended in Hamburg) before murdering them.

Black and white photographs and rare archival footage of such “operations” blends with reenactments to recreate the horror. Audio and filmed archives of the trials of some of these war criminals — most were never brought to justice — lets us hear surviving victims’ accounts, and the killers’ unemotional descriptions of their work, carrying out the grand scheme of their state and the fanatics running it.

None expressed remorse, something one of their surviving prosecutors (Benjamin Ferencz) says.

But as Browning asserts and German academics confirm, these weren’t do-this-or-die orders. These “ordinary men” had a choice. Some chose to endure a bit of “coward” taunting from their comrades and refused, with no official punishment or recriminations.

The “We were just following orders” defense never works, from SS, Gestapo and “Reserve Police Battalions” to ICE or IDF.

Yet Browning reminds us that it’s never been about “orders.”

“Regimes that want to commit genocide or mass murder will never fail to do so for a lack of people who will pull the trigger.”

There’ve been so many Holocaust documentaries over the decades that it’s easy to become numb to the subject and anything those who endured it have to teach us. “Ordinary Men” breaks through that with a warning to those ignoring history repeating itself, and to those who think they’re safe, hiding behind masks as they commit crimes against humanity on behalf of leaders relying on hate to avoid their own reckoning.

Rating: TV-MA, discussions of mass murder, nudity

Cast:Christopher Browning, Harald Welzer, Hilary Earl, Stefan Klemp, Benjamin Ferencz and Sefan Kühl narrated by Brian Cox.

Credits: Directed by Manfred Oldenberg and Oliver Halmburger, scripted by Manfred Oldenberg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 58 minutes