And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
—Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Peace Award speech
More quotes here
Background
As much as I cannot reproach a tubercle bacilli for an activity which means destruction for man but life for them, I am also compelled and entitled, for the sake of my personal existence, to wage the fight against tuberculosis by destroying its pathogens. The Jew, however, becomes and has become through thousands of years in his work the racial tuberculosis of the peoples. To fight him is to destroy him.
—Adolf Hitler to Konstantin Hierl, July 3, 1920
Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.
—Adolf Hitler to Josef Hell (1922)
"If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."
So, we are now going to have a total solution to the Jewish question. The programme is clear. It reads: total separation, total segregation! What does this mean? It does not only mean the total exclusion of the Jews from the German economic system... It means much more! No German can be expected to live under the same roof as Jews. The Jews must be chased out of our houses and our residential districts and made to live in rows or blocks of houses where they can keep to themselves and come into contact with Germans as little as possible. They must be clearly identified.... And when we compel the rich Jews to provide for the `poor' of their race, which will certainly be necessary, they will all sink together into a pit of criminality. As this happens, we will be faced with the harsh necessity of eradicating the Jewish underworld, just as we root out criminals from our own orderly state: with fire and sword. The result will be the certain and absolute end of Jewry in Germany; its complete annihilation!
—Das Schwartze Korps, November 24th, 1938
As far as the historical appearance of the Jew in Europe is concerned, we believe that the hour of his death has irrevocably arrived.
—Walter Gross (1939 speech)
We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918. The day of reckoning has come.
—Adolf Hitler to František Chvalkovský. January 21, 1939
Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
—Adolf Hitler to the Reichstag. January 30, 1939.
If the Jew wants to fight, it is fine with us. We have wanted that fight for a long time. There is no room in the world for the Jews any more. The Jew or us, one of us will have to go. We know that the Jew will lose, that he and his devilish, life-denying and destructive doctrines will be destroyed (vernichtet).
—"The Jews or Us..." speech by Robert Ley (March 31, 1939)
by Robert Ley (March 31, 1939)A punitive expedition must come against the Jews in Russia. A punitive expedition which will provide the same fate for them that every murderer and criminal must expect. Death sentence and execution. The Jews in Russia must be killed. They must be exterminated root and branch. Then the world will see the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism.
—Julius Streicher, Der Stuermernote (May 1939)
[If England won the war, then] The German people, man, woman, and child would be exterminated. We know it. The Jew would be wading in blood. Funeral pyres would be built on which the Jews would burn us. [...] Hence, it should rather be the Jews that fry, rather that they should burn — that they should starve, that they should be exterminated. Germany will live. That will be our slogan.
—Robert Ley in Lodz (December 1939)
The Holocaust
Overall this country makes a ghastly impression on me [...] beginning with the roads, which are indescribably bad and dusty, then this dump with its many pests and finally the endless great number of Jews, these disgusting Stürmer-types.
— September 24, 1939 letter by an unnamed soldier
Wherever one looks there is filth, and the Jews themselves are full of filth. It is really comical: The Jews all salute us, although we don’t respond and aren’t allowed to. They swing their caps down to the ground. In fact, the greeting is not compulsory, but is a remnant from SS times; that’s how they trained the Jews.
When one looks at these people, one gets the impression, that they really have no justification for living on God’s earth. You must have seen this with your own eyes, otherwise you cannot believe it.
When one looks at these people, one gets the impression, that they really have no justification for living on God’s earth. You must have seen this with your own eyes, otherwise you cannot believe it.
—Private E., in a letter for his family (November 17th, 1940)
It would not be a bad idea then to send our dear ones back home a picture, and tell them: well now, there are not so many lice and Jews any more, and conditions here in the Government General have changed and improved somewhat already. Of course, I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year's time [public amused]. But in the course of time, and above all, if you help me, this end will be attained. After all, it is not necessary for us to accomplish everything within a year and right away, for what would otherwise be left for those who follow us to do?
—Hans Frank, Fall 1940.
I hope to see the very concept of Jewry completely obliterated.
—Heinrich Himmler (March 23, 1941)
Some six million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals... And to this end it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or otherwise bring about their eradication.
—Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, on May 29, 1941
Anyone who has ever looked into the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are. There is no need here for theoretical reflections. It would be an insult to animals if one were to call the features of these, largely Jewish, tormentors of people beasts. They are the embodiment of the infernal, of the personified insane hatred of everything that is noble in humanity. In the shape of these commissars we witness the revolt of the subhuman against noble blood. The masses whom they are driving to their deaths with every means of icy terror and lunatic incitement would have brought about an end of all meaningful life, had the incursion not been prevented at the last moment [by Operation Barbarossa]
— German Army Information Pamphlet, June 1941.
I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish Questionnote .
—Order from Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, July 31, 1941.
I still have something else to report to you. So I was really there at the great mass dying the day before yesterday. When it came to the first vans my hand was still trembling when I shot, but one gets used to this. When it came to the tenth van I already aimed calmly and fired surely at the many women, children and babies. Considering that I also have two newborn babies at home, which these hordes would treat just the same way, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a nice, short death, compared [to] the infernal torments of thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. Newborn babies were flying high through the air and we picked them off in flight, before they even fell into the pit or the water. Just do away with this brood that has thrown all of Europe into war and is now also mongering in America until it has also drawn the same into the war. Hitler's word becomes true, when he once said before the beginning of the war: if Jewry thinks that it can again start a war in Europe, then Jewry will not win, but it will be the end of Jewry in Europe. […] M. has again lost a number with three zeroes, but that is of no consequence here. I am already looking forward to it, and many here say that we will go back home, for then it will be the turn of our local Jews
—Walter Mattner to his wife. October 5, 1941
Regarding the conduct of troops towards the Bolshevistic system, vague ideas are still prevalent in many cases. The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-Bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks which exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations.
Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e. the annihilation of revolts in hinterland, which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.
Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e. the annihilation of revolts in hinterland, which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.
—Walter von Reichenau, Severity Order. October 10, 1941
Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.
The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km.
I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization program of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.
The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km.
I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization program of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.
—SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, report dated December 1, 1941.
But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories [nor our own] have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here….
—Hans Frank to administration members. December 16, 1941.
Gentlemen, if ever a generation comes after us that is so cowardly and so weak that it cannot understand our good and so necessary work, all of National Socialism was for nothing. Quite the opposite, one must bury a bronze tablet that it was us, us, that had the courage to carry this gigantic work to its end.
— Odilo Globocnik, Lublin District SSPF, early 1942 speech to construction team of unnamed extermination facility
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.
The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)
The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)
—Wannsee Protocol (January 20, 1942)
(January 20, 1942)The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.
—Joseph Goebbels diary entry (February 14, 1942)
Comrades, believe me. I'm not painting too grim a picture. It is bitter for me, bitterly serious. The Jew is the great danger to humanity. If we don't succeed in exterminating him, then we will lose the war. It's not enough to bring him someplace. That would be as if one wanted to lock up a louse somewhere in a cage. (Laughter) They would find a way out and again they come out from under and make you itch again. (Laughter) You have to annihilate them, you have to exterminate them [for what] they have done to humanity (interrupted by ongoing applause).
—Robert Ley to the workers of an Amsterdam factory (May 10, 1942)
Jewish youngster, do not trust those that deceive you. Of the eighty thousand Jews in "The Jerusalem of Lithuania" [the city of Vilna], only twenty thousand have survived. In front of our very eyes, they tore our parents, our brothers, our sisters from us. Where are the hundreds of men who were abducted for labor by the Lithuanian "kidnappers"? Where are the naked women and the children who were taken away from us on the terrible night of the provocation? Where are the Jews who were taken away on Yom Kippur? Where are our brethren from the second ghetto? Whoever was taken out of the ghetto gates never returned again. All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponary [woodlands in the outskirts of Vilna] and Ponary is death! Hitler is plotting to annihilate all the Jews of Europe. It befell the Jews of Lithuania to be the first in line. Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter! It's true, we are weak and defenseless, but the only response to the enemy is resistance! Brothers! It is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers. Resist! To our last breath.
— Jewish partisan Abba Kovner, in a pamphlet distributed following the German invasion of Lithuania, 1942
, in a pamphlet distributed following the German invasion of Lithuania, 1942I did not know what was threatening us. The taking of the sick from the hospitals caught me completely by surprise. And I give you the best proof there is of this: I had my own nearest and dearest among them and I could do nothing for them! [...] I thought that would be the end of it, that after that, they'd leave us in peace, the peace for which I long so much, for which I've always worked, which has been my goal. But something else, it turned out, was destined for us. [...] Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than 20,000 Jews out of the ghetto, and if not - "We will do it!" So the question became, 'Should we take it upon ourselves, do it ourselves, or leave it to others to do?". Well, we - that is, I and my closest associates - thought first not about "How many will perish?" but "How many is it possible to save?" And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we should take the implementation of this order into our own hands. I must perform this difficult and bloody operation - I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take children because, if not, others may be taken as well - God forbid.
—Speech from Mordechai Chaim Romkowski, head of the Jewish Council of the Łódź Ghetto (September 4, 1942)
from Mordechai Chaim Romkowski, head of the Jewish Council of the Łódź Ghetto (September 4, 1942)The Polish Government — as the representatives of the legitimate authority on territories in which the Germans are carrying out the systematic extermination of Polish citizens and of citizens of Jewish origin of many other European countries — consider it their duty to address themselves to the Governments of the United Nations, in the confident belief that they will share their opinion as to the necessity not only of condemning the crimes committed by the Germans and punishing the criminals, but also of finding means offering the hope that Germany might be effectively restrained from continuing to apply her methods of mass extermination.
—Edward Raczyński, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a diplomatic note to Allied governments, December 10, 1942.
The attention of the Belgian, Czechoslovak, Greek, Jugoslav, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norwegian, Polish, Soviet, United Kingdom and United States Governments and also of the French National Committee has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.
From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.
—Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations (December 17, 1942)
On January 22, 1943, six months will have passed since the deportations from Warsaw began. We all remember well the days of terror during which 300,000 of our brothers and sisters were cruelly put to death in the death camp of Treblinka. Six months have passed of life in constant fear of death, not knowing what the next day may bring. We have received information from all sides about the destruction of the Jews in the Government-General, in Germany, in the occupied territories. When we listen to this bitter news we wait for our own hour to come, every day and every moment. Today we must understand that the Nazi murderers have let us live only because they want to make use of our capacity to work to our last drop of blood and sweat, to our last breath. We are slaves, and when slaves are no longer profitable, they are killed. Everyone among us must understand that, and everyone among us must remember it always.
—Jewish partisan Mordechai Anielewicz, in a pamphlet distributed to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943.
, in a pamphlet distributed to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943.On Horthy's retort, what should he do with the Jews then, after he had pretty well taken all means of living from them - he surely couldn't beat them to death - The Reich Foreign Minister replied that the Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.
—Minutes of a discussion between Joachim von Ribbentrop and Admiral Horthy
Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn't want to work, they were shot. If they couldn't work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. That was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism more? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.
—Adolf Hitler to Admiral Miklos Horthy. April 17, 1943.
Shocking reports come in from the good [Max] Fraunendorfer [administrator in the General Government] in Poland. While [Hans] Frank publicly declares he wanted to give Poland a dignified and free existence, and while the gang tries in vain to befuddle world opinion about [better 'with'] the Katyn murders, the SS in Poland carries on most shamefully. Countless Jews have been gassed in specially built chambers, at least 100,000. [...] Meanwhile the unhappy remnants of the Jews [in Warsaw] prepared to defend themselves, and there is heavy fighting which will certainly lead to their complete extermination by the SS.
—Ulrich von Hassell's diary (May 15, 1943)
I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swines, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17
—Heinrich Himmler, First Posen Speech (October 3rd, 1943)
I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over
—Heinrich Himmler, Second Posen Speech (October 6th, 1943)
Whoever does what a Jew does is a scoundrel, a criminal. And he who repeats and wishes to copy him deserves the same fate, annihilation, death.
—Julius Streicher, Der Stuermer. February 1944.
Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.
—Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, German propaganda broadcast on March 1st, 1944.
Jewish plutocracy and Jewish communism are after the German people who have escaped their slavery.
V. The battle to the end.
The Jew wants to force us back to a life of slavery so that he can live off us as a parasite and suck us dry. The healthy life of our people stands against the parasitic life of the Jew.
Who in this struggle can still speak of pity, brotherly love, etc.? Who believes that a parasite (e.g., a louse) can be improved or changed? Who believes that one can come to an agreement with a parasite? We can only choose between being devoured by the parasite or destroying it.
The Jew must be destroyed wherever we meet him!
In so doing, we commit no crime against life, but rather serve life’s laws of battle, which always oppose that which is an enemy to healthy life. Our battle serves to maintain life.
A German victory — the victory of the created order.
V. The battle to the end.
The Jew wants to force us back to a life of slavery so that he can live off us as a parasite and suck us dry. The healthy life of our people stands against the parasitic life of the Jew.
Who in this struggle can still speak of pity, brotherly love, etc.? Who believes that a parasite (e.g., a louse) can be improved or changed? Who believes that one can come to an agreement with a parasite? We can only choose between being devoured by the parasite or destroying it.
The Jew must be destroyed wherever we meet him!
In so doing, we commit no crime against life, but rather serve life’s laws of battle, which always oppose that which is an enemy to healthy life. Our battle serves to maintain life.
A German victory — the victory of the created order.
—To Know the Jews is to Understand the Meaning of the War! (September-October 1944).
(September-October 1944).Enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over.
—Kurt Waldheim (allegedly), German propaganda leaflet distributed on the Eastern Front, late 1944.
It is quite possible that we shall lose this war and that all the wonderful things Adolf Hitler has created will be destroyed by the Unholy Alliance of our enemies. But there is one achievement that will stand, and future generations will thank us for it — there is one fact which will never be reversed : except in the small neutral countries, there are no Jews left on the European Continent. That the Jews will come back in appreciable numbers from the Anglo-Saxon countries where they prosper is most unlikely. Anyhow, the Western Jews do not multiply. Thus, the fact that we have exterminated, root and branch, the mass reservoir in the East from which they were drawing fresh forces makes one thing certain: we have freed Europe from the Jews for good.
—Unnamed SS officer of Auschwitz answering to Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner, an inmate doctor who askd him about the looming German defeat. 1944
Out of respect for human life, I would remove a purulent appendix from a diseased body. The Jews are the purulent appendix in the body of Europe.
—Dr. Fritz Klein, head physician of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, answering to Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner, who asked him why he supported the exterminations
The great significance of 15 March 1939note lies... in the fact that we got rid of the Jews forever!
—Article in the Arijský bojnote (March 10, 1945)
In the brief monthly reports of the Security Police, I only want figures on how many Jews have been shipped off and how many are currently left.
—Heinrich Himmler to Ernst Kaltenbrunner
When I give my word to a dog, I keep it, but not a Jew.
—Alois Brunner, second-in-command of deportation under Adolf Eichmann, to a colleague
Aftermath
The most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower after visiting Ohrdruf concentration camp (April 12, 1945)
When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.
—George S. Patton's diary after visiting Ohrdruf (April 12, 1945)
(April 12, 1945)The German people have been told that stories of German atrocities were Allied propaganda. Here, you can see for yourself. Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither — it is the responsibility of the German people....Your so-called Master Race has demonstrated that it is master only of crime, cruelty and sadism. You have lost the respect of the civilized world.
—US Army Colonel George Lynch to the population of Gardelegen, where the SS burned alive 1016 slave laborers in a barn. April 25, 1945.
You, who represent the fathers and brothers of German youth, see before your eyes some of the sons and daughters who bear the direct responsibility for this crime. They are a small portion only. Therefore, it is more than the human soul is able to bear. But who bears the real responsibility? You, who allowed your leader to carry out this horrible madness; you, who couldn't do enough for this degenerate triumph. You, who were a part of this camp...
—Unnamed British officers speaking from a loudspeaker to local German officials forced to visit Bergen-Belsen. April 1945.
Murder conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Maidanek, and Oranienburg.
—Opening speech of Hartley Shawcross, chief British prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials, July 1946.
When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: "I accuse." For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman and in their name I will unfold the awesome indictment.
[...] Yet never, down in the entire blood-stained road travelled by this people, never since the first days of its nationhood, has any man arisen who succeeded in dealing it such grievous blows as did Hitler's iniquitous regime, and Adolf Eichmann as its executive arm for the extermination of the Jewish people. In all human history there is no other example of a man against whom it would be possible to draw up such a bill of indictment as has been read here. The most terrible crimes of those fearful figures of barbarism and blood-lust, Genghis Khan, Attila, or Ivan the Terrible, the telling of which curdles our blood and makes our hair stand on end with horror, deeds, that have become "a proverb and a taunt" {Jeremiah 24:9} and an "everlasting abhorrence" {Daniel 12:2} to the nations - these almost seem to pale into insignificance when contrasted with the abominations, the murderous horrors, which will be presented to you in this trial.
In this trial, we shall also encounter a new kind of killer, the kind that exercises his bloody craft behind a desk, and only occasionally does the deed with his own hands. True, we have certain knowledge of only one incident in which Adolf Eichmann actually beat to death a Jewish boy, who had dared to steal fruit from a peach tree in the yard of his Budapest home. But it was his word that put gas chambers into action; he lifted the telephone, and railroad cars left for the extermination centres; his signature it was that sealed the doom of thousands and tens of thousands. He had but to give the order, and at his command the troopers took the field to rout Jews out of their neighbourhoods, to beat and torture them and chase them into ghettoes, to pin the badges of shame on their breasts, to steal their property - till finally, after torture and pillage, after everything had been wrung out of them, when even their hair had been taken, they were transported, en masse to the slaughter. Even the corpses were still of value: the gold teeth were extracted and the wedding rings removed.
[...] He must bear the responsibility therefore, as if it was he who with his own hands knotted the hangman's noose, who lashed the victims into the gas-chambers, who shot in the back and pushed into the open pit every single one of the millions who were slaughtered. Such is his responsibility in the eyes of the law, and such is his responsibility according to every standard of conscience and morality.
—Gideon Hauser, Attorney General of Israel, trial of Adolf Eichmann, 17 April 1961.
"Special treatment" in the terminology of the concentration camp means physical extermination. If it was a question of more than a few people, where nothing else than gassing them was worthwhile, they were gassed.
—Dr. Hans Münch, who had worked at Auschwitz, in a 1981 TV interview in response to being questioned about the Deadly Euphemism used in Nazi documentation.
So [Otto] Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camps from end to end. Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. Naturally, that horrified and appalled us. We went back and sat down on our suitcases and cried like old women. Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day!
—Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel in the 1985 documentary Shoah describing the killing process at the Treblinka extermination camp.
Wenn die Generation die den Krieg überlebt hat nicht mehr da ist, wird sich zeigen ob wir aus der Geschichte gelernt haben.
(When the generation that survived the war is no longer with us, only then will we discover if we have learned from history.)
(When the generation that survived the war is no longer with us, only then will we discover if we have learned from history.)
—Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, 20 July 2018
Scholarship about the Holocaust
The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.
—Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945, Ian Kershaw (1987)
"So genocide was there implicit in that attack on the Soviet Union and nobody really attempted to hide this at all in the German leadership. But once it didn’t work out in terms of the Nazi vision of totally destroying the Soviet Union and having this option of pushing the European Jews into it then, of course, the actual genocide that came out with this so-called 'Final Solution' took place in extermination units on Polish soil which was something that was devised as the war in the East didn’t go according to plan in the autumn and the winter of 1941-2. But genocide was there absolutely as a central point of this war in the East and therefore you could say that genocide was a central component of the Second World War itself."
They came first for the communists
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Them they came for the trade unionists
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew
Then they came for me
And no one was left to speak up
And no one was left to speak up
Appropriating the victimhood of the Jews was a rather common feature of post-Holocaust politics of memory, commemoration, rhetoric, and historiography. The Soviet Union refused to recognize the unique fate of the Jews under German occupation; the Poles claimed that they too had six million victims (conveniently forgetting that half of them were Polish Jews and that many Poles had collaborated in their murder or stood passively by as it took place); the Germans insisted that the "catastrophe" that ended the "thousand-year Reich" made them into the moral equivalents of their victims; the French made the Jewish victims of Vichy vanish under the mantle of heroic Resistance deportees; the Dutch made Anne Frank into a symbol of compassion rather than of denunciation and betrayal.
— Omer Bartov, The "Jew" in Cinema, page 76, Indiana University Press.
