People indicted for war crimes

"My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don't have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate, nothing more."

"Shoot first and inquire afterwards, and if you make mistakes, I will protect you."

"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."

"The Jew must clearly understand one thing at once, he must get out!"

"Now you see. You are even turning the Fuehrer against me. Ah, the Jews, the Jews, they'll be the death of me yet!"

"Excellency, please sign. I hate to say it, but my job is not the easiest one. Prague, your capital–I should be terribly sorry if I were compelled to destroy this beautiful city. But I would have to do it, to make the English and French understand that my air force can do all it claims to do. Because they still don't want to believe this is so, and I should like an opportunity of giving them proof."

"Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate.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 (Endlösung) of the Jewish question."

"The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!"

"Why has this silly engine suddenly turned up, which is so idiotically welded together? They told me then, there would be two engines connected behind each other, and suddenly there appears this misbegotten monster of welded-together engines one cannot get at!"

"The people were merely to acknowledge the authority of the Führer, or, let us say, to declare themselves in agreement with the Führer. If they gave the Führer their confidence then it was their concern to exercise the other functions. Thus, not the individual persons were to be selected according to the will of the people, but solely the leadership itself."

"I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand ... I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!"

"The German people trusted the Führer. Given his authoritarian direction of the state, they had no influence on events. Ignorant of the crimes of which we know today, the people have fought with loyalty, self-sacrifice, and courage, and they have suffered too in this life-and-death struggle into which they were arbitrarily thrust. The German people are free from blame."

"We are living through a National Socialist revolution. We emphasize the term “socialist” because many speak only of a “national” revolution. Dubious, but also wrong. It was not only nationalism that led to the breakthrough. We are proud that German socialism also triumphed. Unfortunately, there are still people among us today who emphasize the word “national” too strongly and who do not want to know anything about the second part of our worldview, which shows that they have also failed to understand the first part. Those who do not want to recognize a German socialism do not have the right to call themselves national."

"Just as nationalism protects a people from outside forces, so socialism serves a people's domestic needs. We want the people's strength to be released within the nation, forging the people once more into a strong block. The individual citizen must again have the sense that, even if he is finds himself in the simplest and lowest position, that his life and opportunities are assured."

"Marxist socialism was degraded to a concern only with pay or the stomach. The bourgeoisie degraded nationalism into barren hyper-patriotism. Both concepts, therefore, must be cleansed and shown to the people anew, in a crystal-clear form. The nationalism of our worldview arrived at the right moment. Our movement seized the concept of socialism from the cowardly Marxists, and tore the concept of nationalism from the cowardly bourgeois parties, throwing both into the melting pot of our worldview, and producing a clear synthesis: German national Socialism. That provided the foundation for the rebuilding of our people. Thus this revolution was National Socialist."

"Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein."

"The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused."

"After the United States gobbled up California and half of Mexico, and we were stripped down to nothing, territorial expansion suddenly becomes a crime. It's been going on for centuries, and it will still go on."

"Do you think I give that much of a damn about my lousy life? — For myself, I don't give a damn if I get executed, or drown, or crash in a plane, or drink myself to death! — But there is still a matter of honor in this life! — Assassination attempt on Hitler! — Ugh! — Gott im Himmel!! I could have sunk through the floor! And do you think I would have handed Himmler over to the enemy, guilty as he was? Dammit, I would have liquidated the bastard myself!"

"Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

"What do I care about danger? I've sent soldiers and airmen to death against the enemy — why should I be afraid?"

"Hitler decided that. I thought it was stupid because I believed that first we had to defeat England. Also we had to take Gibraltar."

"No. It was the last hours and he (Hitler) was under pressure. If I could have seen him personally it would have been different."

"I know you want to study me psychologically. That's reasonable and I appreciate it. At least you don't lecture to me and pry into my affairs. You have a good technique as a psychiatrist. Let the other fellow talk and stick his neck into the noose. I don't mean that the way it sounds. But you hardly say anything. Someday I'm going to ask you questions."

"I have always been interested in family history. Chromosomes are funny things, aren't they? They may skip a generation and you can find children who resemble the grandfather, rather than either parent. Heredity is more important than environment. Blood will tell. For example, a man is either musical by heredity or he is not. You can't make a man musical by the environment. You can find a person who is very musically inclined and be puzzled because neither parents nor grandparents had any ear for music. But if you trace it back, you will find that the great-grandfather was a musician. But the environment plays a great part in the development of a man. It is significant whether a man is brought up in the city or in the country, near a lake or on the shores of the ocean."

"In Berlin Jews controlled almost one hundred percent of the theaters and cinemas before the rise to power."

"Hitler had the willpower of a demon and he needed it. If he didn't have such a strong willpower he couldn't have achieved anything. Don't forget, if Hitler had not lost the war, if he did not have to fight against the combination of big powers like England, America, and Russia — each one he could have conquered individually — these defendants and these generals would now be saying, 'Heil Hitler,' and would not be so damn critical."

"To me there are two Hitlers: one who existed until the end of the French war; the other begins with the Russian campaign. In the beginning he was genial and pleasant. He would have extraordinary willpower and unheard-of influence on people. The important thing to remember is that the first Hitler, the man who I knew until the end of the French war, had much charm and goodwill. He was always frank. The second Hitler, who existed from the beginning of the Russian campaign until his suicide, was always suspicious, easily upset, and tense. He was distrustful to an extreme degree."

"I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions. In 1934, I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that if I disapprove of the experimentation on animals, how could I possibly be in favor of torturing humans? The prosecution says that I had something to do with the freezing experiments which were performed in the concentration camps under the auspices of the air force. That is pure nonsense! I was much too busy to know about these medical experiments, and if anybody had asked me, I would have disapproved violently. It must have been Himmler who thought up these stupid experiments, although I think he shirked his responsibility by committing suicide. I am not too unhappy about it because I would not particularly enjoy sitting on the same bench with him. The same is true of that drunken Robert Ley, who did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started. He was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand."

"The atrocities are, for me, the most horrible part of the accusation in this trial. They thought that I took it lightly or laughed about it or some such nonsense, in court. That is definitely a mistake. I am the type of person who is naturally against such things and my own psychological reaction is to laugh or smile in the face of adversity. Perhaps that explains my attitude in court. Besides, I was not to blame for these horrors. It's not just that I am a hard man because of my long experience in the army and in politics. It's true that I saw plenty in the First World War and during the air raids and at the front in this war. But I was always a person who felt the suffering of others. To paint me as an unfeeling ogre who laughs in court at the atrocities is stupid."

"All nonsense. Nobody knows the real Göring. I am a man of many parts, but the autobiography, what does that tell you? Nothing. And those books put out by the party press, they are less than useless."

"I think that women are wonderful but I've never met one yet who didn't show more feeling than logic."

"If I didn't have a sense of humor, how could I stand this trial now?"

"In the first place I'm sure Hitler did not write that damned testament himself. Probably some swine like Bormann wrote it for him. But I don't see what is so terrible in the testament when you examine it, anyway. There was Berlin, bombed every minute. The noise of artillery from the lousy Russians, the American and British bombers overhead. Maybe Hitler was a trifle unbalanced by all that. If he wrote the testament at such a time, it was hysteria. But essentially, what difference does it make?"

"I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany."

"The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally."

"No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Göring. You may call me Meyer."

"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set – then at least I'll own something that has always worked."

"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning!"

"I will decide who is a Jew!"

"Hitler neither developed his ideas in a vacuum nor rose to power alone. A rather motley crew of people formed his inner circle. Its membership changed many times, as people fell in and out of favor. Three individuals who stuck with Hitler throughout his political career and gained international profiles were Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler. All of them would play key roles in the Nazi regime, each amassing enormous power even as they fought among themselves for Hitler's favor."

"Hermann Göring (1893-1946) was a hero of World War I who rose through the air force to become commander of the famous Richtofen Squadron. Somewhat at a loss after the war ended with Germany's defeat and massive demilitarization, he joined the Nazi Party in 1922. One of Hitler's oldest associates, Göring had the distinction of having been wounded at the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Nazi lingo reserved the label "old fighters" for those of the faithful who had been members before the failed Putsch. Hitler often presented Göring as one of Nazism's more respectable figures. Göring's father had been a judge and consular official, and he had ties with conservative and nationalist circles. Göring senior had even served as resident minister plenipotentiary in German Southwest Africa, site of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people in 1907. In fact there was a major street named after him in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia (now Daniel Munamava Street)."

"Throughout the 1930s Hitler showered appointments on Hermann Göring. When the Nazi Party became the largest party in the German parliament, Göring became president of the Reichstag (as the German parliament was called). Göring established the Gestapo, a political police force, and was named commander in chief of the Luftwaffe (air force). In 1936 Hitler chose Göring to head the Four-Year Plan to prepare Germany for war. A swaggering, flamboyant individual who relished luxury and excess, Göring was also an ambitious schemer and vicious infighter."

"Goering, wreathed in smiles and orders and decorations received us gaily, his wife at his side. There is something un-Christian about Goering, a strong pagan streak, a touch of the arena, though perhaps, like many who are libidinous-minded like myself, he actually does very little. People say that he can be very hard and ruthless, as are all Nazis when occasion demands, but outwardly he seems all vanity and childish love of display."

"In Goering's tones there is just such a shadow. He is a complex villain if ever there was one. He also kept his bravery to the end and made a showing at Nuremberg which shamed his colleagues. He also kept his stubborn cunning, defeating the hangman."

"I can't see a thing wrong with Göring's behavior as far as this trial is concerned. They have proven none of the charges. I have mentioned to Göring that the trouble with National Socialism is that it is a house divided, that we Germans tried to live in a community without considering our neighbors, and Göring agreed with me. So even Göring isn't as bad a fellow as the prosecution would have the world believe."

"The statesmen of the 1930s were not blind to the danger posed by a Germany dominant on the continent. On the contrary, it became conventional wisdom that the nation's capital would be flattened within twenty-four hours of the outbreak of war by the might of Hermann Gôring's Luftwaffe. In 1934 the Royal Air Force estimated that the Germans could drop up to 150 tons a day on England in the event of a war in which they occupied the Low Countries. By 1936 that figure had been raised to 600 tons and by 1939 to 700 tons - with a possible deluge of 3,500 tons on the first day of war. In July 1934 Baldwin declared, 'When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.' Yet he and his successor Neville Chamberlain failed altogether to devise a rational response to the German threat. It was one thing to let the Japanese have Manchuria; it meant nothing to British security. The same was true of letting the Italians have parts of Abyssinia; even Albania could be theirs at no cost to Britain. The internal affairs of Spain, too, were frankly irrelevant to the British national interest. But the rise of a Greater Germany was a different matter."

"And another question was unfortunately not asked of Göring: 'The German people put faith in you even if they doubted Hitler because you were gentlemanly and more likable. What did you, Göring, do to justify this confidence? You have led a luxurious life and collected stolen art.'"

"Göring wanted to know if we had ever thought about this. "Jawohl, Herr Reichsmarschall!" He looked me straight in the eyes and said, "What would you think of an order to shoot down pilots who were bailing out? "I should regard it as murder, Herr Reichsmarschall", I told him, "I should do everything in my power to disobey such an order". "That is just the reply I had expected from you, Galland"."

"The blame for the faulty use of the Air Force must be apportioned equally to Hitler and to Goering. Neither the bravery nor the military and technical ability of the Luftwaffe sufficed to compensate for the vanity of its Commander-in-Chief and for the indulgence that Hitler showed towards the ambitions of his principle disciple. Only much later did Hitler form a true picture of Goering's worth- or rather worthlessness- but it is significant that on 'grounds of policy' he always refused to replace him in an appointment that was, for better or for worse, decisive to the outcome of the war. It has often been maintained that Hitler showed unshakable loyalty to his 'old comrades'. So far as Goering is concerned this was unfortunately true. It is also true that he frequently complained about him, but he never drew the correct conclusions from his own observations."

"The two incidents which contributed most deeply to the motivation of his life came about in 1918, just after the Armistice. First, Goering refused to demobilize and surrender his planes. He was ordered to do so by the German General Staff, but he refused to obey, until he was finally brought to ground near Darmstadt. He said farewell to his fellow officers, toasting the day when Germany would be supreme in the air. His planes were then destroyed. He never got over this. The destruction of his precious aircraft, by men whom he considered his infinite inferiors, was a psychic shock from which he did not recover; his present passionate energy to build a new German air fleet is compensation. Second, after he had returned to Berlin, a socialist mob saw him in uniform and forcibly tore his officer's insignia from his coat lapels. Foaming with rage, he swore vengeance. His hatred of socialists, which is psychopathic in intensity, dates from that day. This incident is important to Nazi history. It is not entirely fanciful to assume that much of the Brown Terror was motivated by this incident."

"His ambition as well as his vanity is enormous. On March 6, 1933, exactly one day after the elections which confirmed Hitler's accession to office, he ordered his portrait painted- with a book in his lap conspicuously titled Life of Napoleon. His pets are lion cubs. All of them, male or female, are named Caesar. He is as carnivorous as Hitler is frugal- brusque, impulsive, brutal. Testimony after the Munich Putsch of 1923 recorded his orders to "beat in the skulls" of his opponents "with rifle butts". His famous order to the police in February, 1933, to shoot "enemies" without question, really signalled the beginning of the Nazi terror. His ruthlessness is unthinking, spasmodic, hot-blooded. He is not a plotter like Goebbels. He has great executive ability, and this serves to make him doubly dangerous."

"The jokes about Goering are, of course, legion. Most of them, are predicated either on the resplendency of his uniforms or his abnormal size. He is not merely fat: he is fat atop an immensity of muscle. He moves with the vigor of a man a hundred pounds lighter: there is nothing torpid about him; his energy is terrific. But the story goes that he is so obese that he "sits down on his own stomach"; he and Emmy have to sleep in a tent: and he wears "corsets on his thighs." One story is that he dons an admiral's uniform whenever he takes a bath, with rubber duplicates to all his medals. A new unit of weight has been established in Germany- a "goering"- to signify the aggregate displacement of his decorations. Once he visited a steel factory and his companions were horrified to see him suddenly leave the floor and dart perpendicularly upward to the ceiling. Reason: an electro-magnet above had caught his medals. Another little story has him arriving late at a luncheon in Berlin, where he is to meet an eminent (and doubtless mythical) visiting Englishman. Goering apologizes for his tardiness, and says he has been out shooting. The Englishman turns to him with the lofty words, "Animals, I presume?" Goering, incidentally, is said to be fond himself of all the stories about him. Once, the legend has it, Hitler fell into a doze during a performance of Lohengrin. The Führer was too tired to keep fully awake. His eyes opened suddenly as the figure of the shining knight in armor took the stage. Hitler thought it was Goering. "Hermann," he shouted, "you are going too far." Goering's basic importance, if the present set-up lasts, is not his blood lust, not his position in Prussia, not his command of the Prussian police. What matters is his association with aviation. The next war will be fought in the air, and it is an ill-omen that a man like Goering, with his immense drive and ruthlessness, should be supremely responsible for the developments of the German air army."

"I was immensely entertained at meeting the man. One remembered all the time that he had been concerned with the "clean-up" in Berlin on June 30th 1934, and I wondered how many people he had been responsible for getting killed. Like a great schoolboy, full of life and pride in all he was doing, showing it all off, and talking high politics out of the setting of green jerkin and red dagger. A modern Robin Hood: producing on me a composite impression of film-star, gangster, great landowner interested in his property, Prime Minister, party manager, head-gamekeeper at Chatsworth."

"Had Hitler died in middle of the 1930's, Nazism would probably have shown, under the leadership of a Goering, a fundamental change in its course, and the Second World War might have been averted. Yet the sepulcher of Hitler, the founder of a Nazi religion, might perhaps have been a greater evil than all the atrocities, bloodshed and destruction of Hitler's war."

":Strasser: Are your people ready at the hotel?"

"The large and varied role of Göring was half militarist and half gangster. He stuck his pudgy finger in every pie. He used his SA musclemen to help bring the gang into power. In order to entrench that power, he contrived to have the Reichstag burned, established the Gestapo, and created the concentration camps. He was equally adept at massacring opponents and at framing scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. He built up the Luftwaffe [air force] and hurled it at his defenseless neighbors. He was among the foremost in harrying Jews out of the land. By mobilizing the total economic resources of Germany, he made possible the waging of the war which he had taken a large part in planning. He was, next to Hitler, the man who tied the activities of all the defendants together in a common effort."

"These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. If we combine only the stories of the front bench, this is the ridiculous composite picture of Hitler's Government that emerges. It was composed of: A No. 2 man who knew nothing of the excesses of the Gestapo which he created, and never suspected the Jewish extermination programme although he was the signer of over a score of decrees which instituted the persecution of that race; A No. 3 man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy; A Foreign Minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy; A Field-Marshal who issued orders to the armed forces but had no idea of the results they would have in practice ... ... This may seem like a fantastic exaggeration, but this is what you would actually be obliged to conclude if you were to acquit these defendants. They do protest too much. They deny knowing what was common knowledge. They deny knowing plans and programmes that were as public as Mein Kampf and the Party programme. They deny even knowing the contents of documents which they received and acted upon. ... The defendants have been unanimous, when pressed, in shifting the blame on other men, sometimes on one and sometimes on another. But the names they have repeatedly picked are Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Bormann. All of these are dead or missing. No matter how hard we have pressed the defendants on the stand, they have never pointed the finger at a living man as guilty. It is a temptation to ponder the wondrous workings of a fate which has left only the guilty dead and only the innocent alive. It is almost too remarkable. The chief villain on whom blame is placed — some of the defendants vie with each other in producing appropriate epithets — is Hitler. He is the man at whom nearly every defendant has pointed an accusing finger. I shall not dissent from this consensus, nor do I deny that all these dead and missing men shared the guilt. In crimes so reprehensible that degrees of guilt have lost their significance they may have played the most evil parts. But their guilt cannot exculpate the defendants. Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him. All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler's shroud. It was these dead men whom these living chose to be their partners in this great conspiratorial brotherhood, and the crimes that they did together they must pay for one by one."

"Air tactics, after all, merely interested Goering because he believed they could be solved at once by quick, unconsidered solutions."

"The stage was thus set for the entrance of Hermann Goering and his once powerful Luftwaffe. On 24th November the Reichsmarschall was present at a situation conference at Hitler's headquarters when Zeitzler stated that the Sixth Army had requested a minimum of 750 tons of supplies a day flown into the Stalingrad ring. It was realized that such a figure was beyond the capacity of the Luftwaffe or any other air force, and the General Staff had decided on a minimum of 300 tons a day. Zeitzler doubted if the Luftwaffe could raise sufficient transport aircraft to undertake the job; what had Goering to say about it? "Well?" demanded Hitler, looking directly at Goering. It is doubtful if Goering knew anything about the state of the Luftwaffe in Russia. For over a year, he had drifted lazily between Berlin and Rome; occasionally amusing himself in Vienna, always seeking refuge from the grim reality of a world at war. His star had waned in the Nazi hierarchy; he no longer had any friends, only associates who treated him with contempt or openly ignored him. He was a worried, lonely and dispirited man, hiding behind the inevitable mask of joviality and wanting desperately to be left alone with his jewels and art treasures. But the shackles of responsibility still weighed heavily upon him. He was Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. "The task is a difficult one," said Goering. "Nevertheless, you will carry it out." Hitler turned to his Chief of Staff. "You see, Zeitzler? It can be done." Zeitzler shook his head. "It would need at least 200 planes a day," he commented. "The Luftwaffe can do it!" insisted Goering, turning crimson with anger. He had spoken with scarcely a moment for thought, and, as always, had immediately convinced himself that he was right. In retrospect, one can only feel surprise that Hitler, after so many disappointments, was still willing to believe him."

"Hands clasped behind his back, Hermann Goering wandered sadly through the great house-cum-mausoleum he had named Karinhall. Many of the rooms were empty now; for weeks a large staff had been carefully packing the hundreds of art treasures for transporting to Berchtesgaden and other places. Valuable paintings, statues, priceless glass and porcelain, all had departed by lorry and train to the south, to be followed very soon by the crockery, furniture and a mountain of personal baggage. Within a month, nothing would remain at Karinhall except empty showcases, leaving the last evidence of Goering's years of triumph a deserted shell to be destroyed by high explosive on his orders. He was living in a nightmare: evacuating Karinhall before the Russian tanks and infantry blasted a path through the beautiful estate; trying to salvage a few baubles out of the wreckage of his former glory. He was already a commander without any forces; soon he would be a prince without a palace. Thus far had the mighty fallen; and Goering wept to think that at a time when Soviet guns were massed against Berlin, the amazing new aircraft that could have saved the Third Reich- and the Luftwaffe- were entering operational service. The Me 262, haunted by Hitler's interference; the Ta 152, Kurt Tank's replacement for the Fw 190; the rocket-driven Me 163 interceptor; the tandem-engine Do-335; all exceptional fighters, yet available in such pathetically small numbers. And Germany had new bombers, too: the Me 264, intended for the bombing of New York; the Ju 287; the Ar 234, first turbo-jet bomber in the world. Dozens of other projects still lay on abandoned drawing-boards, soon to be studied by the Allies. Did Goering, as he walked aimlessly through the vastness of Karinhall, remember Ernst Udet, and the wonderful new aircraft he had been promised back in 1941? there had been too many delays, too many tactical errors, too many wrong decisions. Now, time was the strongest enemy; the trees with their ripening fruit were about to come crashing down."

"For month after month during the summer of 1946 Hermann Goering sat in the dock beside Hess, von Ribbentrop, Keitel and the other defendants, eyes sunken in his head, the grey-blue Luftwaffe uniform hanging in folds on his shrunken frame. Despite his haggard appearance, he was mentally alert and followed the trial closely; during his cross-examination he crossed swords so deftly with the prosecution that the United States Prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, lost his temper. In his final statement, the former Reichsmarschall said: "I did not want a war, and I did not bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out, I did everything to assure victory..." It was his last public speech, and there was no applause."

"For Hermann Wilhelm Goering, the fighter pilot of the First World War whose amazing rise to power brought him many high honors, including the title of Marshal of the Greater German Reich, it can only be said that he possessed great physical courage and an intelligence not readily apparent to those who only saw the bemedalled facade. He was also a skillful hunter who could be an amusing and lively host. But Goering was frequently cunning, deceitful and vindictive, a man given to wild boasting- "My bombers will darken the sky over London!"- and fits of childish temper. He was blinded by the vanity that destroyed his career; his craving for riches became such an obsession that even personal ambition ceased to be of any importance. He sought a life of luxury, and having achieved untold wealth, loved it not wisely but too well, to the exclusion of responsibility, the Nazi Party and all else. He ransacked the art museums of Europe while German military aviation fell in flames. The organization and administration of the Luftwaffe paid a bitter price for his indolence."

"After lunch [in March 1935] Goering told me that the British treated their Cabinet ministers very shabbily. In the matter of official residences or even motor-cars, for example, little or nothing was done for them. "I have 42 official cars," he told me proudly, "and that is not enough. I have had to buy a giant Mercedes for myself." Goering's uninhibited vulgarity was at once revolting and rather comic. At an official dinner-party in his house he produced samples of table-glass he had ordered, heavily cut objects with gold rims. "And when this is delivered," he explained, "the muck you now see on the table will be taken down to the kitchen and smashed with a hammer.""

"German troops crossed the frontier and marched on Vienna... As luck would have it, Goering was giving a monster party at the Haus der Flieger that night [11 March 1938]... News of the Austrian coup had reached the guests... As usual after a coup, the Germans showed signs of nervousness and did all they could to reconcile foreign opinion. Goering at once took Henderson into a corner and urged him to use his good offices to see that peace was not broken. He even sought to placate Mastny, the Czech Minister in Berlin, to whom he gave his word of honour that events in Austria would have no detrimental effect on relations between the Reich and Czechoslovakia. He then sought out the Minister again and repeated the assurance, adding that he was able to give Hitler's word as well. It was a perfect example of Nazi technique. First you brutally assault a man; then you rush round to his neighbours to express the pious hope that there will be no breach of the peace, particularly since you do not intend to assault them."

"For over two hours Goering and I chatted about the war... [H]e readily admitted that Hitler had made mistakes. Of these the gravest and the one most damaging to German fortunes was Hitler's failure to seize Spain and North Africa in 1940. Goering said that Germany should have resolved immediately after the fall of France to march through Spain, with or without Franco's assent, capture Gibraltar and spill into Africa. This could very easily have been done and it would have altered the whole course of the war. He had pressed Hitler, but in vain. When asked to explain why Hitler had rejected his advice, Goering replied that Hitler was convinced in 1940 that he had won the war... I asked Goering whether Hitler had not made two bad mistakes in attacking Russia and gratuitously declaring war on the United States. Goering agreed, but thought that if in 1941 Hitler had been in possession of Africa, he could have safely afforded the luxury of attacking Russia and America simultaneously."

"I...asked Goering whether he considered that our strategic bombing of Germany had paid off. He said it had without a doubt. But for the bombing, the war would have gone on a great deal longer, and in that event rockets and buzz bombs would have devastated Britain. As it was, we had only scraped home by a very short head. If he had had his way, Hitler would have allowed him to build special broad-gauge railways to bring the missiles to the bomb sites. If the R.A.F. had not disrupted communications, the Germans could have launched very many more missiles than they in fact did. In reply to a further question Goering admitted that the Battle of Britain had been a turning-point in the war. It had been a great disappointment to him. But he was very scornful about the R.A.F. claims of German losses and regarded the issue of the battle as a draw. But a draw was of no use to Germany, and her tragedy was that she failed to achieve victory."

"At the start of the Second World War, there were still some questions, at least on the Allied side, about what constituted a legitimate target (a British Cabinet minister is said to have protested in 1939, ‘But that’s private property,’ when the possibility of bombing German industry in the Ruhr came up). The all-out nature of the war swept such issues aside, although, again on the Allied side, they never completely disappeared. All the belligerents used bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight on. Ports, factories, railway marshalling yards, oil depots, dams and bridges were all targets, but so too were housing and city centres. Hermann Goering promised Hitler in the summer of 1940 that he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities, especially London. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, was convinced, and managed to persuade his superiors, including Winston Churchill, that the war against Germany could be won by the bomber and that the critical target was German morale."

"Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference* between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If It would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. ... If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come. This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country."

"World War I air ace and heir to the Red Baron's (von Richtofen's) Squadron. Hitler's closest and most loyal associate in the Nazi High Command. Head of the Luftwaffe. The Reich's main economic planner. Diplomat. Superb art collector. Overweight morphine addict. Gourmand and dandy. Defeated war criminal. Suicide... The events of Hermann Goering's life comprise a tragedy of truly dramatic proportions. Yet even more fascinating was the private man behind the public figure, for as Leonard Mosley writes in this definitive biography, "he was, nonetheless, at the same time both the strongest and the weakest man in the Nazi ruling circle, the only human being. Surrounded as he was by fanatics, madmen, zealots, and petty-crooks-jumped-to-high-places, he was the only one among them dogged in his dark moments by a tremendous sense of guilt and aware right from the beginning that he would have to pay." That is the final judgement rendered here of the extraordinary and terribly misguided man who, next to Hitler, played the largest part in the shaping of the Nazi inferno."

"I remember coming away from my first meeting and asking myself the question: How had such a worldly, cultivated man got himself mixed up with such a sleazy and murderous gang as the Nazis? I was somewhat chastened shortly afterward when I went to one of his meetings and saw on the platform not the charming art and animal lover I had first encountered but a raving anti-Semite mouthing all the shibboleths of the Party, a quivering mass of hate and rancor. I was to meet hims several times before I finally left Berlin on the outbreak of World War II, and each encounter made me more conscious of the contradictions of his nature. Which was the real Hermann Goering? The self-proclaimed friend of Britain who seemed to be sincerely and genuinely trying to prevent an Anglo-German war in 1939? The family man, the ecologist, the lover of art and beauty? The Party hack and Hitler's fawning slave? The peacock, the bully, the cunning deceiver of foreign statesmen? By the time I left Berlin, I had still not made up my mind. The last time I saw Hermann Goering, he was so confident that his efforts to prevent World War II would succeed that he bet me a bottle of champagne that Britain would not fight Germany. Was it a brave effort on his part to frustrate Hitler's plans, or was it merely a trick?"

"History will no doubt recognize that he was a man of extraordinary talents and considerable achievements. He played a large part in restoring the self-respect of the German people and forcing the world to pay attention to them. He built up the German Luftwaffe into a formidable force which might have won World War II for Germany in 1940 had it been used the way he planned. He worked hard, and at considerable risk, to prevent the war in the West from starting in 1939 and the war in Russia in 1941. He was an extremely brave man, and faced manfully up to the challenges of war, of pain, and, at the end, of death without flinching. No future historian will be able to avoid conceding that at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, with a poor case to fight, he challenged his opponents and won. His supreme victory was to cheat them in the end of his body dangling from their gallows. But for all his fearlessness and defiance, there is once vice from which Hermann Goering suffered which will prevent any history book from accepting him as a great man. It was not the vice of vanity, from which, when all's said and done, many great men have suffered. It was not his hard-driving and ruthless ambition, for that has carried many a great leader to the top in times gone by. It was not his flamboyance, which outraged so many of his contemporaries, but would not be unnoticed on Carnaby Street or Sunset Boulevard today. It was not even his Nero-like capacity for fiddling while Rome was burning, or, rather, playing with his jewels and drooling over his pictures while Germany was sinking into defeat, because what else was there to do? The vice from which Goering suffered, and for which the history books will undoubtedly blame him, was his moral cowardice. It was his great crime. All through his association with Adolf Hitler, there were moments when he might have changed the course of National Socialism and Germany's race to perdition- by arguing with and persuading the Fuehrer to begin with, by usurping him when that was no longer possible."

"Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, the psychiatrist at Nuremberg, was talking to Goering one day when the Reich Marshal recounted how he and Ernst Roehm had built up the Brownshirt Army between them. "It was evident," Kelley noted at the time, "that Roehm and Goering were more than brothers in arms, they were friends." Then Goering went on to tell how he and Roehm had become rivals for Hitler's favor, and how he finally had arranged for Roehm to be shot during the purge. Kelley broke in and asked him how he could have brought himself to arrange the killing of a friend. "Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright," Kelley noted. "Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: 'But he was in my way...'""

"There came a time when Adolf Hitler was in his way too, and when his elimination would not only have resulted in the apotheosis of Hermann Goering but in the re-emergence of sanity in Germany. But it turned out that the man who was not afraid of anything else, danger or death, was afraid of Adolf Hitler. Rather than challenge him in a last mortal combat and finish him off, for Germany's sake, as well as for the world, he opted out of the struggle. It is that failure to show his abhorrence, to take a stand, to oust Hitler before it was too late, for which history will not forgive him."

"Goering's great air offensive against Great Britain, Operation Eagle (Adlerangriff), had been launched on August 15 with the objective of driving the British Air Force from the skies and thus achieving the one condition on which the launching of the invasion depended. The fat Reich Marshal, as he now was, had no doubts about victory. By mid-July he was confident that British fighter defenses in southern England could be smashed within four days by an all-out assault, thus opening the way for the invasion. To destroy the R.A.F. completely would take a little longer, Goering told the Army High Command: from two to four weeks. In fact, the bemedaled German Air Force chief thought that the Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to her knees and that an invasion by land forces probably would not be necessary."

"At eleven minutes past 1 A.M. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentrop mounted the gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison, and he was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl. But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn was to have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact."

"Now, for example, Göring made an excellent impression. I must say I rather liked him. The fashion was for 'strong men.' Göring had his weaknesses — he was like a child in many respects — but he was a human being."

"Hermann Göring, at this time Hitler’s most important associate, held overall responsibility for economic planning. His Four-Year-Plan Authority had been charged with preparing the German economy for war between 1936 and 1940. Now his Four-Year-Plan Authority, entrusted with the Hunger Plan, was to meet and reverse Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The Stalinist Five-Year Plan would be imitated in its ambition (to complete a revolution), exploited in its attainment (the collective farm), but reversed in its goals (the defense and industrialization of the Soviet Union). The Hunger Plan foresaw the restoration of a preindustrial Soviet Union, with far fewer people, little industry, and no large cities. The forward motion of the Wehrmacht would be a journey backward in time. National Socialism was to dam the advance of Stalinism, and then reverse the course of its great historical river. Starvation and colonization were German policy: discussed, agreed, formulated, distributed, and understood. The framework of the Hunger Plan was established by March 1941. An appropriate set of “Economic Policy Guidelines” was issued in May. A somewhat sanitized version, known as the “Green Folder,” was circulated in one thousand copies to German officials that June. Just before the invasion, both Himmler and Göring were overseeing important aspects of the postwar planning: Himmler the long-term racial colony of Generalplan Ost, Göring the short-term starvation and destruction of the Hunger Plan. German intentions were to fight a war of destruction that would transform eastern Europe into an exterminatory agrarian colony. Hitler meant to undo all the work of Stalin. Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race. Such were the plans."

"I learned that besides Hitler, only Göring was charismatic and powerful enough to have had a German constituency of his own. (...) In the early days of Hitler's regime he was the man of action."

"Even the last scintillating assembly of the leaders of the Reich could scarcely distract me from my cares. That was the gala celebration of Goering's birthday on January 12, 1944, which he held at Karinhall. We all came with expensive presents, such as Goering expected: cigars from Holland, gold bars from the Balkans, valuable paintings and sculptures. Goering had let me know that he would like to have a marble bust of Hitler, more than life size, by Breker. The overladen gift table had been set up in the big library. Goering displayed it to his guests and spread out on it the building plans his architect had prepared for his birthday. Goering's palace-like residence was to be more than doubled in size. At the magnificently set table in the luxurious dining room flunkies in white livery served a somewhat austere meal, in keeping with the conditions of the time. Funk, as he did every year, delivered the birthday speech at the banquet. He lauded Goering's abilities, qualities, and dignities and offered the toast to him as "one of the greatest Germans." Funk's extravagant words contrasted grotesquely with the actual situation. The whole thing was a ghostly celebration taking place against a background of collapse and ruin."

"Around the middle of February, I called on Goering one evening in Karinhall. I had discovered from studying the military map that he had concentrated his parachute division around his hunting estate. For a long time he had been made the scapegoat for all the failures of the Luftwaffe. At the situation conferences Hitler habitually denounced him in the most violent and insulting language before the assembled officers. He must have been even nastier in the scenes he had with Goering privately. Often, waiting in the anteroom, I could hear Hitler shouting at him. That evening in Karinhall, I established a certain intimacy with Goering for the first and only time. Goering had an excellent Rotschild-Lafite served at the fireplace and ordered the servant not to disturb us. Candidly, I described my disappointment with Hitler. Just as candidly, Goering replied that he well understood me and that he often felt much the same. However, he said, it was easier for me, since I had joined Hitler a great deal later and could free myself from him all the sooner. He, Goering, had much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together- and he could no longer break loose."

"At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Goering had undergone a systematic withdrawal cure which had ended his drug addiction. Ever since, he was in better form than I had ever seen him. He displayed remarkable energy and became the most formidable personality among the defendants. I thought it a great pity that he had not been up to this level before the outbreak of the war and in critical situations during the war. He would have been the only person whose authority and popularity Hitler would have had to reckon with. Actually, he had been one of the few sensible enough to foresee the doom that awaited us. But having thrown away his chance to save the country while that was still possible, it was absurd and truly criminal for him to use his regained powers to hoodwink his own people. His whole policy was one of deception. Once, in the prison yard something was said about Jewish survivors in Hungary. Goering remarked coldly: "So, there are still some there? I thought we had knocked off all of them. Somebody slipped up again." I was stunned."

"The Germans did not succeeded in gaining undisputed control of the air, a prerequisite for a successful land invasion. As later revealed, German production hadn't concentrated on building sufficient air strength, either in type or numbers. Moreover, Goering continually interfered with operations during the critical period of the Battle of Britain, ordering costly daylight bombing attacks that resulted in a tremendous attrition of Nazi planes. There seemed to be a total lack of firm objectives- "too many targets", as General Kreipe has said. Although Goering was a disciple of the doctrines of General Douhet, he was often guilty of dissipation of means."

"Professional Luftwaffe officers, realizing that German bombers were not armored or otherwise equipped for defense against enemy fighters, were opposed to the Battle of Britain. But Hitler, supported of course by Hermann Goering, overruled his professional airmen and insisted upon carrying through."

"The party is Hitler, Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Hitler! Sieg heil!"

"You take an oath to a man whom you know follows the laws of providence, which he obeys independently of the influence of earthly powers, who leads the German people rightly, and who will guide Germany's fate. Through your oath you bind yourselves to a man who — that is our faith — was sent to us by higher powers. Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your mind. You will find him through the strength of your hearts!"

"Our nation has the good fortune today to be led largely by front soldiers, by front soldiers who carried the virtues of the front to the leadership of the state. The rebuilding of the Reich was guided by the spirit of the front. It was the spirit of the front that created National Socialism. In the face of looming death at the front, ideas of social standing and class collapsed. At the front, the sharing of common joys and common sorrows led to a previously unknown camaraderie between citizens. At the front, everyone could see that the common fate towered above the individual fate."

"The units of the Waffen-SS, consisting of National Socialists, are more suitable than other armed units for the specific tasks to be solved in the Occupied Eastern Territories due to their intensive National Socialist training in regard to questions of race and nationality."

"My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children."

"I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand year history. Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty, to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I do not regret anything. If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent."

"Bravo, Streicher!"

"Thanks to the directors for addressing this message to my home. Written several minutes before my death."

"People don't forget, do they?"

"I have been reading about the problems of youth. You know, with all the criticism that was levelled at von Schirach and his Hitler Jugend, it is forgotten that he did a fantastic thing with Germany's young. He kept them busy, he kept them out of trouble. In those years we did not have to concern ourselves with the worry of youths taking drugs, getting involved in crime, and sexual permissiveness. We did not have burning of national flags and draft cards. We had a healthy youth with healthy minds, all pulling together to build a nation. That is what we need today. We need to get them back on the right track."

"Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If It would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. [...] If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come. This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country."

"A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America - which cannot be regarded as very probable - the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were, to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia."

"I saw Hess's pendulum and he used it. I never paid any attention to his strange ideas. He was quiet and bothered nobody. I knew a great surgeon who believed in a similar pendulum, using it the same way Hess did. Apparently, it's a common superstition."

"Hess was slightly off balance for as long as I can recall. Why the Fuhrer kept him on as head of the party was a mystery to most people, but to me I always felt it was Hitler's loyalty to his old friends. I remember Hess had a bright idea once in treating me for some neuralgia that I had at the time. It was in 1936 or so. Anyway, one day lots of pots and pans arrived of all different sizes. I didn't know what they were for. One was for soaking my arm, another my forearm, another size for my leg, my thing, and so on. I called him up and asked him what he had sent me so many pots for - did he think I wanted to start an aquarium? But Hess explained that I told him I had neuralgia and that this was the treatment for it. I thanked him over the telephone and laughed for days."

"The zealot Hess, before succumbing to wanderlust [flew to Scotland in May 1941], was the engineer tending the party machinery, passing orders and propaganda down to the Leadership Corps, supervising every aspect of party activities, and maintaining the organization as a loyal and ready instrument of power."

"A number three man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy."

"Reflecting upon the whole of the story, I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been and is being treated. Whatever may be the moral guilt of a German who stood near to Hitler, Hess had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence. He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy. He was a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded."

"I was suspicious for several reasons... after all, Hess who had been held in Spandau for almost 30 years was by then 93-years-old and fragile. I doubted he had the strength to kill himself with a cord which was not attached at both ends to anything."

"I often found him warm and humourous."

"I was the only man he trusted."

"[F]uck the Turks in Žepa, in Srebrenica, in Goražde."

"People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that.... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide."

"Krle, Krstić, come on. Record that flag. Tear that flag down so it doesn't fly any more. Pull it down. Bravo! Towards Potočari! Towards Potočari and Bratunac! Don't stop, come on! Go in front of me the whole way, come on. Come on, boys, forward!"

"Here we are, on the eleventh of July of the year 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica. On the eve of yet another great Serb holiday we present this town as a gift to the Serb nation. The moment has finally arrived that, after the revolt against the Dahijas, we will have vengeance against the turks in this place."

"There are so many! It is going to be a feast. There will be blood up to your knees."

"Don't be afraid of anything, just take it easy, easy. Let the women and children go first. Thirty buses are coming, we're send you off toward Kladanj. Don't be afraid of anything, nobody is going to do anything to you. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, be safe. Nobody knows anything. Everything is done on my order."

"I can not participate in a conversation if people are portraying me as somebody who is trying to establish greater Serbia. I am not Tsar [king] Dušan."

"The generations of the past failed to unite Serbia and to establish a common Serbian state, which should include all Serbian national, ethnic and historical territories."

"We, as the winners [of WW1 & WW2], created a common country [Yugoslavia] with our enemies [Croats & Muslims], who were on the defeated side Central Powers & Axis Powers]."

"We Serbs are the only nation, on this planet, who decided to unite with people who tried to exterminate us and were our enemies."

"I have no intention to create greater Serbia, neither to re-establish the former Byzantium. I am only defending my nation and my country."

"We are fully aware that war is not the only way to defend our values. But if those values are fundamentally endangered, as is the case today, then war is the only way to defend them. Everything that hinders us in our effort to defend ourselves is an injustice. We did not want this war, it was thrust upon us, like all others. Defending one's people is a holy duty,"

"It would have been better if we had fought in Italy and Austria which are really at war against us, instead of allowing them to use our unfortunate Slovenians, Croats and Moslems as bait and cannon fodder."

"I wonder, if France really wants to create a Muslim state in Europe, why don't they empower them to do this in Paris or Britain?"

"They went running around to jewelry stores, banks, and well-stocked super-markets. There is not a single hill that they kept or liberated. On the other hand, the soldiers and officers in the army lead modest lives."

"I think it is time for all peace-loving people of this world to start pondering where all this leads. I think it's high time that the weapons in this part of the world, and all over the world, were silenced.""

"If humankind were to follow my advice and if it were in my power, I wouldn't allow the word 'war' to be uttered in any language, I would ban all weapons, even in the form of toys."

"When I guarantee something, it's the same as the word of the Almighty."

"The most brutal in all this was Mladic; his orders, like the one from May 1992, "aim at Velusici; there aren't many Serbs there," or the one "shoot in their bodies, blow up their brains," show that he is a monster. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one."

"Who are they for a whole nation to suffer for them, both in the Republika Srpska and in Serbia, because a certain Mladic has decided that he does not want to surrender and go to court? Or Karadzic? And then they say: "I love the Serbian people." The hell they love us. They are pushing us into ever deeper problems."

"As a confused old pensioner or retiree, Mladic is in danger of arousing local sympathy in rather the same way John Demjanjuk did but of doing so within a few years of the original atrocities and not several decades. Moreover, Mladic was a director and organizer of the mass slaughters at Srebrenica and Zepa (as of the obscene bombardment of the open city of Sarajevo), and not a mere follower of orders. The new and allegedly reformist Serbian government bears some responsibility for this moment of moral nullity and confusion, since it seems to regard the arrest of Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic as little more than an episode in the warming of Belgrade's relations with the European Union. You don't have to be a practicing Serbo-chauvinist to find something a bit trivial and sordid in that calculation. (And what if it doesn't prove possible to stretch the increasingly inelastic Eurozone to accommodate Serbia's pressing needs and add them to those of Greece and Ireland? A possible hostage to fortune here.)"

"Setting his goal as the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’, Milošević deployed the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) — then the fourth largest army in Europe — against would-be secessionist republics. Meanwhile, Serb separatist forces within such republics were encouraged to rise up. Lacking a large Serb population, Slovenia was allowed by Milosevic, after a ‘ten-day war’, to go its own way after declaring independence in June 1991. Not so with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: he was determined that their sizeable Serb minority populations would remain within Yugoslavia. Milosevic loyalists helped carve out Serb autonomous enclaves in each: first Milan Babic in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, and then General Ratko Mladić and the psychiatrist-turned-demagogue Radovan Karadžić, within Bosnia. Paramilitary gangs bearing outlandish names — Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles, the Chetniks — rampaged through Serb-run Croatia and Bosnia, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. In the process they endowed the lexicon of conflict with a new term, ethnicko cis cenje terena — literally the ‘ethnic cleansing of the earth’, or simply ethnic cleansing."

"General Ratko Mladić is a living 100 kg contradiction … His large and compact face is almost always painted with a smile. He inspires trust at first sight, but the same senior UN functionaries, those who spent the most time with him in [1993], are divided in their judgement."

"All over northern and eastern Bosnia, Serb paramilitaries, the JNA, and Ministry of Interior forces, acting in conjunction, laid siege to towns and villages, driving out Muslims in a firestorm of brutality. On 20 May 1992, General Ratko Mladic, since indicted as a war criminal by the Hague Tribunal, was named commander of the Republika Srpska (that is, the Bosnian Serb Republic) Army. He brought a high level of professional expertise and ruthlessness to the Serb nationalist forces. Everywhere the pattern was the same—artillery barrages that laid waste to people and buildings; sieges that went on sometimes for months, even years, reducing the populations to a starved, diseased, and fearful existence. When Serb nationalist troops entered a town, the suffering became even worse."

"If one of you should detect any dissatisfaction or unsettled feeling within your (the governors’) jurisdiction, you should take immediate and concrete steps for the complete removal of these elements … Now the people of our nation must endure our little punk of an emperor and their inconveniences and overcome painful hardships in order to win this war."

"The moment the first American soldier sets foot on the Japanese mainland, all prisoners of war will be shot."

"It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one's words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this."

"When reflecting upon it today, that the Pearl Harbor attack should have succeeded in achieving surprise seems a blessing from Heaven. It was clear that a great American fleet had been concentrated in Pearl Harbor, and we supposed that the state of alert would be very high."

"Despite Japan's desires and efforts, unfortunate differences in the ways that Japan, England, the United States, and China understood circumstances, together with misunderstandings of attitudes, made it impossible for the parties to agree. Up until the very end, these were important reasons for the outbreak of war, and from Japan's point of view, this is a matter of great regret."

"The preference of the Navy Staff was to launch assaults on Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya, while at the same time overrunning Dutch Sumatra, Borneo and Java. Their assumption, which proved entirely correct, was that the European empires in Asia had been dealt lethal blow at home by the German occupation of the Netherlands and France and the continuing German threat to the British Isles. The Dutch colonies, in particular, looked like easy quarry; they had the added allure of being oil-rich. Malaya, meanwhile, was the world's biggest producer of rubber. Living space for Japanese settlers was all very well, but the Japanese Empire needed strategic raw materials far more urgently. In 1940 army planners had argued for an invasion of Indo-China, to provide new bases from which to attack the Chinese Nationalists in Sichuan. As War Minister in the new Cabinet formed by Prince Konoe in July 1940, Tôjô had insisted that unless Japan struck soon, she risked being too late. By 1941, it is true, some senior generals had become less enthusiastic about this idea. But by now the proponents of the Southern strategy had the upper hand."

"The Japanese followed a very resolute tactic in unleashing this conflict. They simply pounced on the enemy that wanted to strangle them and attacked him. I trust that the Japanese still have a few things in reserve; for they generally pursue very cautious, traditionally conservative policies; they will not negligently risk their empire, and they surely have a whole series of military options, about which even we know nothing. They did not inform us in advance of their intention to attack suddenly, and this was also necessary to maintain the secrecy of their plans. All these events are still rather unclear for the time being. But the war is a fact. Tojo was more dependable after all than we had assumed at first. The Führer and the whole headquarters are overjoyed at this development. We are now at least temporarily secure from a serious threat. In the coming weeks and months Roosevelt will no longer be as insolent as he has been in the past. Now this war has become a world war in the true sense of the word."

"There was little public sympathy for Tōjō in Japan in the post-war period. His responsibility for the war, his oppressive regime, and his failure to commit suicide turned him into a notorious figure. Later revelations about his personal integrity, impeccable family life, devotion to duty, and loyalty to the emperor somewhat improved his image."

"I had an uneasy feeling he might plead his own cause against indictment as a war criminal. There had been considerable outcry from some of the Allies, notably the Russians and the British, to include him in this category. Indeed, the initial list of those proposed by them was headed by the Emperor's name. Realizing the tragic consequences that would follow such an unjust action, I had stoutly resisted such efforts. When Washington seemed to be veering toward the British point of view, I had advised that I would need at least one million reinforcements should such action be taken. I believed that if the Emperor were indicted, and perhaps hanged, as a war criminal, military government would have to be instituted throughout all Japan, and guerrilla warfare would probably break out. He played a major role in the spiritual regeneration of Japan, and his loyal co-operation and influence had much to do with the success of the occupation."

"Most dangerous of all, it was the product of a leadership where the military focused on winning battles and the civilians had given little thought to what happened after that. That limited vision is more common in war than one might think. The Germans in 1914 had not worked out their war aims or what they would do if France and Russia sued for peace. In September 1941, as Japan moved closer towards war with the United States, a high-level imperial war conference took place in the presence of the emperor, key civilian and military leaders and elder statesmen. The military, which by now dominated policy-making, produced a document of breathtaking vagueness on its goals in the coming war. ‘We cannot exclude the possibility,’ it said, ‘that the war may end because of a great change in American public opinion … At any rate we should be able to establish an invincible position … Meanwhile, we may hope that we will be able to influence the trend of affairs and bring the war to an end.’ The Japanese prime minister, Tojo Hideki (who was later tried for war crimes), shortly afterwards compared the decision to jumping off a cliff with one’s eyes closed. ‘There are times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things.’ Asia, the Americans and the Japanese people paid a heavy price for that sort of courage."

"Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme: From the East Asian Correspondent, Sept 1, 1939. — In a course of action praised by many as "far-sighted" and "tactically brilliant," the Japanese government has sworn its allegiance to the Axis powers led by white-supremacist Nazi Germany. In a formal statement, Japanese leaders declared, "We wish to be counted among the loyal allies of this back-stabbing, racist hate nation." Following the announcement, Japanese General and military leader Hideki Tojo told reporters, "We are pleased to enter into an alliance with the paranoid, xenophobic government of Nazi Germany. We anticipate a deeply enriching exchange of our military aid with their deep-seated hatred of our non-white heritage.""

"I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess."

"In the course of history periods of capitalism and socialism alternate with one another; capitalism is the unnatural, socialism the natural economic system.... The National Socialists and the Red Front have the same aspirations. The Jews falsified the Revolution in the form of Marxism and that failed to bring fulfilment."

"Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is fight, and it is madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally."

"I know there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black uniforms, we understand the reason for this, and do not expect we shall be loved by all that number of people; those who come to fear us in any way or at any time must have a bad conscience towards the Fuhrer and the nation. For these persons we have established an organisation called the Security Service."

"We shall unremittingly fulfill our task, to be the guarantors of the internal security of Germany, just as the Wehrmacht guarantees the safety of the honor, the greatness, and the peace of the Reich from the outside. We shall take care that never more in Germany, the heart of Europe, can the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be kindled internally or by emissaries from abroad. Pitilessly we shall be a merciless executioner's sword for all these forces whose existence and doings we know... whether it be today, or in decades, or in centuries."

"It is vital we rid ourselves of homosexuals]; like weed we must pull them up, throw them on the fire and burn them. This is not out of a spirit of vengeance, but of necessity; these creatures must be exterminated."

"A consequence of the over-privileged woman is that in America no man any more dares to look at a girl, since otherwise he will be brought before the marriage court and made to pay for it. In America homosexuality is absolutely a defensive measure for the men because they have fallen into such slavery to the women. The women can behave like an axe there: she just starts hacking away on something. She is never rebuked: the best example of tyranny by women! There is no danger among us, however, that the chivalry of the man be overplayed and exploited by the other side, since the women in Germany by habit and education are not inclined to do that."

"We won't waste much time on the Jews. It's great to get to grips with the Jewish race at last. The more that die the better; hitting them represents a victory for our Reich. The Jews should feel that we've arrived. We want to put half to three quarters of all Jews east of the Vistula. We will crush these Jews wherever we can. Everything is at stake. Get the Jews out of the Reich, Vienna, everywhere. We have no use for Jews in the Reich. Probably the line of the Vistula, behind this line no more. We are the most important people here."

"One rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people."

"I hope to see the very concept of Jewry completely obliterated."

"It is a war of ideologies and a struggle of races. On one side stands National Socialism: ideology, founded on the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood. It is worth the world as we want to see: beautiful, orderly, fair, socially, a world that may be, still suffers some flaws, but overall a happy, beautiful world filled with culture, which is precisely Germany. On the other side stands the 180 million people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself. These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world. When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1,000 years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism."

"...the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses."

"I don't want to hear anymore of your difficulties. For an SS officer there are no difficulties; his duty is always to remove difficulties himself as soon as they arise. How you do it is for you to figure out, not me."

"[We have] the moral duty toward our race to kill this [Jewish] race that wanted to kill us."

"I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934 to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed, up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never [p. 65] speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never to speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary. I mean the evacuation out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about - "The Jewish race is being exterminated", says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program - elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them." And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be [p. 66] written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if - with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war - we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the 1916/17 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body."

"One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the S.S. men. We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else. What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture: otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be tough and heartless where it is not necessary, that is clear. We, Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes up to me and says: 'I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them,' then I have to say: 'You are the murderer of your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood....' Our concern, our duty, is our people and our blood. We can be indifferent to everything else. I wish the S.S. to adopt this attitude towards the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians...."

"The Slav is never able to build anything himself. In the long run, he's not capable of it. I'll come back to this later. With the exception of a few phenomena produced by Asia every couple of centuries, through that mixture of two heredities which may be fortunate for Asia but is unfortunate for us Europeans — with the exception, therefore, of an Attilla, a Ghenghis Khan, a Tamerlaine, a Lenin, a Stalin — the mixed race of the Slavs is based on a sub-race with a few drops of blood of our blood, blood of a leading race; the Slav is unable to control himself and create order. He is able to argue, able to debate, able to disintegrate, able to offer resistance against every authority and to revolt. But these human shoddy goods are just as incapable of maintaining order today as they were 700 or 800 years ago, when they called in the Varangians, when they called in the Ruriks."

"However, in their centuries-long history the Poles were never able to create such an organization that could be called a state."

"Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness."

"Some information and observations of recent date have led me to draw up plans that I would like to bring to your attention. This concerns Jehovah’s Witnesses. . . . How are we going to govern and pacify Russia when . . . we will have conquered vast areas of its territory? . . . All forms of religion and the pacifist sects must be supported . . . , among all the others the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is well-known that the latter have characteristics incredibly positive for us: Apart from the fact that they refuse military service and anything to do with war . . . , they are incredibly reliable, do not drink, do not smoke; they are relentless workers and of rare honesty. For them the spoken word stands. These are ideal characteristics . . . , enviable qualities."

"[T]o put an end to the epidemics, we were forced to burn the bodies of an incalculable number of people who were destroyed by the disease. So we were forced to build crematoria, and on this account they are loosing a bond for us. "He also stated that he punished the culprit if the atrocities occurred in the camps." On the Einsatzgruppen: "The war on the Eastern front made the demands more difficult for our soldiers. A terrible climate, never-ending distances, an enemy population and constantly apparent partisans. Just because it was difficult, the troops prevailed. So they were forced to destroy entire villages if there was resistance and gunfire from such a village. Russians are not ordinary enemies, we can not understand their mentality. In the most desperate situations, they would refuse to capitulate. If, because of these difficulties in the East, the Jewish people suffered large casualties, it must be remembered that the German people also suffered severely.""

"Ich bin Heinrich Himmler."

"I am Heinrich Himmler."

"The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear."

"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."

"I must really say that he is a veteran Communist, this Herr Josip Broz, a consistent man. Unfortunately he is our enemy. He really has earned his title of Marshal. When we catch him we shall do him in at once; you can be sure of that; he is our enemy. But I wish we had a dozen Titos in Germany... The man had nothing at all. He was between the Russians, the British and Americans for a ride and to shit on them in the most comical way. He is a Moscow man … He has never capitulated."

"My honor is my loyalty."

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA — ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."

"It was not Goebbels but his rival Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) who would become, next to Hitler, the most powerful man in the Third Reich. Head of the elite Nazi guard known as the Schutzstaffel (SS) from 1929 to 1945, by 1936 Himmler had become chief of all German police. In these positions he presided over a vast network of offices and agencies that implemented terror and mass murder all over German-occupied Europe."

"Himmler was neither flashy like Göring nor educated like Goebbels. Mousy and awkward as a young man, he read voraciously and had developed his own conspiratorial view of the world even before he met Hitler in 1926. Like Hitler, Himmler feared and hated Jews and believed in the superiority of the so-called Aryan race. Himmler too was convinced that Germany had to expand to the east. Dogged and capable of meticulous attention to detail, Himmler involved himself directly in projects that targeted homosexual men and Roma as well as Poles and Jews. With justification the historians Richard Breitman and Peter Longerich consider Himmler the "architect" of the Nazi genocide."

"Himmler was not personally charismatic, but his enormous power and access to Hitler caused ambitious men to flock to him. He had a knack for identifying highly capable, driven individuals who would prove ruthless in pursuit of their goals. Some, like Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), whom Himmler personally recruited for the SS and named chief of its Security Service, became almost as famous as their boss. Others, with Himmler's help, made tremendously successful careers, particularly during the war, but are no longer household names. For example, Odilo Globocnik, Friedrich Jeckeln, and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, three of Himmler's trusted associates, achieved positions of almost unbounded power in the occupied east. Together they were responsible for the murder of literally millions of people."

"There was also Himmler the crusader and visionary, the man who built a romantic castle in a German forest where the knights of the S.S., many of whom could hardly read or write, were required to repair at intervals to contemplate the glory of their order and establish spiritual contact with the heroes of mediaeval Germany."

"For him the Russian war offered a glorious opportunity for comparative anatomy: while immense armies were manoeuvring over the frozen plains and smashing each other to pieces, Himmler set himself the urgent task of building up a collection of skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars: such things were impossible to come by in Germany."

"The SS came into being in early 1925, by Hitler's order, as a select corps drawn from SA membership to serve as an efficient, elite, and completely dependable bodyguard for the party's leadership. The emphasis from the start was on loyalty, obedience, and discipline, but the SS remained insignificant in size and undistinguished in function until Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler to head it and conferred upon him, in January 1929, the grandiose title of Reichsführer-SS. Himmler soon transformed the SS into an organized guided solely by the will of the Führer and that became, in Hans Buchheim's words, "the real and essential instrument of the Führer's authority." Indeed, Himmler came to regard himself as an instrument of Hitler's will."

"Himmler's name and title have come to evoke images of a demonic evil contained within a frame of steely iciness, rigor, and discipline, unloosed not in the passion of rage or hate, but on calculation. Yet his early life, shaped by familial authoritarianism, seemed ordinary and dull, never suggestive of the sinister role he would later assume. Born in 1900 in Munich, the second son of middle-class Catholic parents, Himmler had an unexceptional youth. The diary that he started to keep in 1914 shows him as pedantic, pedestrian, and unimaginative, already molded according to the parental tradition of rigid self-discipline. When war broke out, he was stricken with patriotic passion. At seventeen, when he reached the age of eligibility, he applied to an officer training program and was eventually admitted, but while he was still in training the armistice was signed. However, the cadets in training were not discharged until after the military had suppressed the revolution, dissolved its institutions, and regained political control. Here the young Himmler may have had his first lessons in the uses of the military for political suppression."

"In June 1924 Himmler finally found a job he wanted, one that would satisfy him ideologically and provide him with the political environment he had come to need. He became secretary and general assistant to Strasser, who was the NSFB Gauleiter for Lower Bavaria. Early in May 1925 the whole Strasser organization, lock, stock, and barrel, went over to the NSDAP, which Hitler had begun to rebuild after his release from Landsberg. Thus Himmler automatically became the NSDAP Party Gauleiter of Bavaria. A year later, when Strasser became the party's propaganda leader, Himmler was once again made his deputy. In 1927 Himmler was appointed deputy leader of the SS, and finally, in 1929, at the age of twenty-nine, with the appointment as Reichsführer-SS, he emerged at the top of the field in his chosen career- the professional Nazi. As Reichsführer-SS Himmler was able to integrate his diverse compulsions and obsessions- with the military, the occult, racial nationalism, and anti-Semitism- and give them form and substance. The SS became a proving ground for Himmler's romantic, grandiose, and sinister ideas and offered scope for him to exercise his pedantry and his proclivities for spying and informing. It became the vehicle through which his meanness, hardness, and vindictiveness found deadly expression. His rigid sense of duty and obedience turned him into a zealot carrying out Hitler's murderous ideology with fanatical "idealism." No wonder the SS's most distinctive insignia was to become the death's-head."

"Himmler, too, was developing the idea of the Jew as an enemy of the state, less in a legal sense than in a combative sense. Early in 1937, in a lecture to the Wehrmacht on the nature and purpose of the SS, he spelled out the idea that "the enemy in a war is an enemy not only in the military sense, but also an ideological enemy."... Thus, at a time when talk of war was becoming the everyday rhetoric of National Socialist Germany, the SS, too, despite the careful paperwork of the SD, began increasingly to talk of war against an ideological enemy."

"Although at the time I knew but little of the crimes he had committed, it was obvious to me that Himmler, as far as I was concerned, was intolerable. This I had to make quite clear to him, and one way or the other, I had to have a swift and final showdown with him. On the evening of April 30, shortly after the receipt of the telegram I told my ADC to telephone to Himmler, from whom I had parted in Luebeck only a few hours before, and ask him to come to Ploen forthwith. To my ADC he retorted with a blunt refusal, but when I myself spoke to him and told him that his presence was essential, he eventually consented to come."

"At about midnight he arrived, accompanied by six armed SS officers, and was received by my aide-de-camp, Ludde-Neurath. I offered Himmler a chair and myself sat down behind my writing desk, upon which lay, hidden behind some papers, a pistol with the safety catch off. I had never done anything of this sort in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be. I handed Himmler the telegraph containing my appointment. 'Please read this,' I said. I watched him closely. As he read, an expression of astonishment, indeed, of consternation spread over his face. All hope seemed to collapse within him. He went very pale. Finally he stood up and bowed. 'Allow me,' he said, 'to become the second man in your state.' I replied that that was out of the question and that there was no way in which I could make use of his services. Thus advised, he left me at about one o'clock in the morning. The showdown had taken place without force, and I felt relieved."

"Himmler's political tendencies were philo-monarchist and Right-wing conservative, inherited from his father who had been the loyalist instructor of Heinrich, hereditary prince of Bavaria. He was especially fascinated by the ideal of the Order of Teutonic Knights, which we spoke of earlier. He wanted to make the SS a corps that would perform the same function of the state's central nucleus that the nobility had played with its unquestioning loyalty to the regime, but in a new form. For the formation of a man of the SS, he considered a blend of Spartan spirit and Prussian discipline. But he also had in view the order of Jesuits (Hitler jokingly used to call Himmler 'my Ignatius of Loyola')."

"The most impenetrable of all Hitler's disciples was the National Leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. An inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority, the impression he made was one of simplicity. He went out of his way to be polite. In contrast to that of Goering his private life might be described as positively Spartan in its austerity. His imagination was all the more vivid, and even fantastic. He seemed like a man from some other planet. His racial doctrine was fallacious and led him to commit terrible crimes. His attempt to educate the German people in National-Socialism resulted only in concentration camps. As late as 1943, long after Stalingrad, he still believed that Russia should be colonised by Germans as far as the Urals. On one occasion, when I said to him that it was already impossible to find volunteer colonists for the east, he insisted that the land as far as the Urals must be Germanised by compulsory colonisation if necessary and by planting the land with German peasants conscripted for that purpose."

"As far as the consequences of Himmler's racial theories, I have, from personal observation and experience, nothing to say. Hitler and Himmler succeeded in keeping this part of their programme strictly secret. Himmler's 'methods of education,' as practised in the concentration camps, have meanwhile become sufficiently well known. During his lifetime the general public knew only a little about this. The atrocities carried out in those camps were made known to most people, as to myself, only after the collapse. The way the concentration camp methods were kept secret can only be described as masterly."

"After 20th July Himmler became filled with military ambition: this led him to have himself appointed commander of the Training Army and even commander of an army group. In military matters Himmler proved an immediate and total failure. His appreciation of our enemies was positively childish. His decisions when in command of Army Group Vistula, in 1945, were dictated by fear. Despite this he retained Hitler's confidence almost up to the end. All the same even this paladin bowed down before the dictator. I was in a position on several occasions to observe his lack of self-assurance and of civil courage in Hitler's presence."

"Himmler ended his life by committing suicide though he had previously consistently condemned such an action, which he had claimed to regard as contemptible and which he had forbidden the SS. He therefore escaped his judges here below and left behind less responsible men to carry on the burden of his great guilt."

"He had a pale, round, expressionless face, almost Mongolian, and a completely inoffensive air. Nor in his early years did I ever hear him advocate the race theories of what he was to become the most notorious executive."

"In the summer of 1941, I was called to Berlin to see Himmler. I was given the order to erect extermination camps. I can almost give you Himmler's actual words, which were to the effect: "The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution to the Jewish problem. Those of us in the SS must execute these plans. This is a hard job, but if the act is not carried out at once, instead of us exterminating the Jews, the Jews will exterminate the Germans at a later date.""

"No doubt the bespectacled S.S. Fuehrer, who had almost fainted at the sight of a hundred Eastern Jews, including women, being executed for his own delectation, would have seen in the efficient working by S.S. officers of the gas chambers in the extermination camps an even more glorious page in German history. For it was in these death camps that the "final solution" achieved its most ghastly success."

"Because the SS was the chosen instrument of the murder campaign, Himmler moved closer to the center of power. The SS, now separated institutionally from the SA, became the most powerful institution within the National Socialist party. After the Night of the Long Knives, its task would be to subordinate the many German police institutions to Nazi ideology. Himmler would seek to merge his SS with Germany’s established police forces by way of rotation of personnel and institutional centralization under his personal command. In 1936 Hitler named Himmler the Chief of German Police. This placed him in charge of the uniformed men of the Order Police, the detectives of the Criminal Police, and the operatives of the Secret State Police (Gestapo). The police was a state institution (or rather comprised a number of different state institutions) and the SS was a Nazi party institution; Himmler sought to bring the two together. In 1937, Himmler established the office of Higher SS and Police Leaders, regional chiefs who in theory commanded both SS and police forces, and unified the hierarchy of command."

"At this time a high-ranking SS leader hinted to me that Himmler was preparing decisive steps. In February 1945, the Reichsführer-SS had assumed command of the Vistula Army Group, but he was no better than his successor at stopping the Russian advance. Hitler was now berating him also. Thus what personal prestige Himmler had retained was used up by a few weeks of commanding frontline troops. Nevertheless, everyone still feared Himmler, and I felt distinctly shaky one day on learning that Himmler was coming to see me about something that evening. This, incidentally, was the only time he ever called on me. My nervousness grew when Theodor Hupfauer, the new chief of our Central Office- with whom I had several times spoken rather candidly- told me in some trepidation that Gestapo chief Kaltenbrunner would be calling on him at the same hour. Before Himmler entered, by adjutant whispered to me: "He's alone." My office was without window panes; we no longer bothered replacing them since they were blasted out by bombs every few days. A wretched candle stood at the center of the table; the electricity was out again. Wrapped in our coats, we sat facing one another. Himmler talked about minor matters, asked about pointless details, and finally made the witless observation: "When the course is downhill there's always a floor to the valley, and once it is reached, Herr Speer, the ascent begins again." Since I expressed neither agreement nor disagreement with this proverbial wisdom and remained virtually monosyllabic throughout the conversation, he soon took his leave. I never found out what he wanted of it, or why Kaltenbrunner called on Hupfauer at the same time. Perhaps they had heard about my critical attitude and were seeking allies; perhaps they merely wanted to sound us out."

"This, what you are doing, is not good. This is the path that you want to take Bosnia and Herzegovina on, the same highway of hell and death that Slovenia and Croatia went on. Don't think that you won't take Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell, and the Muslim people maybe into extinction. Because the Muslim people cannot defend themselves if there is war here."

"There is no doubt that the United States and Germany had their own interests in igniting wars in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia."

"Who are they for a whole nation to suffer for them, both in the Republika Srpska and in Serbia, because a certain Mladic has decided that he does not want to surrender and go to court? Or Karadzic? And then they say: "I love the Serbian people." The hell they love us. They are pushing us into ever deeper problems."

"In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detention camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (...) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (...) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (...) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation."

"People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that.... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide."

"Setting his goal as the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’, Milošević deployed the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) — then the fourth largest army in Europe — against would-be secessionist republics. Meanwhile, Serb separatist forces within such republics were encouraged to rise up. Lacking a large Serb population, Slovenia was allowed by Milosevic, after a ‘ten-day war’, to go its own way after declaring independence in June 1991. Not so with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: he was determined that their sizeable Serb minority populations would remain within Yugoslavia. Milosevic loyalists helped carve out Serb autonomous enclaves in each: first Milan Babic in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, and then General Ratko Mladić and the psychiatrist-turned-demagogue Radovan Karadžić, within Bosnia. Paramilitary gangs bearing outlandish names — Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles, the Chetniks — rampaged through Serb-run Croatia and Bosnia, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. In the process they endowed the lexicon of conflict with a new term, ethnicko cis cenje terena — literally the ‘ethnic cleansing of the earth’, or simply ethnic cleansing."

"In addition to the ICC, various other bodies have been involved in the hunt for and prosecution of war criminals. The best-known of these is the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in 1993 to bring to justice those responsible for crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. In 1996 a Bosnian Serb, Dusan Tadic, became the first man to be convicted by the tribunal when he was found guilty of murder and torture. Other prosecutions have followed, most notably that of Slobodan Milošević — the first ever sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes (see main text). Having evaded capture for more than a decade — despite an international warrant for his arrest — Milošević's Bosnian Serb proxy Radovan Karadžić was finally run to earth in July 2008 in Belgrade, where he had been working under a new identity as a New Age healer. Ratko Mladić, who with Karadžić was responsible for events on the ground in Bosnia, remains at large at the time of this writing. The fate of Milošević stands as a clear message to them and others like them: for the perpetrators of the most terrible crimes, there is no escape from justice."

"[The Jews] tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad."

"[T]here is no such things as "Islamic terrorism," because terrorism differs from Islam. There's just terrorism, not Islamic terrorism. But the term "Islamic terrorism" has become widespread."

"Not there's no Holocaust, let say they "exaggerated" the Holocaust. We don't say many people...but they say there's Holocaust but they are exagerating, so there's such perception of this event of this title, the Holocaust, in our region...It's not the matter how many were killed, six million or one million, or half...killing is killing, I mean how many Soviets were killed? eight million, so why didn't we talk about them? the problem is not how many were killed. How do they do use it? what do the Palestinians have to do to the Holocaust to pay the price? This is one question we asked...We know that there was massacre against Jewish and against others...what's going on in Palestine we see it the same way, but you don't see it the same way..."

"They are not my forces. They are military forces that belong to the government.… I don't own them. I am [the] president. I don't own the country so they are not my forces."

"The army is engaged in a crucial and heroic battle... on which the destiny of the nation and its people rests. The enemy is among us today, using agents to destabilise the country, the security of its citizens... and continues to exhaust our economic and scientific resources. They (the enemy) wanted to deprive the people of their national decision... but they were astonished to see these proud people, who confronted their plans and defeated them. You men of the country... you have demonstrated, in dealing with the war waged against our country by the terrorist gangs, that you possess an iron will and a keen awareness. Our military remains the backbone of the motherland."

"I'm not a puppet. I wasn't made by the west to go to the west or any other country. I'm Syrian. I'm made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in Syria."

"[Enemies of Syria] are the enemies of the people and the enemies of God. And the enemies of God will go to hell."

"We are facing an external attack against us, which is more dangerous than any other previous wars... We are dealing with those who are extremists, who only know the language of killing and criminality."

"The policy is crucial thing for us, when they started supporting the terrorists with such projects, or plans, or steps; this is where you can have more chaos in the world, that's another question, Do the United States have interests in having more chaos around the world or the United States have more interests in having stability around the world? That's another question, of course the United States can create chaos, they've been creating chaos for the last 56 years around the world, It's not something new. Are they going to make it more...worse, more prevailing? That's another question. But it's not about me, it's not about the president, it's about the whole situation in the world, 'cause you cannot separate the situation in Syria from the situation in the Middle East, when the Middle East is not stable, the world cannot be stable."

"They may attack civillians, and I cannot blame the innocents in the United States for the bad intentions of their officials, this is not correct, and as I said many times, I don't consider the United States as direct enemy as they don't occupy my land."

"With every treacherous shell that had fallen, the enemies’ hopes would grow that Aleppo would become another Aleppo, one that never existed throughout history, an Aleppo that does not constitute with its twin Damascus the wings by which the homeland soars; rather an Aleppo whose people would stand with traitors in front of masters, kneeling and prostrating themselves before them, begging for a few dollars and much disgrace. That was in their dreams; but in our real world, with every shell that fell, fear fell and the will to challenge grew. With every martyr, nationalist spirit grew and faith in the homeland became stronger. In our real world, it remained the real Aleppo, the Aleppo of history, nobility, and authenticity. And because it is so, its people did not settle for steadfastness just in the sense of bearing of pain and suffering and acceptance of the status quo; but rather in the sense of work and production that persisted throughout the years of the siege despite the conditions that contradict any economic sense."

"The most important factor is how long are the supporters of those terrorists are keep going to keep supporting them, especially Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, with endorsements of some Western countries including United States, if you don't have that support it won't take more than a few months....That depends on how much the support of terrorist have in Turkey, in Saudi money to have more terrorists coming to Syria, their aim is to prolong the war, so they can prolong it if they want, they've already succeeded in that. That depends on that. If you're talking about how much is going to take as only Syrian conflict, isolated conflict, this is what it won't take for a few months but if it is not isolated conflict as it is the case today, with the interferences of many regional and international powers, it will be going to take some time, and no one has the answer as we have, of course, nobody knows how the war is going to develop..."

"Talk about the reality, about the facts, when to talk about children being killed, children of who? where? how? you're talking about propaganda, about media campaign, about sometimes fake pictures on the internet, we cannot talk but ones of the facts. We can talk about the facts, I cannot talk about allegations."

"When we talk about "clean war," when there is no casualties, no civilians, no innocent people to be killed, that doesn't exist, no one could make it, no war in the world..."

"Since the beginning of this crisis, we have the same motto "Assad must go" many times from nearly every Western officials in different level whether leader or foreign minister and other officials...we never cared about it...we never, so you cannot talk about this threat, this is an interference in our internal issues; we're not going to respond to, as long as i have the support of Syrian people, I don't care about whether...including the President of United States himself, anyone, so it's same for us, that's why...say Clinton and Trump and what Obama said, for me nothing, we don't put it on our political map; we don't waste our time with those rhetorics or even 'demands'"

"Whatever (Valerie) Amos or any other official or any organization say something against us doesn't mean it's real. We have to verify what they say and is it the part of propaganda? is it politicized? or what..."

"Every 'brute reaction' was by an individual, not by an institution, that's what you have to know, There is a difference between having a policy to crackdown and between having some mistakes committed by some officials. There is a big difference, We don't kill our people… no government in the world kills its people, unless it's led by a crazy person, There was no command to kill or be brutal."

"You are mixing between the protesters and the killings, it's different, now we are having terrorists in many places...killing, not only now, from the very beginning, now it's recognized by the media that's the difference, that from the very first few weeks we had those terrorists they are getting more and more, more aggressive, they have been killing. we have 1100 soldiers and policemen killed, who killed them? "peaceful demonstrators"? this is not logical, this is unpalatable..."

"When, but you, to be frank with you, Barbara, I, you don't live here...how did you know all this? you have to be here to see. We don't see this. So it cannot depend on what you hear in the United States."

"Had this 'Spring' been genuine, it would've started in the backward Arab countries. Were it a call for freedom, democracy, justice, it would've began in the most oppressive and tyrannical states. The states behind every hardship that befell this nation, and every war against it. States behind the intellectual and religious deviation and moral decline. Their existence is the best success for the west and the main reason for Israel's continued existence. There is no clearer evidence than their current stand regarding the Israeli aggression against Gaza. Where is the 'alleged' zeal and passion that they showed towards Syria or the Syrian people? Why haven't they supported Gaza with money and arms? Where are their jihadists and why didn't they send jihadists to defend our people in Palestine?"

"It is an integrated chain of events: from the occupation of Palestine, to the invasion of Iraq and trying to divide it now and the division of the Sudan all planned by Israel and the West and always executed by the states of tyranny and backwardness in our Arab world. Was it not Abdul Aziz Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Faisal [Ibn Saud] who conceded to Britain that he does not object to giving Palestine to the ‘poor’ Jews in 1915? Did those states not incite the 1967 war, whose price we are still paying today, in order to get rid of the Abul Naser ‘phenomenon’? Did those states not support Iran under the Shah, only to stand against it when it decided to support the Palestinian people and turn the Israeli embassy into a Palestinian embassy after the revolution? Those are the countries which made the ‘King Fahd Peace Initiative’ in 1981 and threatened the Palestinians with rivers of blood if they don’t accept it. When the Palestinian factions rejected it, and in less than a year, there was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the ejection of the PLO from Lebanon, not out of concern for Lebanon, but for Israel. Those same states surprised us in 2002 with their greatest concession: ‘normalization in return for peace,’which was later modified to become the ‘Arab Peace Initiative’in the Beirut summit. When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, it was those same countries that encouraged Israel and the West not to accept a cease-fire until the Lebanese resistance was destroyed, describing them as ‘adventurous.’ Because these satellite countries succeeded in their tasks, they were charged with funding chaos under the name of the ‘Arab spring,’ and with leading the Arab League after other Arab countries abandoned their roles. The Arab League itself was reduced to summoning NATO and imposing a siege on the Arab states that refused to comply. All of these events constitute a strongly linked chain aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause; all the money spent by those countries since their creation has been for this purpose. And here they are today playing the same role: in Gaza through Israeli terrorism, and in Syria through terrorism belonging to 83 nationalities. The methods may differ but their objective is the same."

"None of these allegations you mentioned are concrete, all of them are allegations. You can bring photos from anyone and say this is torture. Who took the pictures? Who is he? Nobody knows. There is no verification of any of this evidence, so it’s all allegations without evidence... It’s funded by Qatar, and they say it’s an anonymous source. So nothing is clear or proven. The pictures are not clear which person they show. They’re just pictures of a head, for example, with some skulls. Who said this is done by the government, not by the rebels? Who said this is a Syrian victim, not someone else? For example, photos published at the beginning of the crisis were from Iraq and Yemen."

"You have to convince your audiences, you cannot mention such a picture without verifying who are those and where and everything about, just to put it in front of the audience, tell them “they’ve been killed by the Syrian soldiers.” At the end, these are allegations. We have to talk about concrete evidence, at the end. That’s how you can base your judgment. Anyone can say whatever he wants."

"Finding a link between Bashar Assad′s regime and the rise of the so-called Islamic State will not come as a surprise to many Syrians. Unlike the image the regime has been trying to sell to world media that Assad is fighting IS, there is well-documented evidence of the Assad dictatorship′s contributions to the IS tale of terror."

"Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power, to which he is clinging, and for which he is also prepared to commit genocide."

"The Assad regime is absolutely monstrous and responsible for a large majority of the atrocities."

"Russia, Iran and Hezbollah openly supported the Assad regime from the outset. But why have the US and the nations of the West, which are apparently so concerned with respect for human rights, done nothing to stop the terrible violence of the Assad regime? Is the so-called "Islamic State" a logical consequence of the violence of the Assad regime?"

"The Assad dictatorship is conducting an outright campaign of annihilation against its own population."

"The tyranny of Assad will always give rise to extremist violence, whether it is called "Islamic State" or known by another name. Western societies are increasingly equating the terror of the Assad regime with that of "Islamic State", even going so far as to describe Assad as the evidently lesser evil. This despite the fact that Assad has killed a quarter of a million Syrians with barrel bombs and chemical weapons alone, while IS has between 10,000 and 20,000 people on its conscience (exact figures are not known). In addition, the deployment of Assad's air force and the besieging of cities by government troops have driven several million Syrians from their homes. It is terrifying how the deeds of the man who is currently the world's most brutal mass murderer are being relativised and how the focus is increasingly on the crimes of "Islamic State"."

"Everyone [in western capitals] says to us ‘What’s the alternative to Assad and why is the opposition not united?’. But it’s not the revolution’s fault that it’s not united and we can’t wait for unity while the river of blood flows. The alternative to Assad is the ballot box."

"People’s homes are invaded, women and children are taken hostage, because the authorities are not satisfied with arresting an activist – they take the whole family. This is going on in all regions of the country. President Bashar al-Assad said that his government’s priority was ensuring that there is enough baby formula, because that’s more important than freedom. Today he’s doing the opposite: depriving the children of Daraa not only of freedom, but also of milk, since he’s starving the city."

"He represents the case of stubbornness."

"There is one painting [titled Betrayal] that speaks to me on an emotional level. [President] Bashar al-Assad should look at this painting. He probably would see a big part of himself inside it. He might recognize the evil presented in this painting in himself. That’s the point of every painting in this room: They are designed for people to come to terms with their own capacity to commit horrible acts. If we don’t understand the root of violence, then we’ll never be able to protect ourselves from committing it."

"Everybody knows what this regime is capable of doing, including people who favour Assad. And everybody knows what's happening in Syrian jails. Of course the regime denies all these charges. But do you remember the photographs by Caesar who took pictures of torture victims in a military hospital and then smuggled them out of the country? After he published them in 2013, many Syrians looked through them in order to identify missing family members and friends. I discovered a good friend. He was arrested one and a half years beforehand and then tortured to death. Western countries look at the Syrian civil war and say: "If we have to choose the lesser of two evils, we'd rather live with Assad.""

"Assad's bombs gave life to IS in Syria. People have been radicalised and ultimately, view IS as a protector of Sunnis. Assad's air strikes on cities, like Aleppo, or the targeted infrastructure attacks, were fatal. His assaults killed seven times more civilians than IS has."

"Yes, we have understood – Assad is not the lesser evil, but a war criminal. It is not IS that kills the most civilians, but the regime in Damascus (and Russia has to date killed more civilians than IS and the Nusra Front together). And a leader who is indicted for crimes against humanity in this country cannot be made a partner in the war on terror."

"As long as foreign Shia militias are allowed to murder as they please on Assad's behalf, the radicalisation of Syria's majority Sunni population will continue."

"The Syrian conflict has several narratives, all of which are jostling for media supremacy. In the end, the one that is being heard most clearly is that of Bashar al Assad."

"In Syria, the "good" war against terror looks something like this: all Syrians who are against Assad are cast as "terrorists", "tools of US imperialism" or "puppets" of Saudi Arabia or Turkey. They have practically no will of their own, they have not experienced any misery and are completely dehumanised. Assad himself on the other hand is seen as the legitimate president of a sovereign state, as a "quiet, thoughtful man", as Jurgen Todenhofer described him."

"It′s a great failure for humanity. What is happening in Syria is not just a Syrian affair. The oppression of the Syrian people by the Assad regime also concerns us in the West. "IS" draws its power from the dictatorship′s oppression."

"...But the international community doesn′t want to act on it. They see intervention as too complicated for them. Syria is a sovereign state and Assad an elected president. Even if he wasn′t elected democratically, he is recognised as having been elected. And then there′s the fact that he and his wife look like us. His wife is very beautiful. She doesn′t wear a veil and they both appear "civilised". So it′s much more difficult to see the barbarism there than it is with the members of "IS", who post their crimes on social media for all to see."

"...must be made clear that Assad and the higher ranks of the regime will have no part in any political solutions. They are responsible for mass crimes and you can′t go back to business as usual with criminals."

"The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.... As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.... From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”"

"After years of brutal fighting along purportedly confessional lines, the complex Syrian conflict has become a regional and international proxy war. What began as a peaceful popular uprising against the brutal tyranny of the Assad clan is now a global conflict."

"Dear Bashar al-Assad Apologists: Your Hero Is a War Criminal Even If He Didn’t Gas Syrians."

"It’s sickening to hear these clowns repeatedly claim that “Assad murdered 500,000 of his people,” as though the U.S.-backed terrorists have played no role in the killings. I’ve viewed hundreds of beheadings and crucifixions online but none committed by Syria troops – all were proudly posted by the hellish filth that we’ve recruited, armed and trained for the past eight years. Major war crimes, like beheading 250 Syrian soldiers after running them across the desert in their underpants, were scarcely mentioned by the MSM."

"The reason is not simply because of my opinion of him. It is because it is unimaginable that you can stop the civil war there when the overwhelming majority of people in Syria consider him to be a brutal, murderous dictator."

"My patience ran out on President Assad a long time ago. The reason why is because he houses Hamas, he facilitates Hezbollah, suiciders go from his country into Iraq, and he destabilises Lebanon."

"There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer."

"For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that's why I'm proud to be here."

"Although Americans are starting to wake up, many people are still caught up in the mainstream narrative regarding the Syrian war.... Starting in 2011, tens of thousands of foreigners – Al Qaeda and other jihadists – were sent into Syria to overthrow Assad. The U.S. and its allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey & Jordan – assisted in buying and transporting weapons to the “insurgents.” Special forces from the U.S., U.K., France and Israel also spent billions of dollars arming and training the terrorists, a.k.a “moderate rebels.” What’s happening in Syria is not a civil war – it’s a proxy war. Assad has been fighting the Islamic terrorists for seven years. It’s cynical and Orwellian for the West to shed crocodile tears for the Syrians and blame Assad for this brutal war. While the presstitutes make it look like Assad is fighting women and children, fact is that the rebels have highly sophisticated weapons – million-dollar tanks, U.S.-made anti-tank missiles that cost $250,000 etc.."

"Assad protects Christians and other minorities. There’s no Sharia Law in Syria, and religious minorities have full freedom. The only group that’s “oppressed” in Syria is the violent Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned for many decades. The Syrian opposition consists of Sunni extremists who have been persecuting and killing Shiites and Christians for the last seven years."

"No way – no way possible in the imagination – that the man who has led the brutal response to his own people could regain the legitimacy to govern. One man and those who have supported him can no longer hold an entire nation and a region hostage. The right to lead a country does not come from torture, nor barrel bombs, nor Scud missiles. It comes from the consent of the people. And it’s hard to imagine how that consent could be forthcoming at this point in time."

"The regime of Bashar al-Assad will inevitably go down. And its collapse will be loud not only in Syria but across the Arab world."

"Bashar Al-Assad was able to break Syria over the heads of the Syrians."

"Other translation: " Bashar Al-Assad was able to destroying Syria on the heads of Syrians" cbc.ca"

"... Assad’s survival—if Saddam Hussein’s murderous rampage in 1991 is any indication—will without a shadow of a doubt translate into hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead, mostly butchered after his victory has been assured. The comparison comes to mind because the two Ba’thi regimes of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad bear an unmistakable resemblance—they are mirror images of one another, one might say. Both are minority dominated, single party regimes originating in the same quasi-fascist pan-Arab ideology built on the principle that any form of disagreement is an act of “betrayal” to the “revolution.”"

"Assad as President has actively tried to kill his own people. He has bombed them with barrel bombs in a most terrible way. He has brought untold suffering over his people -- if you look at Aleppo and other places. When you talk to the many Syrian refugees who have fled here to Germany, they will be able to tell you their own personal story, and the majority of them -- the great majority of them -- fled from Assad, and most of them not even fled the IS. So I don’t see him as an ally."

"The US foreign policy establishment had rhetorically justified America’s presence in Syria as part of the war on the Islamic State (ISIS). With ISIS essentially defeated and dispersed, Trump called the establishment’s bluff... This shift had the benefit of unmasking America’s real purposes in the Middle East...because of ISIS. In fact, ISIS was more a consequence than a cause of the US presence. The real purposes have been US regional hegemony; and the real consequences have been disastrous."

"The truth about the US presence in Syria has rarely been told. But one can be sure that the US has had no scruples about democracy in Syria or elsewhere in the region, as its warm embrace of Saudi Arabia amply demonstrates. The US decided to promote an insurgency to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in 2011 not because the US and allies like Saudi Arabia longed for Syrian democracy, but because they decided that Assad was a hindrance to US regional interests. Assad’s sins were clear: he allied with Russia, and he received support from Iran."

"Today, Bashar Al-Assad is playing the role of the son of the Levanter, offering his services to any would-be buyer through interviews with whoever passes through the corner of Damascus where he is hiding. At first glance, the Levanter may appear attractive to those engaged in sordid games. In the end, however, the Levanter must betray his existing paymaster in order to begin serving a new one. Four years ago, Bashar switched to the Tehran-Moscow axis and is now trying to switch back to the Tel-Aviv-Washington one that he and his father served for decades. However, if the story has one lesson to teach, it is that the Levanter is always the source of the problem, rather than part of the solution. ISIS is there because almost half a century of repression by the Assads produced the conditions for its emergence. What is needed is a policy based on the truth of the situation in which both Assad and ISIS are parts of the same problem."

"Those who urge an alliance with Assad cite the example of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet despot who became an ally of Western democracies against Nazi Germany. I never liked historical comparisons and like this one even less. To start with, the Western democracies did not choose Stalin as an ally; he was thrusted upon them by the turn of events. When the Second World War started Stalin was an ally of Hitler thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union actively participated in the opening phase of the war by invading Poland from the east as the Germans came in from the West. Before that, Stalin had rendered Hitler a big service by eliminating 22 000 of Polish army officers in The Katyn massacre. Between September 1939 and June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was an objective ally of Hitler. Stalin switched sides when he had no choice if he wanted to save his skin. The situation in Syria today is different. There is no alliance of democracies which, thanks to Obama’s enigmatic behavior, lack any strategy in the Middle East. Unlike Stalin, Assad has not switched sides if only because there is no side to switch to. Assad regards ISIS as a tactical ally against other armed opposition groups. This is why Russia is now focusing its air strikes against non-ISIS armed groups opposed to Assad. More importantly, Assad has none of the things that Stalin had to offer the Allies. To start with Stalin could offer the vast expanse of territory controlled by the Soviet Union and capable of swallowing countless German divisions without belching. Field Marshal von Paulus’ one-million man invasion force was but a drop in the ocean of the Soviet landmass. In contrast, Assad has no territorial depth to offer. According to the Iranian General Hossein Hamadani, who was killed in Aleppo, Assad is in nominal control of around 20 percent of the country. Stalin also had an endless supply of cannon fodder, able to ship in millions from the depths of the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. In contrast, Assad has publicly declared he is running out of soldiers, relying on Hezbollah cannon fodder sent to him by Tehran. If Assad has managed to hang on to part of Syria, it is partly because he has an air force while his opponents do not. But even that advantage has been subject to the law of diminishing returns. Four years of bombing defenseless villages and towns has not changed the balance of power in Assad’s favor. This may be why his Russian backers decided to come and do the bombing themselves. Before, the planes were Russian, the pilots Syrian. Now both planes and pilots are Russian, underlining Assad’s increasing irrelevance. Stalin’s other card, which Assad lacks, consisted of the USSR’s immense natural resources, especially the Azerbaijan oilfields which made sure the Soviet tanks could continue to roll without running out of petrol. Assad in contrast has lost control of Syria’s oilfields and is forced to buy supplies from ISIS or smugglers operating from Turkey. There are other differences between Stalin then and Assad now. Adulated as “the Father of the Nation” Stalin had the last word on all issues. Assad is not in that position. In fact, again according to the late Hamadani in his last interview published by Iranian media, what is left of the Syrian Ba’athist regime is run by a star chamber of shadowy characters who regard Assad as nothing but a figurehead."

"... the biggest criminal of our time."

"The fate of ISIS will not differ from the fate of Bashar Al-Assad, as the two are moving on top of the killing and destruction machine."

"Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay."

"A foolish and cowardly boss who lives in isolation."

"Assad is definitely a terrorist who has carried out state terrorism."

"It is impossible to continue with Assad in Syria. Why? Because how can we embrace the future with a Syrian president who has killed nearly 1 million of his citizens? Do the Syrian people want to see a person like him in power? I am saying it loud and clear, Bashar al-Assad is actually a terrorist who has inflicted state terror. We cannot say such a person can handle this issue. Because saying so means doing injustice to 1 million Syrians who have been massacred. tccb.gov.tr"

"There is no peace in Syria and this peace won’t come with Assad."

"Bashar Assad should see the tragic ends of the ones who declared war against their own people."

"History will mark these leaders as the leaders who feed on blood."

"He is a man who wages state terror. It is he who killed nearly one million people."

"If only he could stay in Moscow longer, to give the people of Syria some relief. In fact, he should stay there so the transition can begin."

"If Bashar has the interest of his country, he would step down, but he would also create an ability to reach out and start a new phase of Syrian political life."

"When the refugees realize that their return is conditioned on coordination with Bashar al-Assad's regime, they won't return, because Bashar al-Assad himself was behind their displacement."

"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering his own people."

"We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside."

"...President Assad, who is resorting to brutal military force against his own people and who is responsible for the situation, has lost all legitimacy and can no longer claim to lead the country. We call on him to face the reality of the complete rejection of his regime by the Syrian people and to step aside in the best interests of Syria and the unity of its people."

"He is not going to lead the programme of change in Syria now. He has shown he is not capable of reform. His position is untenable. There is no process of change that leaves him intact."

"In essence, I see the Syria war as a wrong one. If we had any sense, and if the Qods Force had not had excessive aspirations, Bashar Assad would have been toppled in 2011 because of the Arab Spring, and his dictatorial, oppressive Ba'thist regime would have fallen. We could have maintained good ties with those who would have replaced him in a democratic manner. That way, Iran's resources would not have been wasted in Syria."

"if instead of supporting Bashar Assad's tyrannical regime we protect the Syrian people from ISIS – then Turkey, Russia, America, and Iran can unite and decide that democracy should be established in Syria and that Assad must go."

"Bashar al-Assad is a criminal, he will have to be tried and answer for his crimes before international court."

"A day will come when international justice will give its verdict on Bashar al-Assad who is massacring his people."

"That was how his country was branded by the dictator: Souriyya al-Assad, the Syria of Assad, as though it were private property. Drilled into children’s heads at school, written on the walls and on banners hanging from bridges, the phrase made clear there was no escaping the Assads, father and son. Then came 2011 and the Arab uprisings. Timid yearnings for freedom became a flood of people on the streets of Syria demanding the fall of the dictator. Millions took to the street. Yassin glimpsed the contours of a more hopeful future. So how could it be that when he returned to his hometown of Raqqa, in the summer of 2013, he found himself at the epicenter of a conflict not his own, looking over the ruins of his life, having been robbed of his soul, his love, his family. Yassin and millions of Syrians were rebelling against tyranny, but their country found itself caught between the spiritual heirs of Ibn Abdelwahhab and the upholders of Khomeini’s legacy; between the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)."

"Throughout 2011 and 2012, Assad steadily lost his grip on large parts of the country. In Washington and European capitals, presidents and prime ministers believed his days were numbered. But they had underestimated the dictator with no conscience. He was the true heir of his father. He would make no concessions; his approach was “Assad, or we burn the country.” And he would do just that. The Syrian uprising and the subsequent brutal war have been characterized from many perspectives. Most cite big geopolitical events for saving Assad, like President Obama’s reluctance to intervene as he had done in Libya, or his backing down from a promise to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against his people in 2013. But the longer the outside world allowed Assad to kill, torture, and imprison with impunity, the more the revolution fractured. The Syrian battle for freedom was in a race against the inexorable radicalization and militarization of any revolution that drags on too long. As rage and despair built up, the revolutionaries picked up arms, rebel factions formed and splintered. The revolution was also in a race against those who saw an opportunity in the chaos—two very different groups of men in black, bearing different flags, enemies in fact, had been scouting the terrain. They weren’t even Syrians."

"Bashar al-Assad′s regime is by no means secular; it is sectarian. When it comes to Muslim-majority countries, many people in the West tend to adopt what I call Huntingtonian secularism, defining secularism in an oversimplified culturalist way as something that is basically against Islam."

"In Assadʹs prisons, thereʹs no such thing as a pampered prisoner."

"To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing."

"I was only carrying out the orders of the Zionists. They asked me to gather the Jews in a specific place in the world, using expulsion or murder. First, their target was Poland, then Madagascar, but in the end they chose the Middle East. If I am guilty of the so- called killing of 6 million Jews then the Zionist leaders are much guiltier than I am. This is because they wanted to silence the world under the pretext that if they had stayed in Germany they would have been killed. Because they don’t have a country they are forced to occupy other people’s land. And that is what they did."

"Over the years I learned which hooks to use to catch which fish."

"Regret is something for little children."

"It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since."

"Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. … His success alone proved that I should subordinate myself to this man."

"My political sentiments inclined toward the left and emphasized the socialist aspects every bit as much as the nationalist ones."

"Our opinion at the time was that National Socialism and the Communism of the Soviet Republic were sort of 'siblings’. And it may also be that this attitude was peculiar especially to an Austrian SS member. For his enemies at that time were not Social Democracy and Communism; these were combated by the Austrian aristocracy as much as he himself was;…"

"Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business."

"I was never an anti-Semite. … My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood... I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it."

"Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God."

"I hope that all of you will follow me."

"Hätten wir 10,3 Millionen Juden getötet, dann wäre ich befriedigt und würde sagen, gut, wir haben einen Feind vernichtet. … Ich war kein normaler Befehlsempfänger, dann wäre ich ein Trottel gewesen, sondern ich habe mitgedacht, ich war ein Idealist gewesen."

"During cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner asked Eichmann if he considered himself guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. Eichmann replied: "Legally not, but in the human sense … yes, for I am guilty of having deported them". When Hausner produced as evidence a quote by Eichmann in 1945 stating: "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction", Eichmann countered the claim saying that he was referring only to "enemies of the Reich"."

"I have them completely in hand here, they dare not take a step without first consulting me."

"It was my job to catch our Jewish enemies like fish in a net and transport them to their final destination."

"My heart was light and joyful in my work, because the decisions were not mine."

"I knew that in this 'promised land' of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann, former SS Obersturmbannführer."

"In Hungary in 1944, Eichmann introduced himself this way: "Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound!""

"After the [[w:Wannsee Conference|[Wannsee] conference]], Heydrich, Müller and myself sat cozily around the fireplace. We had drinks. We had brandy. We sang songs. After a while, we got up on chairs and drank a toast. Then we got up on the tables and went round and round. On the chairs. On the tables. Then we sat around peacefully, giving ourselves a rest after so many exhausting hours."

"Eichmann boasted about anything that seemed at all plausible to him: his genuinely close ties to the highest powers in Hungary; his somewhat indirect contact with the powers of the Third Reich; his access to everything from a "personal aircraft" to direct control of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. ... He threatened his victims with the prospect that after the "final victory," Hitler would make him "World Commissar of the Jews.""

"After the speech he looked at us ironically and added softly: "Otherwise you would die". The words were icy but the tone like velvet, almost friendly."

"The language becomes entirely perverted where Eichmann turns metaphors on their heads, talking about expulsion and murder using gentle images of life. An institution for forced emigration was his "first child," where he was able to "be creative in my work." All the individual acts of robbery and expulsion that took place in Austria were committed to "provide [the country] with injections of Jewish solutions." Even exterminations and deportations were "born". This was why he felt so superfluous in Budapest, when he was forced to stop deporting people to Auschwitz: "As far as I know, I couldn't have done anything fruitful anymore" ... In Eichmann's language, he didn't send people to the death camps; the camps were "fed with material"."

"Eichmann ... found all bureaucracy by definition tiresome. This was what staff were for. "These matters to do with bureaucracy," he explained to Sassen [in Argentina], "I just relied on my civil servants for them". He deployed these "living articles," like Ernst Moes and Fritz Wöhrn, as "bureaucratic brakes.""

"Brand was then conveyed to Eichmann's office in the Hotel Majestic and ushered into his presence. Eichmann, resplendent in his SS uniform, stood in front of his desk and started barking at him: 'You ... do you know who I am? I am in charge of the Aktion! In Europe, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria it has been completed, now it is Hungary's turn.'"

"I loved playing an open hand against all the Jewish political functionaries ... For me, 'open hand' is a winged word."

"I will simply not do penance."

"As my chief, Gruppenführer Müller expressed it, they were sending in the master himself, so I wanted to behave like a master."

"I have to forge my weapons according to the strength of the resistance."

"While we were working with the Jews to solve the Jewish question, the others used the Jews as a means to an end, to milk them for their own ends.... And this is why there are still a whole lot of Jews enjoying life today who ought to have been gassed."

"They knew me wherever I went. Through the press, the name Eichmann had emerged as a symbol.... In any case, the word Jew ... was irreversibly linked with the word Eichmann. Much more power ... was attributed to me than I actually had."

"The men in my command had the kind of respect for me that prompted the Jews to effectively set me on a throne."

"It wasn't in our interests for the material to be used for labor in the concentration camps to arrive completely useless and needing repair.... Look, how can you make 25,000 Jews, or people, or let's say 25,000 cows, how can you simply let 25,000 animals just disappear en route? Have you ever seen 25,000 people in a pile? ... Have you ever seen 10,000 people in a pile? That's five transport trains, and if you pack them in the way the Hungarian police planned, then at best you'll get no more than 3,000 people in one transport train. Loading a train is a tricky business anyway, whether it's with cattle or flour sacks ... and so much more difficult to load it with people, especially when you have problems to reckon with."

"The only good enemy of the Reich is a dead one. In particular I have to add, when I received an order, I always carried out this order with the executioner, and I am proud of that to this day.... If I had not done this, they would not have gone to the butcher."

"I was here, there and everywhere, you never knew when I was going to show up. I was a traveler.... I was able to creep into every territory of our corner of Europe."

"Müller said to me once, if we'd had fifty Eichmanns, we'd have won the war for sure. And I was proud. That should have given you an insight into my interior - since you don't know me, not from within, and that is important."

"Nobody else was such a household name in Jewish political life at home and abroad in Europe as little old me."

"As I sometimes said to the important Jews, when I had them, something like: 'Well then, do you know where you are? You're with the Czar of the Jews. Don't you know that, didn't you see the Pariser Tageblatt?!'"

"Every department was trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Eichmann."

"These Jew-treks, as I called them, were carried out in the most elegant way.... I can tell you today that I saw two bodies on the whole route, they were old Jews - it's clear, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. And were no eggs broken when much larger contingents of Germans marched from the East after 1945?"

"I am one of those people who can't stand to see corpses.... But there is one good thing nature gave me. I can switch off and forget very quickly, without trying to.... I still have a very devout saying from my youth, and I always do it when I find something horribly unpleasant and I can't stop thinking about it. And in order to forcibly distract myself, do you know what I say? You'll laugh! "I believe in God the Father, and the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, died under Pontius Pilate, suffered" and so on and so on, "was raised from the dead," and so on. I somehow realized early on, as a child - still a devout believer at that time, of course - that once I'd said that, I didn't think about anything else."

"I, "the cautious bureaucrat," that was me, yes indeed. But ... This cautious bureaucrat was attended by a ... a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright, and I say here, just as I have said to you before: your louse that nips you, Comrade Sassen, does not interest me. My louse under my collar interests me. I will squash it. This is the same when it comes to my people.... what benefits my people is a sacred order and a sacred law for me.... I have no regrets! I am certainly not going to bow down to that cross! ... it would be too easy ... for me to pretend that a Saul has become a Paul. I tell you, Comrade Sassen, I cannot do that. That I cannot do, because I am not willing to do it, because I balk inwardly at saying that we did anything wrong."

"Before my people bite the dust, the whole world should bite the dust, and then my people. But only then!"

"We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples, if we had exterminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects alive today. For that is what I said to Streicher, what I have always preached: we are fighting an enemy who, through many many thousands of years of schooling, is intellectually superior to us. Was it yesterday or the day before, or a year ago, I don't know, I heard or read: even before the Romans had their state, before Rome had even been founded, the Jews there were able to write. This is an understatement. They should have said, aeons before the Romans erected their state, aeons before the very founding of Rome itself, they were able to write. Look at the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Look at a race that today has recourse to, may I just say, six thousand years of written history, a race that has been making laws for let us say five thousand years or six thousand years - and I am not wrong, I believe, when I estimate a seventh millennium. The fact that the Christian church today makes use of this lawmaking is very depressing for me. But it tells me that this must be a race of the first order of magnitude, since lawmakers have always been great. And because of these realizations I fought against this enemy."

"Now through the vagaries of fortune, most of these 10.3 million Jews remained alive, so I say to myself: fate wished it so. I have to subordinate myself to fate and destiny. I am just a little man and don't have to fight against this, and I couldn't, and I don't want to."

"It is hard, what I have told you, I know, and I will be condemned for being so hard in my phrasing, but I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth! Why should I deny it?"

"On the Lüneberg Heath, it was near where Bergen-Belsen had been, and everything round there smelled of garlic and it was all Jews, because who was buying anything at that time? Only the Jews, and then I said to myself, I, I who was bargaining with Jews over wood and eggs, I was amazed and astounded, and I thought you see - goddammit! They all should have been killed, and there those fellas are, doing deals with me, you know?"

"He [Rudolf] Kastner could be characterised as a callous intellectual only insofar as he would thoughtlessly sacrifice thousands or hundreds of thousands of his blood in order to achieve his political goal, and his political goal was EREZ ISRAEL! For that he needed valuable human material, and for that he bargained hard with me. They were to a certain degree Jewish SA or SS men for Israel who moved into Palestine illegally, thus against the will of the High Commissioner, through Romania, and developed the resistance organisation of the Haganah and other associations that finally contributed their part to creating Israel. So Kastner is, on the one hand, a betrayer of his own blood; for he said to me – let it be repeated here once again: “Old Jews and those in favour of assimilation do not interest me; their fate I find regretful – but one cannot do anything about it.” On the other hand, as a warrior he was again right in the establishment of EREZ ISRAEL, for only the establishment of the state of Israel could indeed guarantee a real protection of their blood, a real defence against periodically erupting, provoked or unprovoked, anti-Jewish actions throughout the world. This goal demanded sacrifice like any great aim that was to guarantee security throughout the future."

"The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941, I think. And I believe it was two months later, or maybe three, that Heydrich sent for me. I reported. He said to me: "The Führer has ordered physical extermination." These were his words. And as though wanting to test their effect on me, he made a long pause, which was not at all his way. I can still remember that. In the first moment, I didn't grasp the implications, because he chose his words so carefully. But then I understood. I didn't say anything, what could I say? Because I'd never thought of a … of such a thing, of that sort of violent solution. … Anyway, Heydrich said: "Go and see Globocnik, the Führer has already given him instructions. Take a look and see how he's getting on with his program. I believe he's using Russian anti-tank trenches for exterminating the Jews." As ordered, I went to Lublin, located the headquarters of SS and Police Commander Globocnik, and reported to the Gruppenführer. I told him Heydrich had sent me, because the Führer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews. … Globocnik sent for a certain Sturmbannführer Höfle, who must have been a member of his staff. We went from Lublin to, I don't remember what the place was called, I get them mixed up, I couldn't say if it was Treblinka or some other place. There were patches of woods, sort of, and the road passed through — a Polish highway. On the right side of the road there was an ordinary house, that's where the men who worked there lived. A captain of the Ordnungspolizei welcomed us. A few workmen were still there. The captain, which surprised me, had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, somehow he seemed to have joined in the work. They were building little wooden shacks, two, maybe three of them; they looked like two- or three-room cottages. Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned. I was horrified. My nerves aren't strong enough … I can't listen to such things... such things, without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I visualized the scene and began to tremble, as if I'd been through something, some terrible experience. The kind of thing that happens sometimes and afterwards you start to shake. Then I went to Berlin and reported to the head of the Security Police."

"I'd like to say something about this last, about this last point of this terrible, terrible business. I mean Treblinka. I was given orders. I went to see Globocnik in Treblinka. That was the second time. The installations were now in operation, and I had to report to Müller. I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that's what I remembered. Instead, again with the same Sturmbannführer Höfle, I came to a railroad station with a sign saying Treblinka, looking exactly like a German railroad station — anywhere in Germany — a replica, with signboards, etc. There I hung back as far as I could. I didn't push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big... no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed. As I was told, they were gassed with ...what's it called? … Potassium cyanide... or cyanic acid. In acid form it's called cyanic acid. I didn't look to see what happened. I reported to Müller and as usual he listened in silence, without a word of comment. Just his facial expression said: "There's nothing I can do about it." I am convinced, Herr Hauptmann, [Eichmann is referring to his interrogator, Avner Less] I know it sounds odd coming from me, but I'm convinced that if it had been up to Müller it wouldn't have happened."

"Obeying an order was the most important thing to me. It could be that is in the nature of the German."

"From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed services at the age of 27, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders."

"Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."

"I was sent to Treblinka, Minsk, Lemberg and Auschwitz. When I see the images before my eyes, it all comes back to me … Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, decaying corpses. They seemed to pop out of the ground when a grave was opened. It was a delirium of blood. It was an inferno, a hell, and I felt I was going insane."

"I am certain, however, that those responsible for the murder of millions of Germans will never be brought to justice."

"I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork. It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times."

"When I arrived at the place of the execution, the gunmen fired into a pit the size of several rooms. They fired from small submachine guns. As I arrived, I saw a Jewish woman and a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull out the child, but then a bullet smashed the skull of the child. My driver wiped brain particles from my leather coat."

"Because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver, I now feel called upon and have the desire to tell what happened."

"The fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."

"Journalist: [...] in Italy a scandal was caused by the dossier [...] Majorana and Eichmann, the secret in a photograph, in which the hypothesis that the physicist, after having joined Heisenberg in Germany, worked on the creation of the Nazi atomic bomb took shape. [...] Majorana, or rather someone who looked a lot like him, is portrayed next to Eichmann escaping to Argentina. It seems to me that you discard the Argentinian track..."}} I did not even raise this thesis because it seemed to me at least outlandish. After all, how can one support a thesis based solely on the alleged similarity of a photo taken thirteen years after Majorana's disappearance? On the other hand, there is no trace of Majorana in the German archives concerning his work on the atomic bomb - which are open to all and can be consulted -. And the Italian physicist's name did not even come up in 1945, when German scientists arrested in Germany were transferred to a secret residence in England, and conversations recorded without their knowledge for several months."

"Not at all the man of the "banality of evil", as Hannah Arendt claimed, but an anti-Semite of limitless cruelty, ruthless and corrupt."

"To the very last [at his trial], Eichmann appeared emotionless, a human iceberg. Only once did I see him show any expression other than injured innocence. Films of the concentration camps were being screened in the courtroom. The houselights were out, but from the control booth, on a monitor, I could see the close-up of Eichmann. As the corpses of Bergen-Belsen were bulldozed into their final pit, Eichmann, on camera, smiled."

"Adolf Eichmann, the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program, has estimated that the anti-Jewish activities resulted in the killing of 6 million Jews. Of these, 4 million were killed in extermination institutions, and 2 million were killed by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units of the Security Police and SD which pursued Jews in the ghettos and in their homes and slaughtered them by gas wagons, by mass shooting in antitank ditches, and by every device which Nazi ingenuity could conceive. So thorough and uncompromising was this program that the Jews of Europe as a race no longer exist, thus fulfilling the diabolic "prophecy" of Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the war..."

"Eichmann's skill in [public relations] exceeded anything that Goebbels's clumsy propaganda could have achieved with its rabble-rousing articles. He was even able to inveigle the "enemy press" into spreading his lies for him."

"This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited, planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen mind which directed a gigantic organization; he is the perfect model of inhumanness; but he was not alone. Eager thousands obeyed him. Everyone could not have his special talents; many people were needed to smash a baby's head against the pavement before the mother's eyes, to urge a sick old man to rest and shoot him in the back of the head; there was endless work for willing hands. How many more like these exist everywhere?"

"There are more documents, testimonials and eyewitness reports on Eichmann than on any other leading Nazi. Not even Hitler or Goebbels has occasioned more material. And the reason is not simply Eichmann's survival for seventeen years after the end of the war, nor the impressive efforts of the Israeli police in collecting evidence for the trial: the reason is primarily his own passion for speaking and writing... Eichmann acted out a new role for every stage of his life, for each new audience and every new aim. As subordinate, superior officer, perpetrator, fugitive, exile, and defendant, Eichmann kept a close eye on the impact he was having at all times, and he tried to make every situation work in his favor."

"The Jews looked upon him [Eichmann] and Hitler as the two Adolfs who perpetrated the Holocaust."

"Before a subpoenaed gathering of all notable representatives of Judaism in Vienna, Eichmann flaunted his black SS uniform, his riding crop, and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism. [Jewish historian] Adolf Böhm ... learned that Eichmann was one of his most avid readers, who knew whole pages of [his book] from memory. Böhm realized that the SS was going to use the knowledge he had painstaking gathered as ... a weapon against the Jews."

"I was a hospital nurse in Berlin where we had many visits from the SS, including Adolf Eichmann. He was young, good-looking, sleek, spotless, arrogant, and a smoker. While he was in the room, we had to stand up. He thought it was great merely to harass the Jews. We didn't know at that stage that he was in charge of the entire Jewish section [of the Gestapo]. He was constantly around our necks. That was his job."

"Incognito investigation was one of the tasks that Eichmann most relished, and he remembered it fondly decades later. He visited Jewish organizations, making contacts who thought him liberal-minded and eager to learn ... [but] between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues, he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti-Semitic propaganda, making arrests, and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo."

"Jewish survivors also described the terror that Eichmann inspired: 'And then came Eichmann, like a young god; he was very good-looking, tall, dark, radiant in those days. The pictures of him today [at his trial in 1961] bear no resemblance to how he used to be.' In Vienna, he did not convey the image as he did in the trial in Jerusalem of the subordinate and banal official described by Hannah Arendt ... Eyewitnesses in 1938-9 speak of his anti-Semitic and imperious demeanour. He refused 'for ideological reasons' to shake hands with Jewish representatives or even Zionist emissaries. He berated, threatened and taunted the Jews. While he had still been a subordinate figure in Berlin in 1937, he took the initiative in Vienna to manage the terror and the persecution. He enjoyed his new work ... people could be jailed or deported to concentration camps at his command."

"His behavior, too, was godlike: he was master of arresting and then releasing people, of banning institutions and then allowing them to resume. He initiated and censored a Jewish newspaper and eventually even got to decide who could access the Jewish community's bank accounts."

"I was arrested on the street [in Vienna], brought to the Seitenstettengasse synagogue where I saw a group that was destroying everything ... with hammers, with axes, they broke the cult objects. And the one who was directing all this, it was specifically Mr. Eichmann... He was there, he was directing the operation... It was the SS ... they were in feldgrau [army gray], not in black. It was the first time that the SS weren't in black ... [Eichmann] was there with a crowbar. He smashed the cult objects to pieces ... Eichmann personally. But later, he ... invented a story ... that he went there to protect the building and the offices."

"We were naked when we stood in front of Adolf Eichmann and his helpers during selection on arrival at Auschwitz. Can you imagine how we felt, especially a woman, in front of them? ... He stood there with a dog and a thick leather horsewhip that was very thin at the end, which he pointed left or right. He took my mother to the other side. I cannot say I was brave. Perhaps it was inexperience, but I begged him, saying, "Please, she is the only person left in my life. I won't have anyone anymore." He struck me on the face with his whip so much that I swelled up like a balloon and could barely see through puffy eyes. He put me with my mother and that meant going to the crematorium."

"By about the start of 1940, we knew that if a senior German functionary or an officer arrived, it was best to stay hidden, and not show your face on the street... People were saying you should have no contact with them, because there was one among them who was born in a German colony in Palestine, and spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with all the Jewish customs."

"The story [that Eichmann was born in Palestine and spoke Hebrew] is a common thread winding through the public's perception of Eichmann ... in 1944 Eichmann used it offensively in Hungary to underpin his authority. Wisliceny used it to make the Jewish community afraid of his commander, who knew everything, could read everything, and - a masterstroke of caricature - looked so Jewish himself that he could move undetected among the Jews at any time. This terrifying scenario made such a lasting impression that after the war, people were frightened Eichmann might secretly have gone to Palestine, posing as a Jew, and could be hiding there among the survivors."

"Eichmann was personally a cowardly man, who was at great pains to protect himself from responsibility… He was amoral and completely ice cold in his attitude."

"Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors - in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner - and inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions."

"It was perfectly clear to me that this order spelled the death of millions of people. I said to Eichmann, 'God grant that our enemies never have the opportunity of doing the same to the German people', in reply to which Eichmann told me not to be sentimental; it was an order of the Fuhrer's and would have to be carried out."

"He was very upset that we had published something about him in that paper ... that he was ‘der Bluthund Eichmann’ (bloodhound Eichmann) - I am using the language [he] used at that time - ‘ Der Bluthund Eichmann,’ ‘blutunterlaufene Augen’ (blood-shot eyes), ‘ein neuer Feind,’ ‘Judenfeind’ (a new enemy, an enemy of the Jews). I don’t remember all the expressions, but they were very trenchant."

"Was Eichmann ever really the "man in the shadows"? Perhaps only during the short time he spent playing the SD commissar in a long leather coat, as feared and mysterious as a film noir villain. But by 1937 ... Eichmann became a symbol for anti-Jewish policy, exactly as he had planned. The symbol was perpetuated by other people's perception and by his own behavior, but it was also how he saw himself. The only difference in the postwar period was that he was elevated even further and held up as an isolated perpetrator ... thanks to his associates and accomplices' efforts to defend themselves."

"And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."

"With his characteristically ambiguous combination of praise, irony, and an eye for a slogan, Reinhard Heydrich called Eichmann his "little prime minister.""

"We knew who Eichmann was, even in Holland. We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions - and there was also a rumor he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sarona. This was very clear from the way he spoke. He was interested in our history, our background, our life in Holland. He asked very specific questions about synagogues, Zionist matters, certificates, our membership of youth movements. He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto, but if we said anything there about our experiences in Ravensbrück, or about anything we knew, 'then you will' - this was the phrase he used - 'be going up the chimney.'"

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong."

"He complained regularly about death-camp quotas not being fulfilled, about the problems of getting all French Jews to the death camps, and about the intermittent failure of the Italians to cooperate. As late as 1944, he played a leading, and open, role in the killing of Hungarian Jews, and in August of that year he reported that four million Jews had died in the death camps and another two million at the hands of the Nazis' mobile extermination units in Eastern Europe. At no point did he show the least compunction over the planning, organization and execution of what became known as the Holocaust."

"In the Sassen tapes, Eichmann ... was not yet under the threat of the gallows, and he was not cautious. Here was Eichmann without any remorse, boasting and glorying in what he had done. Here Eichmann reveals himself as a passionate zealous man, happy to celebrate a weekend with his mistress at a Hungarian lake, slightly surprised to find that the killings and roundups in Hungary had gone so easily ... [The tapes] reveal an arrogant, boastful man, disdainful of his subordinates, totally indifferent to the fate of his victims and distant from his family. Capable of peacefully playing the violin at home, he is not above tearing up his wife’s bible and throwing it at her. He is a man cocooned in self-deception. Above all, he is a man passionate about his job and his mission ... Essentially a desk man, Eichmann fantasizes about himself in the [tapes] as a man of action and courage, deftly rewriting history in the process."

"This was no contented man in his fifties, reading for pleasure: the peaceable rabbit farmer was capable of throwing books against the wall and tearing them to pieces, filling them with aggressive marginalia, insults, and invective, and covering mountains of paper with his commentaries, writing like a man possessed. Pencils snapped under the force of his scribbling; his fighting spirit was unbroken. The ideological warrior had not been defeated ... His writing was not an attempt to comprehend his own actions; it arose from the fact that people were condemning the crimes he felt to be his life's work."

"He is responsible because of the conspiracy and the plots for all that happened to the Jewish people — from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the Aegean Sea, from the Pyrenees to the Urals."

"Mister death who signs papers then eats telegraphs simply: Shoot them then eats"

"People knew exactly who was meant by "a repulsive, unpleasant fellow, you shake hands with him and you want to wash your hands afterward." Erring on the side of caution, Eichmann corrected this denunciation for his superiors: "I make sure I never shake hands with these Jews.""

"If we had fifty Eichmanns, we would have won the war."

"Eichmann became the "Nuremberg Ghost," ever present but impossible to lay hands on. His name haunted all the war crimes trials that followed."

"Eichmann is 34 or 35 years old, a very active, adventurous man. He felt that this act against Jews was necessary and was fully convinced of its necessity and correctness, as I was."

"Eichmann continually managed to inveigle his Jewish negotiating partners into making concessions and cooperating, using nothing but their hope that by "negotiating" with him, they could prevent something worse from happening. How terrible their realization must have been that they were caught in a trap. On the transports, in the camps, and in direct sight of the apparatus of extermination, the Nazis' involuntary collaborators realized what they had been involved in. If they did not feel then, in this moment of realization, that they had fallen victim to a diabolical perpetrator, Satan in human form, then when? The terrible visions that emerged later of "Caligula" and "Grand Inquisitor Eichmann," the heartless monster, were rooted in these moments of unavoidable insight into the true aims of National Socialist anti-Jewish policies... "Eichmann" became the embodiment of this mechanism: it was the name the Jewish community representatives knew, and people trusted them. So the name walked abroad among the Nazis' victims, though the man himself was nowhere to be seen and was not immediately responsible for their suffering. This explains the memories of many Holocaust survivors of encounters with Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, when in all likelihood they never met him... the victims were able to see Eichmann in every jackbooted Nazi or arrogant inspector who screamed at them only because "Eichmann" had become much more than just a person. The name was the symbol and the guarantor of the power that was crushing people, and it no longer mattered who actually embodied and exploited it. The threat inherent in that name went far beyond what a faceless, nameless bureaucracy could ever have achieved."

"Nearly four decades after being buried in Israel's state archives, a rambling manuscript by Adolf Eichmann, the chief transport technician behind the Nazi death machine, was finally released to the public yesterday, reeking of mendacity, self-interest, and delusion. Penned in jail as he awaited his execution, the man who dispatched hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers ended his days trying to convince the world he was a mere Nazi underling, a lickspittle who was only obeying orders and who went to the gallows tortured by regret at having been dazzled and led astray by the Third Reich's leaders. … time and again, he absolves himself of responsibility for the Nazi regime's horrendous crimes, painting a picture of himself as a nature-loving, simple, practical figure, who was brought up (in Austria, though he was German-born) to believe in discipline. He casts himself as a man who could not understand why his superiors kept embroiling him in death, instead of giving him the desk job he so coveted and clamoured for. A man who was horrified to witness the gassing of Jews in a mobile execution van. A man who loved his family, who made friends before the war with Jews and dissidents. … Almost every chapter contains an explanation of how little authority that he — the head of the Gestapo section in Berlin whose job it was to locate, deport, and exterminate Jews — actually held."

"The people who met [Eichmann in hiding]... met a pleasant man who didn't drink or gamble, organized a fair distribution of rations, knew his way around the "red tape," was intelligent and polite, and paid his rent on time. This charming man with the slight Viennese accent clearly didn't have a provincial upbringing. "He was such a quiet, unassuming person. On warm summer evenings he often played his violin for us. He played Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven" ... his general technical knowledge meant he could fix broken equipment, and he was the only one in the area with a radio, on which he particularly liked to follow the news ... even the children loved him: he helped tutor them and gave them chocolate."

"I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck."

"All offices of the SD and the security police are to be informed that pogroms of the populace against English and American terror-fliers were not to be interfered with; on the contrary, this hostile mood is to be fostered."

"I do not feel guilty of any war crimes, I have only done my duty as an intelligence organ, and I refuse to serve as an ersatz for Himmler."

"Please report to RF SS and to the Fuehrer that all arrangements against Jews, political and concentration camp internees in the Protectorate have been taken care of by me personally today."

"Oppression is the essence of power."

"Armenia was always a minority nation. The Armenians were annihilated by the Russians and then by the Turks."

"Russia demanded Armenian territories, very cleverly using long-standing, bitter fights between Armenians and Turks."

"When I saw the newspaper headline "Gas Chamber Expert Captured" and an American lieutenant explained it to me, I was pale in amazement. How can they say such things about me? I told you I was only in charge of the Intelligence Service from 1943 on. The British even admitted that they tried to assassinate me because of that, not because of having anything to do with atrocities, you can be sure of that."

"In the first place, I should like to state to the Tribunal that I am fully aware of the serious character of the charges against me. I know the hatred of the world is directed against me; that I particularly since Himmler, Müller, and Pohl are no longer alive, must here, alone, give an account to the world and the Tribunal. I realize that I shall have to tell the truth in this courtroom, in order to enable the Court and the world to fully recognize and understand what has been going on in Germany during this war and to judge it with fairness."

"I know only that in my belief in Adolf Hitler I put all my strength at the disposal of my people. As a German soldier I could only put myself at the service of the defense against those destructive forces which had once brought Germany close to the abyss, and which today, after the collapse of the Reich, are still threatening the world. If I have made mistakes in my work through a false conception of obedience, if I carried out orders, all of which, insofar as they are alleged to be cardinal orders, were issued before my time of office, then they are part of a fate which is stronger than myself and which is carrying me along with it. I am accused here because substitutes are needed for the missing Himmler and other elements which were completely contrary to me. Whether my point of view and explanation are accepted or rejected, I ask you not to connect the fate and honor of hundreds of thousands of the living and dead of the General SS, of the Waffen-SS, and of the civil servants who, believing in their ideal, bravely defended, their Reich to the last, with your just curse against Himmler. Like myself, they believed that they were acting according to law."

"Among the spiritual forces secretly working in the camp of Germany's enemies and their allies in this war, as in the last, stands Freemasonry, the danger of whose activities has been repeatedly stressed by the Fuehrer in his speeches. The present brochure, now made available to the German and European peoples in a 3rd edition, is intended to shed light on this enemy working in the shadows. Though an end has been put to the activities of Masonic organizations in most European countries, particular attention must still be paid to Freemasonry, and most particularly to its membership, as the implements of the political will of a supra-governmental power. The events of the summer of 1943 in Italy demonstrate once again the latent danger always represented by individual Freemasons, even after the destruction of their Masonic organizations. Although Freemasonry was prohibited in Italy as early as 1925, it has retained significant political influence in Italy through its membership, and has continued to exert that influence in secrecy. Freemasons thus stood in the first ranks of the Italian traitors who believed themselves capable of dealing Fascism a death blow at a critical juncture, shamelessly betraying the Italian nation. The intended object of the 3rd printing of this brochure is to provide a clearer knowledge of the danger of Masonic corruption, and to keep the will to self-defence alive."

"I have talked to you in the past but we have always exchanged pleasantries. And it has always been assumed that I am Kaltenbrunner, the big bad man next to Himmler and the successor of Himmler. But I think you can see by this time, after having treated my brain hemorrhages, both in the hospital and here in my cell, that I am not the disagreeable, uncouth fellow the public probably thinks because of all the atrocities committed under Himmler's rule, and of which I am totally innocent."

"I am thought of as another Himmler. I'm not. The papers make me out as a criminal. I never killed anyone."

"There is no human law or law of God or national law that states that any healthy being has to permit the snake to eat the mouse - but on the other hand, it is perfectly justified to defend the mouse."

"The quicker humanity advances, the more important it is to be the one who deals the first blow."

"I was appointed by Hitler to succeed Canaris because it was well known and proven that my abilities were greater than those of Canaris."

"(While smiling, and jokingly) You haven't come to see me for three weeks. I wondered whether you had become disgusted with us war criminals - particularly me, the so-called archcriminal of them all."

"It is precisely the immediate and thorough eradication of the Jews in Italy which is the special interest of the present internal political situation and the general security in Italy."

"The colonel in charge of the London prison that I was in has told me that I would be hanged in any case, no matter what the outcome would be. Since I am fully aware of that, all I want to do is to clear up on the fundamental things that are wrong here."

"Don't even step out of your garden gate until this matter has been clarified."

"(While playing solitaire and sipping cognac) It's all a lot of crap. The game is up."

"Ich bekenne mich nicht schuldig. (I do not believe that I have made myself guilty.)"

"Where do you think I was today? I stood straight in front of him (Himmler) for a whole hour and talked, and he... he played with a puzzle the whole time – you know, this glass cube with three balls on the inside... When I finished, he took off his pince-nez, wiped it with a handkerchief – he has a skull even on his handkerchief – and said, "Listen, Ernst! Have you by any chance, ever had a dream, where you're riding in the back of a ragged truck to who knows where, and some monsters are sitting around you?" I didn’t say anything. Then he smiled and said, "Ernst, you know, I know as well as you that no astral exists. But what do you think, if you, and even Canaris, have your own people in 'Annenerbe', shouldn’t I have my own people there as well?" I did not understand what he meant. "Think Ernst, think!" he said. I kept silent. Then he smiled and asked, "Whose man do you think is Kröger?" …Yes, Emma... It seems I'm too simple for all these intrigues... But I know that while the Führer needs me, my heart will keep beating...You know, Emma... Sometimes it seems to me, that it's not me who is alive, but it's the Führer who is living inside me..."

"The Prosecution holds me responsible for the concentration camps, for the destruction of Jewish life, for Einsatzgruppen and other things. All of this is neither in accord with the evidence nor with the truth. The accusers as well as the accused are exposed to the dangers of a summary proceeding. It is correct that I had to take over the Reich Security Main Office. There was no guilt in that in itself. Such offices exist in governments of other nations too. However, the task and activity assigned to me in 1943 consisted almost exclusively in the reorganization of the German political and military intelligence service, though not as Heydrich's successor. Almost a year after his death I had to accept this post under orders and as an officer at a time when suspicion fell on Admiral Canaris of having collaborated with the enemy for years. In a short time I ascertained the treason of Canaris and his accomplices to the most frightful extent."

"As early as January 1934, Dr. Kaltenbrunner was jailed by the Dollfuss Government on account of his Nazi views and sent with other leading National Socialists into the concentration camp Kaisersteinbruch. He caused and led a hunger strike and forced the government to dismiss 490 National Socialist prisoners. In the following year he was jailed again, because of suspicion of high treason, and committed to the court martial of Wels (Upper Danube). After an investigation of many months, the accusation of high treason collapsed; but he was sentenced to 6 months' imprisonment for subversive activities. After the spring of 1935, Dr. Kaltenbrunner was the leader of the Austrian SS, the right to practice his profession having been suspended because of his National Socialist views. It rebounds to his credit that in this important position he succeeded through energetic leadership in maintaining the unity of the Austrian SS, which he had built up, in spite of all persecution, and succeeded in committing it successfully at the right moment."

"Kaltenbrunner came and things became worse from day to day. More and more we learned that perhaps the impulsive actions of a murderer like Heydrich were not so bad as the cold, legal logic of a lawyer who took over the administration of such a dangerous instrument as the Gestapo."

"Yes. I know that Heydrich, in a certain sense, really had something akin to a bad conscience when he committed his crimes. At any rate, he did not like it when those things were discussed openly in Gestapo circles. Nebe, who as Chief of the Criminal Police had the same rank as the Chief of the Gestapo, Mueller, always told me that Heydrich took care to conceal his crimes. With the entry of Kaltenbrunner into that organization, this practice ceased. All those things were now openly discussed among the department chiefs of the Gestapo. By now the war had started, of course. These gentlemen lunched together, and Nebe often came to me from such luncheons so completely exhausted that he had a nervous breakdown. On two occasions Nebe had to be sent on long sick leave because he simply could not stand the open cynicism with which mass murder, and the technique of mass murder, were discussed."

"A security chief who was of the impression that the policing functions of his Gestapo and SD were somewhat on the order of directing traffic;"

"Kaltenbrunner, the grand inquisitor, took up the bloody mantle of Heydrich to stifle opposition and terrorize compliance, and buttressed the power of National Socialism on a foundation of guiltless corpses."

"You will remember his description of those horrible luncheon parties at which Kaltenbrunner discussed every detail of the gas chambers and of the technique of mass murder."

"In America, if any citizen were to use a weapon against the state for any reason, they would call him a terrorist. Forget about America."

"I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy."

"Death by hanging...I deserved it and I expected it, as I've always told you. I am glad that I have had the chance to defend myself and to think things over in the last few months."

"This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible."

"We must not be squeamish when we learn that a total of 17,000 have been shot. We are now duty bound to hold together, we who are gathered together here figure on Mr. Roosevelt's list of war criminals. I have the honour of being Number One."

"If the authority of the National-Socialist Reich is to be upheld, then it is unacceptable that representatives of the Reich should be obliged to meet Jews when they enter or leave the house, and are in this way liable to infection with epidemics. I therefore intend to clear the city of Cracow, the seat of the Governor-General of the General Government, of Jews, as far as at all possible, by November 1, 1940. There will be a major operation to move the Jews, on the grounds that it is absolutely intolerable that thousands upon thousands of Jews should go slinking around and occupy apartments in the city which the Führer has granted the great honor of becoming the seat of a high Reich Authority..."

"In Prague, big red posters were put up on which one could read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself, 'If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper."

"Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. 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... For us the Jews are also exceptionally damaging because they are being such gluttons. There are an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps. 3.5 million. These 3.5 million Jews, we cannot shoot them, nor can we poison them. Even so, we can take steps which in some way or other will pave the way for their destruction, notably in connection with the grand measures to be discussed in the Reich. The General Government must become just as judenfrei (free of Jews) as the Reich!"

"I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories."

"I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right."

"Ah! American cigarettes are like the American soul - sweet and light."

"It doesn't matter whether I'm judged criminal. I have a great feeling of guilt - I have a feeling that I ran after Hitler like a wildfire without reason. If I can sacrifice my life to make something good, I'd gladly do it."

"All these things are still apparent today. You Americans can see for yourselves how impossible it is to feed the German people from the German soil itself. From the viewpoint of a historian, one can say that Hitler never would have arisen if the Allies had not treated Germany so poorly. Justice Jackson said so himself. Today things are more impossible than ever. The East has been taken away from Germany - in other words, hunger created Hitler, and paradoxically, Hitler created still greater hunger."

"After the deed is done, one always becomes clever and philosophical."

"I feel that I am obligated to my people - that is not pessimism. If I tried to prove that I was innocent, it would be the same as trying to prove that the German people are guilty. Only one innocent man sits in that dock - and that man is the symbol of the German people. An epoch with such happenings as the murder of 5 million Jews, the projective extermination of millions of Slavs - such an epoch must close up definitely once and for all. It cannot go dragging on and on. Those of us who are guilty must pay the price and set the German people free, no longer to be blamed for our stupidity."

"You can't indict a government and its organizations as criminal. The conception of the Reich government is a hundred years old. The general staff is several hundreds of years old. The case of the SS is another matter, because it was started with the party and by the party. But it's quite impossible to indict or convict an organization as criminal if it has in its membership millions of innocent people."

"Even in art, there is no light without shadows, and no shadows are cast without some light. Even the shadow of Adolf Hitler is accompanied by some light."

"I think of these things frequently, because I know the German people. Among them might arise the legend of Hitler, because Hitler was not heard from in this trial. Time always has some reconciling effect. On every ruin there eventually grows grass, and then some shrubbery, and finally, before you realize it, what is really an old hideous ruin becomes a romantic sight and legend."

"I think that Hitler was abnormal in his sexual needs. That is, he needed too little from the opposite sex. He considered women as objects of beauty, and he often talked with affection about his own mother. I obtained the impression that he disliked his father, because he never mentioned him. But it is a bad thing if a man has too little Eros in him. It makes him insensitive, and probably leads to cruelty. Freud, Sigmund Freud, the last of the great German psychiatrists, who died in England, pointed out the relationship between frustrated love and cruelty. I believe it is what you psychiatrists term sadism. I'm convinced that a man who does not need the love of a woman, and thinks he can forgo it, or who does forgo it, can turn to cruelty and sadism as a substitute."

"Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered."

"What a horrible system we had. How blind we were."

"A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased."

"On the witness stand I said that a thousand years would not suffice to erase the guilt brought upon our people because of Hitler's conduct in this war. Every possible guilt incurred by our nation has already been, completely wiped out today, not only by the conduct of our war-time enemies towards our nation and its soldiers, which has been carefully kept out of this Trial, but also by the tremendous mass crimes of the most frightful sort which - as I have now learned - have been and still are being committed against Germans by Russians, Poles, and Czechs, especially in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Sudetenland. Who shall ever judge these crimes against the German people?"

"Hitler is lonely. So is God. Hitler is like God."

"The job of realizing Hitler's vision in the new Government-General fell to a Bavarian named Hans Frank, who had been among the Nazis' earliest recruits from the legal profession. Aged thirty-nine when he installed himself in the historic Wawel Castle in Krakôw, Frank was immediately gripped by delusions of grandeur. He told his wife she was to be the 'queen of Poland', though in practice he was in charge of only the four districts of Krakôw, Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. The Government-General was to become 'the first colonial territory of the German nation'."

"For a while, Himmler and Frank toyed with the idea of sending the Jews to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, which the Polish government had already considered; it was agreed that this could happen only after the war. Then Hitler spoke of concentrating them on the new Poland's eastern frontier, between the Vistula and the Bug. Later, Siberia was mentioned. In the meantime, the Lublin district became a kind of dumping ground for deported Jews, tens of thousands of whom were crowded into hastily constructed camps, while the supposedly transitional ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Lowicz and Glowno took on a more permanent quality. Not that they could have endured indefinitely. For one thing, they were intolerably cramped; a third of the population of Warsaw was crammed into 2.4 per cent of the city's residential area. At the same time, food rations for Jews were reduced so that by 1941 their daily calorific content was just over 25 per cent of the standard Polish allocation and a meagre 7 per cent of the German, far less than the subsistence minimum. Overcrowding and underfeeding were themselves intended to be lethal - which indeed they were, with mortality rates soaring to 10 per cent in Warsaw in 1941. 'It's high time that this rabble is driven together in ghettos,' declared Himmler, 'and then plague will creep in and they'll croak.' In the summer of 1942 Frank described sentencing 1.2 million Jews to death by starvation as 'just a marginal issue'."

"Yet the more Frank got to know his fiefdom, the more he began to doubt the wisdom of expelling or starving nearly one in ten of the population, to say nothing of the dangers of allowing epidemics to break out in the principal cities. In the early 1930s, Jews had accounted for nearly half of Poland's highest income-earners. A very high proportion of the entrepreneurs, managers and skilled workers of Polish cities were Jewish. One of the first acts of the German occupation had been to authorize the seizure of all Jewish property - the beginning of a campaign of systematic and ruthless plunder. At around the same time Frank had issued an edict imposing a general obligation for forced labour on all male Jews between the ages of twelve and sixty. Whether for their capital or their labour, Jews had an unquestionable economic value; simply stealing the former and eliminating the latter was patently not a profit-maximizing strategy. Unless Frank wanted to return the Polish economy to the Middle Ages, he needed to work out a compromise between the dictates of racist ideology and the economics of empire."

"Long live eternal Germany!"

"Hitler was undoubtedly a genius but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve years."

"It was sad. It's war. Many others died, too. It's war."

"I am skeptical about preventing wars. I doubt if they can be prevented. There will always be wars. Judging by past experiences, working for peace now would be as ineffective as ever. It's a law of nature."

"Personally, he is not particularly depressed, because of the "nature of life, the laws of nature, the ways of war.""

"In the testimony of each defendant, at some point there was reached the familiar blank wall: Nobody knew anything about what was going on. Time after time we have heard the chorus from the dock: "I only heard about these things here for the first time." These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. … A minister of interior who knew not even what went on in the interior of his own office, much less the interior of his own department, and nothing at all about the interior of Germany. … Frick, the ruthless organizer, helped the party to seize power, supervised the police agencies to insure that it stayed in power, and chained the economy of Bohemia and Moravia to the German war machine."

"It is tragic that the Fuehrer should have the whole nation behind him with the single exception of the Army generals. In my opinion it is only by action that they can now atone for their faults of lack of character and discipline."

"The Pact of Munich is signed. Czechoslovakia as a power is out. The genius of the Führer and his determination not to shun even a world war have again won victory without the use of force. The hope remains that the incredulous, the weak and the doubters have been converted and will remain that way."

"In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not by legal prosecution of the guilty but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying power as is appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population. The competent commanders must find the means of keeping order not by demanding more security forces but by applying suitable Draconian methods."

"My most profound confidence is however based upon the fact that at the head of Germany there stands a man by his entire development, his desires, and striving can only have been destined by fate to lead our people into a brighter future."

"But then I ask myself, I have never truly known the man whose flank I have led one difficult and ascetic life for. Perhaps he has played with my idealism, taking advantage for dark scopes that he has held hidden within himself. How can I expect to know a man who has never opened his heart to me? Till now, I do not know what he really thought, knew or wanted. I was alone with my thoughts and my suspicions. And now, the veil that covered this statue has fallen to the ground and instead of an art work, a monster has revealed itself. Now we leave to the historians of the future the task of discussing if that statue was therefore a sin from the beginning, or was changed because of the circumstances. I continue to make the same error: I try to think back to his humble origins. But then I remember how many sons of these people have sealed their history with his name."

"Ah, you come to see the others but rarely to see me."

"Yes, I'm very normal, everything is okay, I won't become a psychiatric case."

"Death - by hanging! - that, at least, I did not deserve. The death part - all right, somebody has to stand for the responsibility. But that - that I did not deserve!"

"My greetings to you, my Germany."

"A new large-scale war will end with the destruction of human culture and civilization. Therefore, this trial must contribute toward preventing such degenerate wars in the future, and toward establishing rules whereby human beings can live together."

"I felt this coming. I tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler in 1945. I am not concerned with jurisdiction of the court as Hess or others are. History will show the trials to be necessary."

"The sacrifices which were made on both sides after January 1945 were without sense. The dead of this period will be the accusers of the man responsible for the continuation of that fight, Adolf Hitler, just as much as the destroyed cities, destroyed in that last phase, who had lost tremendous cultural values and tremendous numbers of dwellings.... The German people” he said” remained faithful to Adolf Hitler until the end. He has betrayed them knowingly. He has tried to throw them into the abyss..."

"The tremendous danger, however, contained in this totalitarian system only became abundantly clear at the moment when we were approaching the end. It was then that one could see what the meaning of the principle was, namely, that every order should be carried out without any criticism. Everything . . . you have seen in the way of orders which were carried out without any consideration, did after all turn out to be mistakes . . . This system let me put it like this to the end of the system it had become clear what tremendous dangers are contained in any such system, as such quite apart from Hitler's principle. The combination of Hitler and this system, then, brought about this tremendous catastrophe to this world."

"20 years. Well … that's fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain. I said the sentences must be severe, and I admitted my share of the guilt, so it would be ridiculous if I complained about the punishment."

"Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical means like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man."

"The Nuremberg Trial stands for me still today as an attempt to break through to a better world. Still today I acknowledge as generally correct the reasons of my sentence by the International Military Tribunal. Moreover, I still today consider as just that I assume the responsibility and thus the guilt for everything that was perpetrated by way of, generally speaking, crime, after my joining the Hitler Government on the 8th February 1942. Not the individual mistakes, grave as they may be, are burdening my conscience, but my having acted in the leadership. Therefore, I for my person, have in the Nuremberg Trial, confessed to the collective responsibility and I am also maintaining this today still. I still see my main guilt in my having approved of the persecution of the Jews and of the murder of millions of them."

"Hatred of the Jews was Hitler's motor and central point perhaps even the very element which motivated him. The German people, the German greatness, the Empire, they all meant nothing to him in the last analysis. For this reason, he wished in the final sentence of his testament, to fixate us Germans, even after the apocalyptic downfall in a miserable hatred of the Jews...When speaking of the victims of the bomb raids, particularly after the massive attacks on Hamburg in Summer 1943, he again and again reiterated that he would avenge these victims on the Jews; just as if the air-terror against the civilian population actually suited him in that it furnished him with a belated substitute motivation for a crime decided upon long ago and emanating from quite different layers of his personality. Just as if he wanted to justify his own mass murders with these remarks."

"So long as Hitler had temperamental outbursts of hate, there was yet hope for a change towards more moderate directions. Therefore, it was the resoluteness and coldness which made his outbreaks against the Jews so convincing. In other areas when he announced horrifying decisions in a cold and quiet voice, those around him, and I myself knew that things had now become serious. And with just this cold superiority he declared also, when we occasionally had lunch together, that he was set to destroy the Jews in Europe."

"The young district leader chose Bauhaus wallpapers at my suggestion, although I had hinted that these were "Communist" wallpapers. He waved that warning aside with a grand gesture: "We will take the best of everything, even from the Communists." In saying this he was expressing what Hitler and his staff had already been doing for years: picking up anything that promised success without regard for ideology…"

"The danger that hung over Moscow in the winter of 1941 struck [Hitler] as similar to his present predicament. In a brief access of confidence, he might remark with a jesting tone of voice that it would be best, after victory over Russia, to entrust the administration of the country to Stalin, under German hegemony, of course, since he was the best imaginable man to handle the Russians. In general he regarded Stalin as a kind of colleague. When Stalin's son was taken prisoner it was out of this respect, perhaps, that Hitler ordered him to be given especially good treatment."

"In contrast to the ultimate realization that he was dealing with a formidable enemy in the east, Hitler clung to the end to his preconceived opinion that the troops of the Western countries were poor fighting material. Even the Allied successes in Africa and Italy could not shake his belief that these soldiers would run away at the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that these soldiers would run away from the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that democracy enfeebled a nation. As late as the summer of 1944 he held to his theory that all the ground that had been lost in the West would be quickly reconquered. His opinions on the Western statesmen had a similar bias. He considered Churchill, as he often stated during the situation conferences, an incompetent, alcoholic demagogue. And he asserted in all seriousness that Roosevelt was not a victim of infantile paralysis but of syphilitic paralysis and was therefore mentally unsound. These opinions, too, were indications, of his flight from reality in the last years of his life."

"Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without any scruples about their activities. The more technical the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was this indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities."

"Even the last scintillating assembly of the leaders of the Reich could scarcely distract me from my cares. That was the gala celebration of Goering's birthday on January 12, 1944, which he held at Karinhall. We all came with expensive presents, such as Goering expected: cigars from Holland, gold bars from the Balkans, valuable paintings and sculptures. Goering had let me know that he would like to have a marble bust of Hitler, more than life size, by Breker. The overladen gift table had been set up in the big library. Goering displayed it to his guests and spread out on it the building plans his architect had prepared for his birthday. Goering's palace-like residence was to be more than doubled in size. At the magnificently set table in the luxurious dining room flunkies in white livery served a somewhat austere meal, in keeping with the conditions of the time. Funk, as he did every year, delivered the birthday speech at the banquet. He lauded Goering's abilities, qualities, and dignities and offered the toast to him as "one of the greatest Germans." Funk's extravagant words contrasted grotesquely with the actual situation. The whole thing was a ghostly celebration taking place against a background of collapse and ruin."

"Actually, a kind of state socialism seemed to be gaining more and more ground, furthered by many of the [Nazi] party functionaries. They had already managed to have all plants owned by the state distributed among the various party districts and subordinated to their own district enterprises... Our very system of industrial direction in the interests of war production could easily become the framework for a state-socialist economic order. The result was that our organization, the more efficient it became, was itself providing the party leaders with the instruments for the doom of private enterprise."

"In the burning and devastated cities, we daily experienced the direct impact of war. It spurred us to do our utmost...the bombing and the hardships that resulted from them did not weaken the morale of the populace."

"At a situation conference early in February the maps showed the catastrophic picture of innumerable breakthroughs and encirclements. I drew Doenitz aside: "Something must be done, you know." Doenitz replied with unwonted curtness: "I am here only to represent the navy. The rest is none of my business. The Fuehrer must know what he is doing.""

"Around the middle of February, I called on Goering one evening in Karinhall. I had discovered from studying the military map that he had concentrated his parachute division around his hunting estate. For a long time he had been made the scapegoat for all the failures of the Luftwaffe. At the situation conferences Hitler habitually denounced him in the most violent and insulting language before the assembled officers. He must have been even nastier in the scenes he had with Goering privately. Often, waiting in the anteroom, I could hear Hitler shouting at him. That evening in Karinhall, I established a certain intimacy with Goering for the first and only time. Goering had an excellent Rotschild-Lafite served at the fireplace and ordered the servant not to disturb us. Candidly, I described my disappointment with Hitler. Just as candidly, Goering replied that he well understood me and that he often felt much the same. However, he said, it was easier for me, since I had joined Hitler a great deal later and could free myself from him all the sooner. He, Goering, had much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together- and he could no longer break loose."

"At this time a high-ranking SS leader hinted to me that Himmler was preparing decisive steps. In February 1945, the Reichsführer-SS had assumed command of the Vistula Army Group, but he was no better than his successor at stopping the Russian advance. Hitler was now berating him also. Thus what personal prestige Himmler had retained was used up by a few weeks of commanding frontline troops. Nevertheless, everyone still feared Himmler, and I felt distinctly shaky one day on learning that Himmler was coming to see me about something that evening. This, incidentally, was the only time he ever called on me. My nervousness grew when Theodor Hupfauer, the new chief of our Central Office- with whom I had several times spoken rather candidly- told me in some trepidation that Gestapo chief Kaltenbrunner would be calling on him at the same hour. Before Himmler entered, by adjutant whispered to me: "He's alone." My office was without window panes; we no longer bothered replacing them since they were blasted out by bombs every few days. A wretched candle stood at the center of the table; the electricity was out again. Wrapped in our coats, we sat facing one another. Himmler talked about minor matters, asked about pointless details, and finally made the witless observation: "When the course is downhill there's always a floor to the valley, and once it is reached, Herr Speer, the ascent begins again." Since I expressed neither agreement nor disagreement with this proverbial wisdom and remained virtually monosyllabic throughout the conversation, he soon took his leave. I never found out what he wanted of it, or why Kaltenbrunner called on Hupfauer at the same time. Perhaps t hey had heard about my critical attitude and were seeking allies; perhaps they merely wanted to sound us out."

"At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Goering had undergone a systematic withdrawal cure which had ended his drug addiction. Ever since, he was in better form than I had ever seen him. He displayed remarkable energy and became the most formidable personality among the defendants. I thought it a great pity that he had not been up to this level before the outbreak of the war and in critical situations during the war. He would have been the only person whose authority and popularity Hitler would have had to reckon with. Actually, he had been one of the few sensible enough to foresee the doom that awaited us. But having thrown away his chance to save the country while that was still possible, it was absurd and truly criminal for him to use his regained powers to hoodwink his own people. His whole policy was one of deception. Once, in the prison yard something was said about Jewish survivors in Hungary. Goering remarked coldly: "So, there are still some there? I thought we had knocked off all of them. Somebody slipped up again." I was stunned."

"Hitler, as it were, came from nowhere- the returning primal being, as the historian Otto Hinze has remarked. The likes of him will always crop up again. Speer, on the other hand, was, by origin and upbringing, the product of a long process of civilization. He came from a respected home with strict values, and had furthermore received his training from a teacher who endeavored to communicate to his students not only professional knowledge, but also standards that would withstand all the temptations of the age. Speer far more than Hitler makes us realize how fragile these precautions are, and how the ground on which we all stand is always threatened."

"The destructive will came from Hitler. But he would not have achieved any of his objectives without the helpers, of which Speer is but one example."

"Speer preserved a sensitive heart through all the horrors of the closing years of the Third Reich. He was a good comrade, with an open character and an intelligent, natural manner. Originally an independent architect, he became Minister after Todt's early death. He disliked bureaucratic methods and attempted to act according to a healthy understanding of human nature. We worked together without friction and always did our best to give one another such assistance as lay within our power, which is surely the obvious and sensible way to behave. But of how many prominent men in the Third Reich could it be said that they pursued this obvious and sensible course? Speer always retained his objectivity. I never saw him become exaggeratedly excited. He managed to calm down his occasionally highly temperamental colleagues, and when inter-departmental strife arose he always did his best to pacify both parties. Speer possessed sufficient courage to speak his mind to Hitler. At an early stage he explained to him clearly and fully why the war could no longer be won and why it must therefore be ended. This brought Hitler's anger down upon him."

"Speer is generally recognized as the most able of Hitler's subordinates and the most interesting, in that he retained throughout his membership a clear-sighted understanding of its essentially Byzantine character."

"An architect by profession, Speer knew little about industrial production, but he had a flexible and brilliant mind, great energy and an exceptional talent for improvisation. As the Führer's personal architect, Speer had directed the construction of most of the Nazi Party buildings at Nuremberg, Munich and elsewhere, and since his relationship with Hitler had been that of one artist to another, he had gained a most favored standing. It appears that he alone of the leading Nazis was given freedom to speak frankly, a freedom which he had the courage to exercise."

"Heil Hitler! (when asked to state his name) You know my name well. Julius Streicher! The Bolsheviks will hang you one day! (to the hangman) Purim festival, 1946! I am now by God my father! Adele, my dear wife."

"I have to repeat again and again: He who knows the Talmud, knows the Jew! The laws of the Talmud are contrary to the German system of laws. You should acknowledge the importance of discussing this matter in connection with the judiciary budget. Once you know what the Talmud orders the Jew to do, you will understand today's state of affairs."

"We handed the most important belongings of our people -- the railroads and the banks -- to aliens who 2000 years ago had turned the temple into a house of usury. Back then there was a man who had the bravery to drive out these scoundrels with a whip! If today a national socialist is seen with such a temple-whip, he's thrown into jail."

"When one listens to your speeches it sounds as if you had always fought against capitalism. The truth is that it was you who gave all the power to capitalism. In this republic capitalism has grown as it had never before. You can think about the old state as you will, one thing is certain: it was not as rotten as the one you brought about! … What shall one say when Reich president Ebert in his letters addresses the Jewish scoundrel Barmat as "My dear Barmat" and closes with the greeting "Yours Ebert"? Despite all the veneration that I feel for this man, whom by the way I respect more as a master saddle-maker than as a Reich president, I simply have to be astonished. Gentlemen, where is the "beauty and dignity"?"

"Moreover I want to tell Dr. Süßheim -- who wants to portray every anti-Semite as a psychopath -- about his racial fellow Dr. Otto Weininger, who as an honest Jew wrote down his thoughts in the book "Sex and Character": "Jewry seems to be somewhat anthropologically related to the Negroes and the Mongolians. To the Negro points the readily curling hair, to an admixture of Mongolian blood points the very Chinese or Malayan formed skull, that one finds so often among Jews, which matches the usually yellowish complexion … The fact that excellent men have almost always been anti-Semites (Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Richard Wagner) can be explained in the following way: they, who have so much more in their own nature than other men, can also better understand Jewry.""

"The Roman historian Tacitus once said, that the health and the disease of a state can be measured in the number of its laws. If we Germans nowadays look at the huge number of laws, we have to say, that it's not health, but death that we're approaching. … It is strange that it is Social Democracy of all movements, which in the old state complained about exceptions, that now issues exception laws itself. These exception-laws are means of force and are created in the parliaments with the help of supranational financial powers. … In the old state an interest rate of more than 6 percent was deemed usury. Today this usury is legalized. It was YOU, the men of the left -- who always pretend to fight against capitalism and exploitation -- who accomplished this. It will be your downfall!"

"If you know these things, the question has enormous importance: who will be the judge in the future? It is not trivial, who is the judge. It's not sufficient to dress somebody in a robe, put a beret on his head and open the lawbook! It's a big difference whether a German or a negro takes place on the judgement seat. Sure, you can teach a negro the German language, the schematic application of laws and paragraphs -- and yet the negro will always judge like his blood commands!"

"And further, I tell you that the Jew is right, when he acts as he does – because we are too timid to be as German as the Jew is Jewish! … It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When the unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament."

"Who are the moneylenders? They are those who were driven out of the Temple by Christ Himself 2000 years ago. They are those who never work but live on fraud."

"Social Democracy preached against capitalism for half a century. After the November revolution the Reds had the opportunity to direct capitalism into the proper paths: but nothing happened!"

"In Soviet-Russia the Jew is forging the tool with which he wants to enslave Europe."

"A moment ago a deputy of the communist party pleaded for the abortion of developing life. … In Russia there has been a soviet rule for ten years already. … Where is the promised paradise after these ten years? Where is the foretold happiness? Is that supposed to be the happiness that in Russia the abortion has been legalized?"

"You may baptize as long as you want, but the Jew remains a Jew, the Chinese a Chinese and the Negro a Negro."

"Can't you feel that the German people has carried for seven years from one station of pain to another a huge cross? Can't you feel that it is persecuted, hounded and whipped bloody like the Nazarene? If you cannot feel that it is gasping under the weight of the cross which was burdened on it and that it walks on its way to Golgatha -- then you're not worth that God the Lord will again let the sun of his mercy shine upon you. … Help us so that in this decisive hour the German people will be freed from the weight of the cross of the yoke of Jewry! Help us, so that a mighty man who's been gifted by God can give us back our freedom and that it will again be a proud people in a German country! Take care that Germany is freed from the chains she has been bound with for seven years. Put an end to this slavery! Our people shall again be great, proud and beautiful!"

"In spite of the fact that the Jews do not even refrain from attacking Christendom, they are protected by those who wear the cassock. The Christendom of the early time was different to the one of today. The first Christians were fighters, who wanted to free their people from the Jewish ignominy. Then the Jew crept into that community and had the originally pure Christendom ridiculed by mankind. The first Christians were willing to die to defend the Christian doctrine."

"You are blinded and you serve the God of the Jews, who is not the God of love but the God of hatred. Why don't you listen to Christ Himself, who said to the Jews: "Ye are of your father the devil!""

"That's why the peoples have to die -- so that the Jew can live. He drives the peoples to war to make a profit from the fratricide of the white race. In the World War II million gentiles had to die. The Jew was the winner."

"They are hated because they satisfy their greed according to Talmudic principles. In the Jewish lawbook "Talmud" the Jews are told that the possessions of gentiles were "ownerless property", which the Jew was allowed to obtain through deceit and cheating. Whatever the "profession" may be called where the Jew earns his money, everywhere he remains a Jew. Such criminal behavior must inevitably provoke the hatred of Jews (anti-Semitism) and fighting repulsion. The fight that the Nazarene led 2000 years ago against the Jewish usurers resulted in a gruesome way of suffering and his slaughter at Calvary. The judgement passed by Jesus on the Jews marks the Jewish people for all time: "Ye are of your father the devil! He was a murderer from the beginning." (John 8:44-45)"

"The way that Adolf Hitler chose to follow to rescue the German people was an inner and outer one. Inwards he overcame the Jewish power by destroying Marxism and the secret lodges. Thereby he removed the hindrances which prevented building a German people's community. Outwards he broke the slave chains of Versailles by rebuilding the People's Army, bringing home those of the German people that had been ripped out, defeating Jewry's vassals and laying the foundation for a Europe that is liberated from Jewish financial power."

"When the Jew says "mankind" he is talking about himself. It is written in the Talmud, that only Jews were human beings, gentiles on the other hand were animals created to serve the chosen people. If looking back and comparing the corresponding articles in the "democratic" and "neutral" countries, one is astonished at the systematic nature of the propaganda whose final goal was the creation of a state of affairs in which a war was inevitable."

"In all peoples where Jews have lived as tolerated people or do so today, they prove to be disturbers of the inner peace and thus the destroyers of naturally grown people's communities. The Old Testament, which as the Jews claim tells their history, is at the same time the history of the peoples that the Jews destroyed physically and spiritually. The Jew does not only prove to be the disturber of the natural development within the peoples. He is also the destroyer of peace between the peoples."

"The Jew always lives from the blood of other peoples, he needs such murders and such sacrifices. The victory will be only entirely and finally achieved when the whole world is free of Jews."

"There must be a punitive expedition against the Jews in Russia, a punitive expedition which will expect: death sentence and execution. Then the world will see the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism."

"This is our mission at home, to approach these future decisions without hesitation, to do our duty and to remain strong. We know the enemy, we have called him by name for the last twenty years: he is the World Jew. And we know that the Jew must die."

"Developments since the rise of National Socialism make it probable that the continent will be freed from its Jewish destroyers of people and exploiters forever, and the German example after the German victory in World War II will also serve to bring about the destruction of the Jewish world tormentors on other continents."

"When one speaks of America, millions of Germans think of their relatives who either recently or long ago left their German homeland to seek their fortune in the “New World.” When someone succeeded in quickly making a lot of money in America, people said he had made his fortune. The result was that the “rich uncle” in America was envied and his nephews and nieces were encouraged to join the fortune-seeker. Seeking fortunes in America led to Germany losing people, and the American continent received many people whose contributions are particularly clear in the agricultural and technical fields. That these people and their descendants now give great help to the enemies of Germany in this Second World War is a tragic fact."

"The family ties between hundreds of thousands of German families and their American relatives led many to think that America would never join a second war against Germany. Now that that has happened, many Germans still believe that America will never allow Bolshevism to conquer and destroy Germany. Recent events have proven how false and dangerous this idea is. One has to be foolish or irredeemably stupid to believe that anything good can come to Europe from the land of presumed opportunity. That that did not happen after the First World War, and will not happen after the second. The Jews have made America what it is today: a nation raped by the Jews, a nation whose 130,000,000 people of many colors and races have been forced into helping the Jews achieve world domination! The descendants of European immigrants do not govern the United States of America today. The foreign and domestic policies of the country are made by the Jews and their lackeys. The American people wanted peace, but were maneuvered into war by Delano Roosevelt, a tool of World Jewry who himself has Jewish blood in his veins. It was the same in World War I, when Woodrow Wilson, also a tool of the Jews, maneuvered it into the war."

"My publication was for a fine purpose. Certain snobs may now look down on it and call it common or even pornographic, but until the end of the war, I had Hitler's greatest respect, and Der Stürmer had the party's complete support. At our height, we had a circulation of 1.5 million. Everybody read Der Stürmer, and they must have liked it or they wouldn't have bought it. The aim of Der Stürmer was to unite Germans and to awaken them against Jewish influence which might ruin our noble culture."

"Hitler promised me protection after I had participated in the Munich putsch in 1923. I am very proud that I marched alongside Hitler in that affair. Hitler was never forgetful of that fact, and his faith and confidence in me was unshaken until the end. I, in turn, never broke my oath of loyalty to him."

"Christ was a Jew, and God, he is supposed to have made the universe. That's a little far-fetched because if God made the world, who made God?"

"I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress."

"The main thing I tried to stress was how badly I was treated in the American camp at Freising, but the American prosecutor and the judges ruled that my comments on my poor treatment there had to be expunged from the record because it was irrelevant. I don't think it is irrelevant when we National Socialists are accused of war crimes and of murdering 5 million Jews and millions of other innocent people such as partisans, hostages, war prisoners. Therefore, I should have been allowed to insert into the record of this trial how badly I was treated personally as a prisoner of war, after the war was over, mind you, in Freising."

"It is a trial within a nation but a trial of victors against the vanquished. Even before the trials started, the victors who are our judges were quite convinced that we were guilty and that we should all pay the price."

"I remember reports that the American and English newspapers were very happy about the fact that so many were killed in Dresden. There are many instances of barbarity and cruelty on the part of the Allies which I could tell you."

"It's perfectly understandable and proper for one to be anti-Semite, but to exterminate women and children is so extraordinary, it's hard to believe. No defendant here wanted that."

"Yes, I believe I had a part in it insofar as for years I have written that any further mixture of German blood with Jewish blood must be avoided. I have written such articles again and again; and in my articles I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves - the law of Moses, which says, "If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women." And that, Gentlemen, is of tremendous importance in judging the Nuremberg Laws. These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these laws. When after centuries, the Jewish lawgiver Ezra demonstrated that notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved. That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished."

"Germans must fight Jews, that organized body of world criminals against whom Christ, the greatest anti-Semite of all time, had fought."

"Only the Jews had remained victorious after the dreadful days of World War I. These were the people of whom Christ said, "Its father is the devil.""

"Anti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries. A book I had, written by Dr. Martin Luther, was, for instance, confiscated. Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants' dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. In this book The Jews and Their Lies, Dr. Martin Luther writes that the Jews are a serpent's brood and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them..."

"Two niggers undressed me and tore my shirt in two. I kept only my pants. Being handcuffed, I could not pull them up when they fell down. So now I was naked. Four days! On the fourth day, I was so cold that my body was numb. I couldn't hear anything. Every two - four hours (even in the night!) Niggers came along under command of a white man and hammered at me. Cigarette burns on the nipples. Fingers gouged into eye-sockets. Eyebrows and chest hair pulled out. Genitals beaten with an oxwhip. Testicles very swollen. Spat at. "Mouth open" and was spat into. When I refused to open, my jaws were pried apart with a stick and my mouth spat into. Beaten with a whip - swollen, dark-blue whelps all over the body... Photographed naked! Jeered at wearing an old army greatcoat which they hung round me."

"He who knows the truth and does not speak it is a miserable coward."

"A people that does not protect its racial purity will perish!"

"Bravo, Streicher!"

"This Streicher affair is a tragedy. At the origin of the conflict lies the hatred sworn between two women. In any case, there's just one statement I Have to make that Streicher is irreplaceable. His name is engraved in the memory of the people of Nuremberg. There's no question of his coming back but I must do him justice. If one day I write my memoirs, I shall have to recognize that this man fought like a buffalo in our cause. The conquest of Franconia was his work. I have a bad conscience when I get the feeling that I've not been quote fair to somebody. When I go to Nuremberg, it's always with a feeling of bitterness. I can't help thinking that, in comparison with so many services, the reasons for Streicher's dismissal are really very slender. All that's said about his alleged disease is false. Streicher had only one disease, and that was nympholepsy. In one way or another, we shall have to find a solution. I cannot dream of holding a rally at Nuremberg from which the man who gave Nuremberg to the party is banished."

"A Gauleiter of Franconia whose occupation was to pour forth filthy writings about the Jews, but who had no idea that anybody would read them;"

"Streicher, the venomous Bulgarian, manufactured and distributed obscene racial libels which incited the populace to accept and assist the progressively savage operations of "race purification.""

"Of Streicher, one need say nothing. Here is a man more responsible, perhaps, than any, for the most frightful crime the world has ever known. For 25 years the extermination of the Jews had been his terrible ambition. For 25 years he had educated the German people in the philosophy of hate, of brutality, of murder. He had incited and prepared them to support the Nazi policy, to accept and participate in the brutal persecution and slaughter of millions of his fellow men. Without him these things could not have been. It is long since he forfeited all right to live."

"Streicher's incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity."

"A soldier's first duty is to obey, otherwise you might as well do away with soldiering."

"War is possible only if you have a lot of enemies. If all the enemies get together and form one front - if you cut down the number of enemies - there would be no war."

"I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner."

"A military leader often faces a situation he has to deal with, but because it is his duty, no court can try him."

"Understanding of other nations does not mean a feeling against your own country. That's the whole trouble with Germans. They can see only their own country, the local church steeples only. If only German youth could go abroad, and youth from other countries come to Germany. You always have to have criticism if you wish to become better."

"The partisan situation in the Italian theater, particularly central Italy, has deteriorated to such an extent that it constitutes a serious danger to troops, supply lines, war industry and economic potential. The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of methods in executing one's orders is better than failure or neglect to act."

"Allied air power was the greatest single reason for the German defeat."

"It is the duty of all troops and police in my command to adopt the severest measures. Every act of violence committed by partisans must be punished immediately. Reports submitted must also give details of countermeasures taken. Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot."

"About mid-day, Kesselring telephones me and tells me that we shall probably have to wait three or four days before our large-scale counter-measures begin to get under way. Until then there can be no major shift of developments in our favour. Kesselring is nevertheless in good heart. He is assured and full of character in his estimate of the situation and there is not a trace of defeatism with him. He tells me also that the attitude of the civil population has somewhat improved under the influence of our propaganda."

"I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons - all for Germany."

"I am a soldier and I worked for the kaiser, under Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler, all the same way, for the past 44 years."

"I believe German soldiers are good and decent, and if they did anything wrong it was because of military necessity."

"Hitler gave us orders - and we believed in him. Then he commits suicide and leaves us to bear the guilt. He should have remained alive to bear his share."

"It isn't right to be obedient only when things go well; it is much harder to be a good, obedient soldier when things go badly and times are hard. Obedience and faith at such time is a virtue."

"Death by hanging. That, at least, I thought I would be spared."

"Why did the generals who have been so ready to term me a complaisant and incompetent yes-man fail to secure my removal? Was that all that difficult? No, that wasn't it; the truth was that nobody would have been ready to replace me, because each one knew that he would end up just as much a wreck as I."

"It is tragic to have to realize that the best I had to give as a soldier, obedience, and loyalty, was exploited for purposes which could not be recognized at the time, and that I did not see that there is a limit set even for a soldier's performance to his duty. That is my fate."

"The Führer has ordered that the enemy employs in partisan warfare Communist-trained fanatics who do not hesitate to commit any atrocity. It is more than ever a question of life and death. This fight has nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or principles of the Geneva Convention. If the fight against the partisans in the East, as well as in the Balkans, is not waged with the most brutal means, we will shortly reach the point where the available forces are insufficient to control the area. It is therefore not only justified, but it is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as it ensures success. Any consideration for the partisans is a crime against the German people."

"If you want my own plain opinion about Keitel's orders, I will tell you. They were the orders of a stupid follower of Hitler. I myself paid very little attention to them and I think any attempt to justify his orders would be a mistake on the part of those of us who are steeped in military tradition and good conduct. I trust you will not quote me on these observations. I knew Keitel fairly well and I think that he is a decent person. It was simply that Hitler wanted a weak general in that powerful position in order to be able to have complete control of him. If I had held Keitel's position under Hitler, I wouldn't have lasted two weeks."

"A field marshal who issued orders to the armed forces but had no idea of the results they would have in practice."

"Keitel, the weak and willing tool, delivered the armed forces, the instrument of aggression, over to the party and directed them in executing its felonious designs."

"God protect Germany. God have mercy on my soul. My final wish is that Germany should recover her unity and that, for the sake of peace, there should be an understanding between East and West. I wish peace to the world."

"Death, death. Now I won't be able to write my beautiful memoirs."

"I think the only way one can arrive at an understanding of his anti-Semitism growing all the time is because in America your Mr. Roosevelt had his brain trust which was made up of so many Jews, Felix Frankfurter, Claude Pepper - was it Pepper? I can't recall the other names. Oh yes, Morgenthau. It made Hitler feel more and more that an international conspiracy had caused the war, with the Jews behind it."

"I rather liked Stalin and Molotov, got along fine with them."

"I don't mean that it is important whether a few of us like Goering, myself, or the others are sentenced to death or hard labor or whatever, but to the German people we will always remain their leaders, right or wrong, and in a few years even you Americans and the rest of the world will see this trial as a mistake. The German people will learn to hate the Americans, distrust the British and French, and unfortunately, perhaps be taken in by the Russians. That will be the worst calamity of all. I hate to think of Moscow ruling Germany or Germany becoming a territorial possession of the Soviet Union. The Allies should take the attitude, now that the war is over, that mistakes have been made on both sides, that those of us here on trial are German patriots, and that though we may have been misled and gone too far with Hitler, we did it in good faith and as German citizens. Furthermore, the German people will always regard our condemnation by a foreign court as unjust and will consider us martyrs."

"I was truly under Hitler's spell, that cannot be denied. I was impressed with him from the moment I first met him, in 1932. He had terrific power, especially in his eyes. Now the tribunal accuses us of conspiracy. I say, how can one have a conspiracy in a dictatorship government? One man and one man only made all the crucial decisions. That was the Fuhrer. In all my dealings with him I never discussed the exterminations or anything of that sort. What I shall never comprehend is that six weeks before the end of the war he assured me we'd win by a nose. I left his presence then and said that from that time forth I was completely at a loss — that I didn't understand a thing. Hitler always, until the end, and even now, had a strange fascination over me. Would you call it abnormal of me? Sometimes, in his presence, when he spoke of all his plans, the good things he would do for the Volk, vacations, highways, new buildings, cultural advantages and so forth, tears would come to my eyes. Would that be because I'm a hysterical weak man?"

"I know for a fact that this idea of the Jews causing the war and the Jews being so all important is nonsense. But that was Hitler's idea, and... was pure fantasy. As I say, Hitler is a riddle to me and will always remain so."

"Tell them in Moscow that I was against this attack."

"Vain, arrogant and shallow, Joachim von Ribbentrop had been trying to foster ties between the British and the Nazis since 1933. Born into the officer class of the old Wilhelmine Germany – though without the ‘von’, which he later bought – he had made his fortune by marrying the daughter of the largest German producer of sparkling wine, before going on to become the agent for such well-known brands as Green and Yellow Chartreuse, Johnnie Walker whisky and Pommery champagne. Having played a minor role in Hitler’s accession to power, the highly ambitious and, by now, devoted Ribbentrop managed to carve a niche for himself, in the early years of the Third Reich, as the Führer’s unofficial emissary and propagandist abroad. Initially, his political efforts were unsuccessful. Sir John Simon responded coolly to his advances, while other Government figures, such as Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain, regarded him as an interfering parvenu. He was, however, favoured by a number of leading hostesses, including Lady Londonderry and ‘Emerald’ Cunard, and in 1935 successfully negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement."

"On 24 July 1936, Hitler rewarded him by appointing him Ambassador to the Court of St James, though not, as Ribbentrop had hoped, State Secretary.According to Frau von Ribbentrop, the Führer’s parting words to her husband were: ‘Ribbentrop, bring me the English alliance.’ This was not to be. Although the newspapers put a brave face on it, Ribbentrop’s tenure in London was, as many predicted, a disaster. Arriving at Victoria station on 26 October 1936, he shocked political opinion by breaking with protocol and making a bombastic speech on the platform. He astounded the congregation in Durham Cathedral by giving the Nazi salute during the hymn "Glorious things of Thee are spoken" – which can employ the same Haydn melody as "Deutschland über Alles" – while the repetition of this gesture to King George VI, in February 1937, became infamous. Soon the object of ridicule, he was christened ‘Ambassador Brickendrop’ and even the pro-appeasement Nancy Astor accused him, to his face, of being a ‘damned bad Ambassador’. Before this reputation was cemented, however, Ribbentrop enjoyed a certain amount of social if not political success, while, at the same time, the Nazis benefited from a series of propaganda coups."

"Domestic pressures also played a part in Hitler’s decision making. In February 1938 he had replaced Constantin von Neurath, foreign minister since 1933, by Joachim von Ribbentrop, former ambassador to Britain. Ribbentrop, in earlier life a wine salesman, had been a long-standing Anglophile, with a penchant for bowler hats and umbrellas. But in London his wooden manner and aggressive Nazism turned people off. Worse still, his frequent gaffes, such as greeting the king with a Nazi salute, made him a laughing stock as “Ambassador Brickendrop.” As a result Ribbentrop’s Anglophilia turned into visceral hatred of Britain. Once foreign minister, he seized every opportunity to incite Hitler to war and to persuade him that the Western powers would not fight."

"When apprehensions abroad threatened the success of the Nazi regime for conquest, it was the duplicitous Ribbentrop, the salesman of deception, who was detailed to pour wine on the troubled waters of suspicion by preaching the gospel of limited and peaceful intentions."

"...ignoring the potential force possessed by a homogeneous race, bemused by the slogans of human equality, all parliaments adopted the dogma of infinite toleration. Tolerance toward the alien, the hostile, and the aggressive was seen as a highly humanitarian achievement, but was, as the history of the nineteenth and especially of our present century shows, merely an ever-greater abandoning of ourselves."

"The gullible European has only too credulously listened to these temptations, sung to the lyrics of the sirens' song—freedom, justice, brotherhood. The fruits of this subversion are apparent today.They are so nakedly apparent that even the most unbiased person, a person who has no idea of the necessary historical relationships, must become aware that he has placed his confidence in crafty and glib leaders, who intended, not his good, but the destruction of all laboriously acquired civilization, all culture."

"The war which is being waged today by the German armed forces under the highest command of Adolf Hitler is a war of an immense reform. It does not only overcome the world of ideas of the French Revolution, but it also exterminates directly all those racially infecting germs of Jewry and its bastards, which now since over a hundred years could develop without check among the European nations. The Jew question, which for 2000 years was a problem for the European nations which was not solved, will now find its solution through the national socialistic revolution for Germany and whole Europe."

"Fate will not be confined by paragraphs."

"From education by the Church to education by Germanic value is a step of several generations. We are the transition from one education to the other. We are the conquerors of one era and the founders of a new - also religious - epoch. We bear a heavy and therefore a great destiny. To destroy images is something every revolution has been able to do. But to establish its cause upon nothing and yet not to burn all bridges behind it: that is the nobility of character of the National Socialist era. The German people is not marked by original sin, but by original nobility. The place of Christian love has been taken by the National Socialist, Germanic idea of comradeship...which has already been symbolically expressed through the replacement of the rosary by the spade of labour."

"How can we still speak of the salvation and reformation of Europe, when we have to ask Europe's destroyer for help?"

"I have the feeling that this Moscow Pact will at some time or other exact vengeance upon National Socialism."

"I would adopt a standpoint, irrespective of whether someone was for or against it, if I felt deeply that it was right for the movement."

"Anti-Semitism is the unifying element of the reconstruction of Germany."

"Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space... Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the continent."

"I didn't say that the Jews are inferior. I didn't even maintain they are a race. I merely saw that the mixture of different cultures didn't work."

"We let 50,000 Jewish intellectuals get across the border. Just as I wanted Lebensraum for Germany, I thought Jews should have a Lebensraum for themselves - outside of Germany."

"As I said, I am grateful that you do take notes, but I do wish that you take them accurately and not misrepresent my rather complex theories and reasoning. After all, I am a philosopher and a student, and my thoughts may be complex. If at any time you don't follow me, please interrupt and I will explain further. I have to smile when some of the defendants say in court that they never read my books or works, because it is a reflection on their inabilities to follow a philosophic trend of thought, which to the common man is much too deep and profound. It is difficult for one to express important opinions and theories scientifically and at the same time use simple construction. However, I have always tried to be as lucid as possible and I never strived to make my work or writings beyond the comprehension of the normally intelligent man."

"The tribunal here and your American newspapers talk so much about our sharp Nazi methods, but do you realize that within the past year, since the defeat of Germany, 1 million Germans have been evicted from what was originally German territory and which has now been given to Poland? No League of Nations or other body intervened."

"The Myth is the Myth of the Blood, which, under the sign of the Swastika, released the World Revolution. It is the Awakening of the Soul of the Race, which, after a period of long slumber, victoriously put an End to Racial Chaos."

"If Rosenberg was to decide … we would only have rite, thing, myth and such kind of swindle."

"For the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - some sixty million of whose citizens at some time or other came under Nazi occupation - a different but equally resonant note could now be struck. As an Estonian, Alfred Rosenberg well understood the visceral hostility felt by many East European peoples towards Stalin's Soviet Union, which had inflicted immense cruelties on them behind a façade of national self-determination. It was not only the (relatively few) ethnic Germans who welcomed the advancing Wehrmacht. German troops were feted when they marched into Lwôw and Riga. Ukrainian peasants saw the black crosses on the invaders' panzers as the insignia of a holy crusade against the Antichrist of Moscow. At Hrubieszôw the people greeted the Germans with bread and salt."

"Rosenberg now envisaged not only a German protectorate over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia ('Baltica'), but also an expanded Ukraine, a Caucasian federation - perhaps even a Crimean Muftiate and a 'Pan-Turanic' bloc in Soviet Central Asia. Appeals were directed at ethnic minorities, notably the Chechens, Karachai and Balkars, in the hope of stripping away all Russia's imperial possessions, to leave nothing more than a rump Muscovy. In truth, neither Hitler nor Goebbels had ever sincerely believed in harnessing the power of East European nationalism. A far truer indication of Nazi intentions were the various versions of the 'General Plan East' {Generalplan Ost) devised to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south (the so-called A-A Line). One draft, by SS Oberfiihrer Professor Konrad Meyer, proposed establishing three vast 'marcher settlements' ('Ingermanland', 'Memel-Narew' and 'Gothengau') with around five million German settlers. A rival scheme drawn up by the Reich Main Security Office envisaged twice as many settlers and the expulsion of an estimated forty-five million of the existing inhabitants. In fact, as was punctiliously pointed out by Erhard Wetzel, the racial ex pert in Rosenberg's Ministry, this estimate included between five and six million Jews and failed to take into account high Slavic birth rates, so that the total unwanted population would be closer to fifty or even fifty-seven million, assuming that 15 per cent of Poles, 25 per cent of Ruthenians and 3 5 per cent of Ukrainians would need to be retained as agricultural labourers, the rest being deported to Siberia. The Russian population would wither away through the use of contraception, abortion and sterilization. The Jews would be exterminated."

"I always had the impression that Rosenberg embodied German mysticism. I felt that he belonged to the Romantic era and that there was only a slight whiff of modernity about him. There was nothing unified or organized about the man. Now I want to say something terrible, which is not for the trial. This pure theoretician carries the main guilt of all those who sit here on the defendants' bench, although he carries that guilt to a certain extent innocently. In my opinion, he had a tremendous influence on Hitler, during the period when Hitler still did some thinking - later that stopped. I mean about between the years 1923 and 1928 Rosenberg influenced Hitler. Let me explain. Hitler was a man who lived in the present and was a tremendously active individual. Rosenberg's importance exists because his ideas, which were only theoretical, became in the hands of Hitler a reality and actually transpired."

"Rosenberg was completely areligious. That was the deepest of his defects. Rosenberg has a one-track mind. He is a pedant. One gathers the impression certainly that he never obtained knowledge from his surroundings, which would be necessary in order to form new philosophic ideas, but he obtained his ideas from books and from his own mind, which was not subject to the influences of reality. Rosenberg had less influence among the old National Socialists than one would believe. But among the youth his ideas played a great part because they were utilized in every school. The tragic thing is that Rosenberg's fantastic theories were actually put into practice."

"A party philosopher who was interested in historical research and had no idea of the violence which his philosophy was inciting in the twentieth century."

"It was Rosenberg, the intellectual high priest of the "master race," who provided the doctrine of hatred which gave the impetus for the annihilation of Jewry, and who put his infidel theories into practice against the Eastern Occupied Territories. His woolly philosophy also added boredom to the long list of Nazi atrocities."

"No attempt of any kind must be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats, and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the most primitive demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews. Be hard, remember that the enemy has no regard for women and children when he bombs German cities."

"Our losses...have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses."

"The enemy holds every trump card, covering all areas with long-range air patrols and using location methods against which we still have no warning...The enemy knows all our secrets and we know none of his."

"What would have become of our country today if the Fuehrer had not united us under National Socialism? Split parties, beset with the spreading poison of Jewry, and vulnerable to it because we lacked the defense of our present uncompromising ideology, we would long since have succumbed under the burden of this war and delivered ourselves up to the enemy who would have mercilessly destroyed us."

"I would rather eat dirt than see my grandchildren grow up in the filthy, poisonous atmosphere of Jewry."

"At about midnight he arrived, accompanied by six armed SS officers, and was received by my aide-de-camp, Walter Luedde-Neurath. I offered Himmler a chair and sat down at my desk, on which lay, hidden by some papers, a pistol with the safety catch off. I had never done anything of this sort in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be. I handed Himmler the telegram containing my appointment. "Please read this," I said. I watched him closely. As he read, an expression of astonishment, indeed of consternation, spread over his face. All hope seemed to collapse within him. He went very pale. Finally he stood up and bowed. "Allow me," he said, "to become the second man in your state." I replied that was out of the question and that there was no way I could make any use of his services. Thus advised, he left me at about one o'clock in the morning. The showdown had taken place without force, and I felt relieved."

"I could imagine that it would be very difficult for the population in the towns to hold out under the stress of heavy bombing attacks if such an influence were allowed to work"

"The north German does not go in for extremes. He has broader horizons than the men from the mountains of Bavaria and Austria."

"I'm an old man at 54, without teeth, and with rheumatism."

"Is to accept the leadership of a crumbling country a crime? Is to prevent the Russians, the natural enemy of Germany, from obtaining our arms and manpower a crime? In Russian eyes it probably is. But I'm referring to the eyes of a westerner. I knew that we had to capitulate and I wanted it to be to the Americans and British, and not to the East. I'm not even accused of war crimes in the sense of the atrocities. It's clear they have no case against me. I came into a powerful position in 1943. How can I be accused of a conspiracy?"

"The trial can only end in a mistake because it is founded on one. How can a foreign court try a sovereign government of another country? Could we have tried your President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary Henry Morgenthau, or Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, if we had won the war? We could not have done so and would not have. And trying that went on would have to be done by the nation itself and the courts set up there."

"To think of Russians sitting on a bench in Nuremberg, trying German leaders! The Russians sank a German boat with men, women, and children aboard. I know of the case. But is that investigated? You Americans weren't completely without fault, either. You armed merchant boats before the U.S.A. was in the war."

"I read sometime around 1938 of Jewish fines and some street actions against them. But I was too concerned with U-Boats and the naval problems to be concerned about Jews."

"By placing these people with foreign ideas in camps, German blood was saved. Would it have been better to have a civil war?"

"If Hitler had not thrown the Communists into camps in 1933, there would have been civil war and bloodshed. The Communists would have revolted against the legally-elected government. The greatest danger of civil war in Germany came in 1932, when it was clearly a choice between Communism and National Socialism. So Paul von Hindenburg and the other conservative bourgeois elements chose Hitler. So did I, and I would do it again if a choice between Communism and Nazism arose."

"Your American admiral said that he held me in the highest esteem, and thought that I conducted my defense perfectly. He said through his chief of staff that my conduct was beyond reproach and he had the greatest admiration for me."

"With the new weapons like the atom bomb, Russia would have it, too, and use it first. It is a very difficult world. But that trouble is imminent is obvious."

"I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front — it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh."

"Certainly inside my heart I know degrees of difference. But I can't blame any of these men who share a common fate with me. The big folly of this trial is that it lacks the two men who are to blame for anything which is criminal, namely Hitler and Himmler."

"The biggest mistake of Hitler, I have to say the main fault, was that under his government these terrific exterminations of men happened, which went on behind the backs of the German nation, which would never have tolerated them, but the government kept these crimes completely secret from the German people."

"I think that I have now said enough about the war, which is past now for over twenty-five years. I bow in reverence before the memory of the men who lost their lives in this war on both sides, and I think that we all hope that we never shall have such a war again.""

"When responsible generals like Rommel subscribed to the idea in 1944 that we should make peace with the West and throw the whole weight of our military strength against the East, they failed to realize that the political prerequisites to such a move were lacking. The British and the Americans would never have considered an offer of this nature, as was proved by the attitude to which they still adhered even in May 1945. At the Casablanca conference in 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill declared that they would continue to fight until Germany and Japan 'surrendered unconditionally'. This meant that in the event of our submitting we should have no rights whatever, but would be wholly at the mercy of our enemies, and of what that meant some idea can be gathered from Stalin's demand at the Teheran conference at the end of November 1943, when he insisted that at least four million Germans should be deported for an unspecified number of years to Russia as forced labor."

"In view of the enemy's demand for unconditional surrender, it was quite useless for any senior commander of the German Armed Forces, who believed in 1943 or 1944 that the war could no longer be won, to tell Hitler that he must now put an end to the war and make peace; for, to unconditional surrender, which was wholly unacceptable, he could have no alternative proposal to submit to the German head of state. Moreover, if it were accepted in principle that when a commander realized that the military situation was hopeless, it was his duty to advocate the conclusion of peace, there would always be a danger that the struggle might be given up prematurely. A history shows, in war even a seemingly all but hopeless situation can sometimes be radically altered by unexpected political developments and similar occurrences; and, with the political situation what it was, it seemed to be that when I was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Navy I had no alternative but to carry on the struggle to the best of my ability."

"This took me completely by surprise. Since July 20, 1944, I had not spoken to Hitler at all except at some large gathering. … I had never received any hint on the subject from anyone else.... I assumed that Hitler had nominated me because he wished to clear the way to enable an officer of the Armed Forces to put an end to the war. That this assumption was incorrect I did not find out until the winter of 1945-46 in Nuremberg, when for the first time I heard the provisions of Hitler's will.... When I read the signal I did not for a moment doubt that it was my duty to accept the task … it had been my constant fear that the absence of any central authority would lead to chaos and the senseless and purposeless sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives … I realized … that the darkest moment in any fighting man's life, the moment when he must surrender unconditionally, was at hand. I realized, too, that my name would remain forever associated with the act and that hatred and distortion of facts would continue to try and besmirch my honor. But duty demanded that I pay no attention to any such considerations. My policy was simple — to try and save as many lives as I could ..."

"Although at the time I knew but little of the crimes he had committed, it was obvious to me that Himmler, as far as I was concerned, was intolerable. This I had to make quite clear to him, and one way or the other, I had to have a swift and final showdown with him. On the evening of April 30, shortly after the receipt of the telegram I told my ADC to telephone to Himmler, from whom I had parted in Luebeck only a few hours before, and ask him to come to Ploen forthwith. To my ADC he retorted with a blunt refusal, but when I myself spoke to him and told him that his presence was essential, he eventually consented to come."

"At about midnight he arrived, accompanied by six armed SS officers, and was received by my aide-de-camp, Ludde-Neurath. I offered Himmler a char and myself sat down behind my writing desk, upon which lay, hidden behind some papers, a pistol with the safety catch off. I had never done anything of this sort in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be. I handed Himmler the telegraph containing my appointment. 'Please read this,' I said. I watched him closely. As he read, an expression of astonishment, indeed, of consternation spread over his face. All hope seemed to collapse within him. He went very pale. Finally he stood up and bowed. 'Allow me,' he said, 'to become the second man in your state.' I replied that that was out of the question and that there was no way in which I could make use of his services. Thus advised, he left me at about one o'clock in the morning. The showdown had taken place without force, and I felt relieved."

"The Führer has nominated me as his successor. In full consciousness of my responsibilities I therefore assume the leadership of the German people at this fateful hour. My first task is to save German men and women from destruction by the advancing Bolshevist enemy. It is to serve this purpose alone that the military struggle continues. For as long as the British and the Americans continue to impede the accomplishments of this task, we must also continue to fight and defend ourselves against them. The British and the Americans in that case will not be fighting in the interests of their own peoples, but solely for the expansion of Bolshevism in Europe."

"The Navy had done its duty to the end. Against its innermost wishes, which were for understanding and lasting peace, unconsulted and poorly equipped, it had been called upon, in 1939 to fight against the naval might of Great Britain. With the meagre forces at its disposal it had fought to the best of its ability against Britain and the United States and achieved successes out of all proportion to its strength. That it had been able to do so was in no small measure to the spirit and determination of its men, without which it would never have been able to stand up thus splendidly to the material superiority of these two great maritime powers."

"Those who were in Germany in September 1939 know that the people showed no enthusiasm for war. But war nevertheless came and demanded sacrifice after sacrifice. The German soldier fought with unsurpassed devotion to duty. The people and the armed forces marched shoulder to shoulder, in victory or defeat, to the very end."

"Every decent German today is ashamed of the crimes which the Third Reich committed behind the nation's back. To hold the people as a whole responsible for the misdeeds of a small minority is contrary to every canon of justice. Men cannot be condemned for things of which they did not even know. The assumption that any one people is morally worse than other peoples is, in itself, a false premise, and it comes particularly unjustly from nations who, during the war and after 1945, did things which were an offence against both legal and moral justice and which resulted in the sacrifice of millions of Germans. I therefore regard it as wrong that individual Germans should be constantly indulging, in the name of the whole German people, in public self-accusations and confessions of guilt. That sort of thing does not win us the respect of other nations; nor, be it noted, has any other nation done the same thing with regard to the inhuman acts committed against us."

"No nation, when selecting its leader, can foresee what characteristics in him will eventually gain the upper hand; and the lesson to be learnt from that is that any constitution must be so framed that it is able to prevent the misuse of power by the individual, and that it must be based on the principle of freedom and justice for the community as a whole. It is, then, an irrefutable fact that the democratic form of government, with its guarantees for the inviolability of individual liberty and of judicial security for all, is the right form for any highly developed nation; and to ensure that these guarantees are valid for all its citizens is the paramount duty of democratic policy and legislation."

"The only thing I truly feared during the war was Dönitz and his U-boats."

"As a submarine Admiral whom I knew to be held in the deepest admiration and respect by Officers and Men of the U-Boat Fleet, I held Admiral Dönitz in respect myself, and there is no doubt that he handled his U-Boat arm with masterly skill and efficiency. In return he was served with great loyalty."

"I rate Admiral Dönitz as the best of them all, land or sea. He was unique in his handling of the German submarines and they were our most dangerous enemy. His performance with them-and he did most of it himself-was the most outstanding Axis performance of the war. Then he succeeded to command all German Navy Forces. It was too late for real accomplishment, but he made no mistakes and no one could have done better. Then he succeeded the Führer himself, and his performance from there on seems to me to have been perfect. So I think Dönitz was the best."

"At a situation conference early in February the maps showed the catastrophic picture of innumerable breakthroughs and encirclements. I drew Doenitz aside: "Something must be done, you know." Doenitz replied with unwonted curtness: "I am here only to represent the navy. The rest is none of my business. The Fuehrer must know what he is doing.""

"In command of the whole Nazi U-boat offensive was tough, brilliant Admiral Karl Doenitz, who would one day succeed Hitler as head of the Third Reich."

"I'm iron. I lasted through ten years of war, and now I can last through this. It's true, it's not good for the nerves."

"I never actively engaged in politics, never made speeches. Politics is a whore. It's too high for me. Just as I don't understand American politics, so I don't understand German politics. The only interest in politics is to get to know how to lead a life under the most favorable circumstances."

"All Asiatics are cruel dogs. All they captured of my soldiers, they beat to death. The Russian soldiers are very brave, stable, tough."

"We fought against an enemy six times as large as us."

"There was no Geneva Convention. But we didn't shoot Russians either. Where would we get three million prisoners if we shot all the Russians? Propaganda! You can't open your mouth, even in the biggest democracy. Do you think it's so nice to sit in prison after ten years of war for the Fatherland? If I would be God, I would do it differently!"

"All I had to do was to cross the river, capture Brussels, and then go on to take the port of Antwerp. The snow was waist-deep and there wasn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast, let alone six armored divisions. It didn’t get light until eight and was dark again at four, and my tanks can’t fight at night. And all this at Christmas time!"

"He (Hitler) knew even less than the rest. He allowed himself to be taken for a sucker by everyone."

"(In early 1945) We call ourselves the "6th Panzer Army", because we've only got 6 Panzers left."

"I once spent an hour and a half trying to explain a situation to "Sepp" Dietrich with the aid of a map. It was quite useless. He understood nothing at all."

"It was the Hitler Offensive. It was brilliantly planned by Hitler but poorly executed by the generals. It was not Rundstedt who was at fault so much as Dietrich and his Sixth Army, which was not capable. Dietrich was no army commander and should never have been made one. This Sixth Army was an all-motorized panzer force."

"Dietrich quite openly criticised measures taken by the Führer. He complains that the Führer does not give his military staff a sufficiently free hand and that this tendency has now become so pronounced that the Führer even lays down the employment of individual companies. But Dietrich is in no position to judge. The Führer cannot rely on his military advisers. They have so often deceived him and thrown dust in his eyes that he now has to attend to every detail. Thank God he does attend to them, for if he did not, matters would be even worse than they are anyway."

"My chief qualification for the job is that I have been in almost every cell in the Moabit Prison in Berlin."

"If Paulus's army had capitulated before the end, the Russians would have had the advantage of withdrawing forces against Paulus and against the southern front, where I had only two Romanian armies. Therefore, the resistance of the Sixth German Army, even to the death of the last man, was necessary."

"I tried at that time to relieve the Sixth Army, of which I was supreme commander, above Paulus, by counterattacks - but it was not possible. I gave the order finally for the Sixth Army to break out, but then Paulus said it was too late and not possible. Hitler did not want the Sixth Army to break out at any time, but to fight to the last man. I believe that Hitler said if the Sixth Army tried to break out, it would be their death."

"The will for victory which gives a commander the strength to see a grave crisis through is something very different from Hitler's will, which in the last analysis stemmed from a belief in his own 'mission'. Such a belief makes a man impervious to reason and leads him to think that his own will can operate even beyond the limits of hard reality - whether these consist in the presence of far superior enemy forces, in the conditions of space and time, or merely in the fact that the enemy also happens to have a will of his own."

"It has always been the particular forte of German leadership to grant wide scope to the self-dependence of subordinate commanders - to allot them tasks which leave the method of execution to the discretion of the individual. From time immemorial - certainly since the elder Moltke's day - this principle has distinguished Germany's military leadership from that of other armies."

"But it is a well-known maxim of war that whoever tries to hold on to everything at once, finishes up by holding nothing at all."

"He was not only the most brilliant strategist of all our generals, but he had a good political sense. A man of that quality was too difficult for Hitler to swallow for long. At conferences Manstein often differed from Hitler, in front of others, and would go so far as to declare that some of the ideas which Hitler put forward were nonsense."

"The general verdict among the German generals I interrogated in 1945 was that Field-Marshal von Manstein had proved the ablest commander in their Army, and the man they had most desired to become its Commander-in-Chief. It is very clear that he had a superb sense of operational possibilities and equal mastery in the conduct of operations, together with a greater grasp of the potentialities of mechanized forces than any other commander who had not been trained in the tank arm. In sum, he had military genius."

"He is the best tactician and combat commander we have."

"Master of the Blitzkrieg."

"Manstein despised Göring and loathed Himmler. To his most trusted colleagues he admitted to Jewish antecedents. He could also be scathing about Hitler. As a joke, his dachshund Knirps had been trained to raise his paw in salute on the command "Heil Hitler". On the other hand, his wife was a great admirer of Hitler, and more importantly, Manstein, as already mentioned, had even issued that order to his troops mentioning "the necessity of hard measures against Jewry""

"He had utter disdain for the Nazis and had no time for their racial purity agenda."

"I asked the Field Marshal von Manstein if he would take part in the actions against Hitler. Manstein was sitting in a chair and reading the Bible. Quick, almost embarrassed, he put it aside and covered it with some papers."

"There were a large number of Jews who held more favorable positions than they should have, according to their percentage of the population. Germans should have held those positions."

"Fascism is a purely stately principle. Mussolini said in 1932, 'The first thing is the state - and from the state are derived the rights and fate of the people. Humans come second.' In National Socialism, it was the opposite. People and humans come first, and the state is secondary."

"In the child, we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently."

"Those Jews stood up, were lined up, and were shot in true military fashion. I saw to it that no atrocities or brutalities occurred."

"The treatment of the Germans by the Allies was at least as bad as the shooting of those Jews. The bombing of cities with men, women, and children burning with phosphorus - these things were all done by the Allies."

"Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the State."

"I surrendered my moral conscience to the fact that I was a soldier, and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine."

"The men of my group who are under indictment here were under my military command. If they had not executed the orders which they were given, they would have been ordered by me to execute them. If they had refused to execute the orders they would have had to be called to account for it by me. There could be no doubt about it. Whoever refused anything in the front lines would have met immediate death. If the refusal would have come about in any other way, a court martial of the Higher SS and Police Leader would have brought about the same consequences."

"There was no distinction made between Gypsies and Jews, the same order applied to both."

"Now, the prosecution will probably bring up Ohlendorf, who worked for me and who admitted before his tribunal he killed ninety thousand Jews. I was quite upset when I heard Ohlendorf. I didn't know things like that existed. And secondly, I didn't know Ohlendorf was involved."

"I always had the feeling that Ohlendorf was spiritually depressed. I mentioned several times to my wife, when we had Ohlendorf to dinner, that he seemed like a man who just could not be happy. Ohlendorf must have been very depressed on account of that experience. He could not laugh heartily - and a man who cannot is either depressed, or sick, or bad. I thought he had something in his soul which bothered him."

"Most of these handpicked leaders were lawyers, and a few were physicians or educators; most had earned doctoral degrees. Among the more exotic specimens were Otto Ohlendorf, a handsome but argumentative young economist who had fallen into disfavor with Himmler."

"I am dying innocent. The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany! God protect my family!"

"Slaves who are underfed, diseased, resentful, despairing, and filled with hate will never yield that maximum of output which they might achieve under normal conditions."

"Although as a sailor I despised politics - for I loved my sailor's life and still love it today - conditions forced me to take up a definite attitude towards political problems."

"I'm a sailor, not a politician."

"In order to provide the German housewife, above all mothers of many children...with tangible relief from her burdens, the Fuhrer has commissioned me to bring into the Reich from the eastern territories some four to five hundred thousand select, healthy, and strong girls."

"Many years before, I had left a beautiful country and a rich nation and I returned to that country six years later to find it fundamentally changed and in a state of upheaval, and in great spiritual and material need."

"What would you do if your country's welfare depended on labor? When a ship is in a storm it requires one captain."

"Himmler, Bormann, and Goebbels, they were probably bad fellows."

"I had nothing to do with concentration camps - Himmler's work. There was a labor minister, Ley, whose position is like your John Lewis in America. My duties were to assign POW and foreign labor to factories or whatever work had to be done. I had nothing to do with punishment, criminals, and so forth. That's Himmler's work. If someone had told me as a seaman I should have engaged in politics I would have taken it as an insult. After my return from France, when I found the workers in the Schweinfurt factory all divided up into groups, many parties - I want to give you an honest reason - that's why I became a National Socialist. In 1922-23 I knew, by fate, I must find a solution to the labor and social problem."

"Only Communists and Social Democrats who acted against the state were incarcerated. Most of the Communists and Social Democrats I had known became Nazis later. Only those who were doing anything against the state were thrown in concentration camps."

"I never burned down synagogues. It was a revolution, and Russians burned churches during their revolution. If there are many different nationalities in a country, the leadership should be divided among people by percentages. In finance, press, radio - the Jews had taken over positions. That feeling existed before Hitler."

"You must understand that the meaning of the word 'unemployed' in Germany is different than in America. In America, 'unemployed' means that a man may be unable to obtain work in his profession. In Germany it means he can't get work in any profession. In Thuringia there were 1.7 million people, of whom 500,000 men were unemployed in 1932 before Hitler came to power. In the whole of Germany, there were 8 million unemployed and 7 million half-time workers."

"America is so big that it cries for work. In Germany, if you tried to find work, you couldn't. In America, it was a strange economy which caused unemployment. German unemployment was due to the boycott of German goods. Not an official boycott. The world market refused to accept German goods. France, England, and America refused. Germany had no colonies and she had to export manufactured goods for grain. We had nothing to speak of. We managed to live during the war by rations. We all lived on a strict ration - even ministers in the government like myself - and we lived on things from the conquered countries, including Africa and Russia."

"That man who is responsible for slave labor in Germany does not have my sympathy. I did not like the whole idea of what he did. After all, there are limits to what one can do with foreign populations in the forced labor business. In the first place, the whole idea is completely unproductive. One needs three or four men to watch one compulsory worker. Sauckel deserves the severest punishment."

"...a plenipotentiary for the war economy who secretly marshaled the entire economy for armament, but had no idea it had anything to do with war."

"The defendant Sauckel, Plenipotentiary General for the Utilization of Labor, is authority for the statement that "out of 5,000,000 foreign workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily." It was officially reported to defendant Rosenberg that in his territory "recruiting methods were used which probably have their origin in the blackest period of the slave trade." Sauckel himself reported that male and female agents went hunting for men, got them drunk, and "shanghaied" them to Germany. These captives were shipped in trains without heat, food, or sanitary facilities. The dead were thrown out at stations, and the newborn were thrown out the windows of moving trains. Sauckel ordered that "all the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.""

"Sauckel, the greatest and cruelest slaver since the pharaohs of Egypt, produced desperately needed manpower by driving foreign peoples into the land of bondage on a scale unknown even in the ancient days of tyranny in the kingdom of the Nile."

"I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and that the lesson taken from this world war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany."

"Death by hanging...well, in view of the whole situation, I never expected anything different. It's all right."

"The National Socialist Party in Austria never tried to hide its inclination for a greater Germany. That Austria would one day return to the Reich was a matter of course for all National Socialists and for true Germans in Austria."

"The Jews are the enemy of National Socialism. From the time of their emancipation their methods were directed to the annihilation of the folkish and moral worth of the German people and to replace a national and responsible ideology with international nihilism. It was really they who stabbed the Army in the back which broke the resistance of the Germans in the First World War. The Jews are the enemy with whom no armistice or peace can be made. We will smite the Jews where we meet them and whoever goes along with them must take the consequences."

"The Fuehrer declared that the Jews have played their final act in Europe, and therefore they have played their final act."

"Bedell Smith: Well, in any case, you are going to be shot. Seyss-Inquart: That leaves me cold. Bedell Smith: It will."

"Seyss-Inquart, spearhead of the Austrian fifth column, took over the government of his own country only to make a present of it to Hitler, and then, moving north, brought terror and oppression to the Netherlands and pillaged its economy for the benefit of the German juggernaut."

"Soon after taking over in Austria, Klausner, Globocnik, and I flew to Berlin to report to Hitler's deputy, Hess, about the events which led to our taking over the government. We did this because we had the impression that the general opinion, perhaps also Hitler's own, was that the liberation depended more on Austrian matters of state rather than the Party. To be more exact, Hitler especially mentioned Dr. Seyss-Inquart alone; and public opinion gave him alone credit for the change and thus believed him to have played the sole leading role."

"If today he descended from Heaven, the great warrior who struck the money changers, You would once again shout 'crucify!' And nail him to the cross that he himself carried. But he would gently laugh at your hatred. 'The truth remains even when your bearers are passed. Faith remains, because I give my life...' And the fighter of all the world towers on the cross."

"A socialist and anti-capitalist attitude is the most salient characteristic of the Young National Socialist Germany."

"The body expresses our very being. The striving for beauty is inborn among the Aryan."

"To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us."

"Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience."

"He who serves our Führer, Adolf Hitler, serves Germany, and he who serves Germany, serves God."

"In the presence of this blood banner which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God."

"That is the greatest thing about him. That he is not only our leader and a great hero. But himself, upright, firm and simple. In him the roots of our world. And his soul touches the stars. And yet he remains a man like you and me."

"To the Führer. This is the truth which bound me to thee: I looked for thee and found my Fatherland. I was a leaf floating in limitless space. Now thou art my homeland and my tree. How far would I be carried by the wind, wert thou not the strength that flows up from the roots. I believe in thee, for thou art the nation. I believe in Germany. For thou art Germany's son."

"Adolf Hitler, you are our great Führer. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon the earth. Let us hear daily thy voice and order us by thy leadership, for we will obey to the end and even with our lives. We praise thee! Heil Hitler!"

"Führer, my Führer given me by God. Protect and preserve my life for long. You rescued Germany from its deepest need. I thank you for my daily bread. Stay for a long time with me, leave me not. Führer, my Führer, my faith, my light. Hail my Führer."

"They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken paganist.... I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity, but I declare just as solemnly that I will put down every attempt to introduce confessional matters into our Hitler Youth."

"When I came here in 1940, I told our Führer that I consider my main task to be making this city free of Jews. This evening, I can tell you that in the autumn of this year, 1942, we will experience the celebration of a Vienna purified of Jews [sustained thunderous applause]. Now, as far as the Czechs in this city are concerned... I give my subordinate offices of the state and the party the order after the complete evacuation of the Jews to remove all Czechs [sustained thunderous applause]... just as I will make this city free of Jews, I will also make it free of Czech! [sustained rapturous applause]"

"Jewry attempted with all available means to spoil the healthy youth... Ethos is alien to the Jew... every Jew at large in Europe is a danger to European culture. If one wished to confront me with the accusation that I have deported tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of Jews to the eastern ghetto from this city that was once the metropolis of Jewry, I must answer that I consider it an active contribution to European culture."

"It is the greatest, the most devilish mass murder known to history... The murder was ordered by Adolf Hitler, as is obvious from his last will and testament... He and Himmler jointly committed that crime which, for all time, will be a stain in the annals of our history. It is a crime which fills every German with shame."

"I have educated this generation in faith and loyalty to Hitler. The Youth Organization which I built up bore his name. I believed that I was serving a leader who would make our people and the youth of our country great and happy and free. Millions of young people believed this, together with me, and saw their ultimate ideal in National Socialism. Many died for it. Before God, before the German nation, and before my German people I alone bear the guilt of having trained our young people for a man whom I for many long years had considered unimpeachable, both as a leader and as the head of the State, of creating for him a generation who saw him as I did. The guilt is mine in that I educated the youth of Germany for a man who murdered by the millions. I believed in this man, that is all I can say for my excuse and for the characterization of my attitude. This is my own—my own personal guilt. I was responsible for the youth of the country. I was placed in authority over the young people, and the guilt is mine alone. The younger generation is guiltless. It grew up in an anti-Semitic state, ruled by anti-Semitic laws. Our youth was bound by these laws and saw nothing criminal in racial politics. But if anti-Semitism and racial laws could lead to an Auschwitz, then Auschwitz must mark the end of racial politics and the death of anti-Semitism. Hitler is dead. I never betrayed him; I never tried to overthrow him; I remained true to my oath as an officer, a youth leader, and an official. I was no blind collaborator of his; neither was I an opportunist. I was a convinced National Socialist from my earliest days—as such, I was also an anti-Semite. Hitler's racial policy was a crime which led to disaster for 5,000,000 Jews and for all the Germans. The younger generation bears no guilt. But he who, after Auschwitz, still clings to racial politics has rendered himself guilty."

"In this hour, when I can speak for the last time to the Military Tribunal of the four victorious powers, I should like, with a clear conscience, to confirm the following on behalf of our German youth: that it is completely innocent of the abuses and degeneration of the Hitler regime which were established during this Trial, that it never wanted this war, and that neither in peace nor in war did it participate in any crimes."

"If you outlaw half a million people you make martyrs of them. For example, if you outlaw Robin Hood, it is all very well, but if you outlaw a whole group of people around Robin Hood, then Robin Hood and his merry men become legends."

"I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual."

"Power is what spoils people. Yes, it seems to me that the seeking after power is the great danger and the great corruptor of mankind."

"Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil."

"I lived with people who had varied opinions, some of whom did not accept my Nazi views. I encouraged this. If a man said something that was critical of me or my ideas, I wouldn't consider him an enemy."

"[Hitler was] a man without measure [i.e. without any sense of measure], a man with great gifts, a man who in some ways could be considered a genius"

"We simply believed."

"Frau von Schirach in particular behaves like a stupid turkey... The Führer doesn't want to know Schirach anymore. Schirach is a weakling, a windbag and an idiot when it comes to deep political matters. He would rather dismiss him from Vienna sooner than later, if only he had a successor."

"Schirach somehow lives in a different world, in a high tower, as it were, pursuing his hobbies. He thinks about foreign policy and wants to sort it out... Without noticing, Schirach lives a life that is not in keeping with the times. He cannot empathize with the life and way of living of the common people."

"Baldur von Schirach was guilty of far more than war crimes. His was the deadly evil of corrupting the young. He poisoned the minds of an entire German generation. He trained and schooled the SS men, the men of the gas vans, the men of Oswiecim and Maidanek."

"In 1937, Rommel was given the duties of liaison officer with the Hitler Jugend, under the charming but arrogant Baldur von Schirach. The two men did not like each other. Schirach, who was American-educated, disliked the ramrod-stiff Rommel whom he saw as a caricature of the Prussian officer. He was surprised when Rommel opened his mouth and spoke with a broad Swabian accent, and proved far less stiff than he had expected."

"Schirach corrupted millions of German children so that they became what they really are today, the blind instruments of that policy of murder and domination which these men have carried out."

"Von Schirach, poisoner of a generation, initiated the German youth in Nazi doctrine, trained them in legions for service in the SS and Wehrmacht [armed forces], and delivered them up to the Party as fanatic, unquestioning executors of its will."

"Have you at any time, instead of sitting in your cell studying philosophy, Latin, French, writing poetry, and thinking how to straighten out your position in history, as you call it, actually faced reality and wondered where the next meal was coming for your wife and children? You isolated yourself from everything and everyone, your head forever in the clouds as it almost always has been from the day of our marriage. As the years went by, I realized more than ever that your idealistic obsessions and dreams were taking you further from me and the children... I was ready to face death with you. Your answer to me was, "I cannot take my life. First I must make my place and my work clear before history." As always, you would not face facts. Had I taken poison, it would have saved me untold suffering in my fight to live and keep my children alive. I have expressed my feeling so many times before to you, but you have always preferred to ignore them as being distasteful. Reality has always been distasteful to you... I intend to divorce you immediately."

"in no way a criminal, but an idealist, and much too good for politics."

"I was one of you."

"At that time I believed in the Führer principle because to me it meant that the best one should be the leader. If the leader is good and responsible, then the government is good."

"Ach! I know. If I were to play the Pathetique or the Moonlight Sonata for the high judges, they would let me off. But my defense unfortunately will not be musical."

"But ignorance of the law is no excuse. A person is guilty even if he breaks the law unknowingly. I shall be perhaps the first of the defendants to get up on that stand and admit that I am at least partly guilty."

"I can spot a musical type. I can tell by looking at a woman whether she is a contralto or a soprano."

"I do feel ashamed of having participated to the slightest even as a tool in those dark days. But I was obliged to serve the state to which I had taken an oath. It was a tragic fate."

"I am guilty of one thing - that I should have cleared out and not had anything to do with these criminals in the first place. Later it was too late. I was in up to my neck. But as for the atrocities, I had not a thing to do with them, did not know about them. And as for conspiring against peace, that is false, too. And that is my plain line of defense."

"Those Russians. They did worse things when they entered Pomerania than we ever did in Russia."

"If you follow a certain road for some time, it takes an enormous willpower to leave, although you might recognize that the road was not good. But in my case I believed and was convinced that I was serving and helping the people until the last. However, it is a terrible fate that has befallen me. If I had remained with my writing and my music I would be working now and not a criminal in the Nuremburg prison."

"In world history we have other examples of frightful destruction. There was Alexander the Great and all of the destruction he caused. Napoleon, too, would have destroyed all of Europe. But unfortunately, the Nazi government, the government of which I unfortunately partook, had no Talleyrand, but we had a Ribbentrop. Through Talleyrand's policy France was saved from a catastrophe that Ribbentrop would have brought about."

"Funk succeeded me and he could not act individually as I could and did. The Reichsbank could give or deny credit under the rules at its own discretion while I was president of it. The very day I left the Reichsbank, Hitler issued a law which obliged the Reichsbank to give any credit he would ask for. It was under that law that Funk took office. Perhaps in that sense Funk was not responsible, but in another sense, of course, he was responsible because he was a willing tool. If he went so far as to take the post, he was willing to obey."

"A Reichsbank president who was totally ignorant of what went in and out of the vaults of his bank."

"As Minister of Economics, Funk accelerated the pace of rearmament and as Reichsbank president banked for the SS the gold teeth fillings of concentration camp victims, probably the most ghoulish collateral in banking history."

"Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler had made the clear political request to build up for him in 5 years, that is, by the first of April 1938, armed forces which he could place in the balance as an instrument of political power."

"National Socialism, which originates from the spirit of the German fighting soldier, has been chosen by the German people as its ideology. The German people follow the symbols of its regeneration with the same great love and fanatical passion. The German people has had practical experience of National Socialism and it has not been imposed, as so many outside critics believe. The Fuehrer has shown his people that in the National Socialist racial community lies the greatest and invincible sources of strength, whose dynamic power ensures not only peace at home, but also enables to make use of all the Nation's creative powers."

"This is the reason for the clear and unsparing summons to fight Bolshevism and international Jewry, whose race-destroying activities we have sufficiently experienced on our own people. Therefore, the alliance with all similar-minded Nations who, like Germany, are not willing to allow their strength, dedicated to construction and peaceful work at home, to be disrupted by alien ideologies as by parasites of a foreign race."

"If later on we instruct in the technical handling of weapons, this task demands that the young soldier should also be taught National Socialist ideology and the problems of life. This part of the task, which becomes for us both a duty of honor and a demand which cannot be refused, can and will be carried out if we stand shoulder to shoulder and in sincere comradeship to the Party and its organization. The armed forces and the Party thus became more and more united in attitude and spirit."

"...the basic principles of the military services are unchangeable. Courage and candor, obedience and comradeship, love of fatherland and loyalty to the State: these are ever the distinguishing characteristics of the soldier and sailor. Building character through intelligent training and education is always the first and greatest goal."

"...to protect our position in the Norwegian and Arctic areas by threatening the flank of enemy operations against the northern Norwegian areas, and by attacking White Sea convoys...to tie down enemy forces in the Atlantic, so that they cannot operate in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean or the Pacific."

"All wars will be settled by sea power."

"Hitler might have accepted his military leaders' advice (notably that of Admiral Raeder) and focused his attention on winning the war in the Mediterranean in 1941, before invading the Soviet Union. He might, for example, have struck across the Eastern Mediterranean to Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria; or through Turkey (violating her neutrality) towards the Caucasus; or across Egypt to Suez and beyond. Even as it was, the British positions in Malta and Egypt were acutely vulnerable. Rommel might well have been able to drive the British out of Egypt if he had been sent the twenty-nine German divisions that were sitting more or less idle in Western Europe. Alternatively, Hitler might have diverted more resources into winning the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. Certainly, the German submarines were inflicting severe losses on Allied shipping throughout 1942 and into the spring of 1943."

"I was the only SS leader in Russia who was not assassinated or upon whom an assassination was never attempted. I could walk anywhere without a bodyguard."

"From May until August, I went on a search for Himmler. Finally, I gave myself up voluntarily in August 1945. I went from one village to another looking for Himmler in order to kill him. I also wanted to find my family, whose whereabouts I did not know. I didn't know what the future held in store for me. At that time, I thought it was certain that since I was an SS general, I would be taken prisoner and executed at once."

"Germany could not win this war because it was in league with the devil. This war would not have ended without revolution."

"I am the only living witness but I must say the truth. Contrary to the opinion of the National Socialists that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever. The mass of the Jewish people were taken completely by surprise. Never before has a people gone so unsuspectingly to its disaster. After the first anti-Jewish actions of the Germans, they thought now the wave was over and so they walked back to their undoing."

"Von dem Bach is so clever he can do anything, get around anything."

"I hardly recognize him here. He was very egocentric, tried to get ahead without considering others."

"Bach-Zelewski is a liar and a criminal — a terrible man. I repeat, he is a liar, a criminal, and a killer. I have proof of what I am saying about myself, but I know that Bach-Zelewski is a frightful liar."

"But to go back to Bach-Zelewski — I think Bach-Zelewski has the kind of personality that can't differentiate between the truth and lies. He gets himself so much into the whole thing he can't differentiate. He convinces himself and believes he has gone so far that he has to die for the cause. Originally it was not the truth, but he so convinces himself — he's ready to die for it."

"That Swine."

"Moreover, there is this completely false trial. I would participate wholeheartedly in a trial if it were to determine the guilt for 5 million murdered people and the guilt for the atrocities. But I see in this trial endless other things brought out and I have the feeling that in the shadow of the guilt of these murders the German people shall be considered guilty of everything, and in the shadow of this guilt the Americans, English, French, and especially the Russians will want to get rid of their own dirty linen."

"So if despite that, Hitler prepared war, he perpetrated the greatest lie and betrayal in the world. This trial clearly shows that Hitler did just that. I have no hesitation to state very clearly that Hitler was a liar and a betrayer on a mammoth scale. Even without the death of the 5 million extermination camp victims, Hitler would still go down in history as the greatest villain that ever lived."

"What I would like to emanate from the darkness of this tragedy is one spark of life. I mean, the realization that crime does not begin when you murder people. Crime begins with propaganda, even if such propaganda is for a good cause. The moment propaganda turns against another nation or against any human being, evil starts. Whereas the Germans started propaganda toward the end of this tragedy, you Allies stand at the beginning of the tragedy."

"We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War."

"The democracy which shows up in the United States and in England is not an ideal democracy, because the will of the people is under the pressure of property, which is in the hands of the wealthy capitalists."

"In the first place, there is the Hitler group, among whom are the most guilty of the defendants and about whom very little, if any, good can be spoken. By the Hitler group I include Göring, Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Rosenberg, Frank, and Streicher. Then there is the group which one might call idealistic. Unfortunately, too many of us were indifferent. Not many belonged to the idealistic group, and I don't care to name them because I think I would be stretching a point to call any of the defendants idealists. I feel that perhaps of all the defendants I was the only idealist, although I suffered from blindness and indifference myself. In this respect, I am not like Speer, Schirach, and Funk. Schacht I consider an opportunist."

"I often said that never in the history of the world did one man receive so much faith and trust as Hitler. Similary, no one has ever betrayed so many people and abused so much good faith as he did."

"I do not by any means want to deny that I and my fellow workers selected news and quotations following a certain tendency. It is the curse of propaganda during war that one works only with black and white. But to my knowledge it is a mistake to believe that in the Propaganda Ministry thousands of little lies were hatched out. If we had lied on a thousand small things, the enemy would have been able to deal with us more easily than was the case."

"...the 'finely polished word' of Hans Fritzsche was as effective as the surgeon's knife in cutting through the putrefying tissue of lies and laying bare the truth."

"Fritzsche, radio propaganda chief, by manipulation of the truth goaded German public opinion into frenzied support of the regime and anesthetized the independent judgment of the population so that they did without question their masters' bidding."

"That Germany beat these countries was due to better planning and not better preparedness."

"Let them try me. I shall have plenty to say about the Allies. I have some very good friends among the Americans and English, and the French industrialists, too. I have done nothing of which I am ashamed."

"He is a shrewd, Napoleonic, short man, who is very affable, but as poisonous as hell with his affability."

"It was true enough, he did not appear ashamed — merely worried about his own immunity from trial as a war criminal."

"There is no reason to believe that Milch was not absolutely sincere in his idealistic belief in Imperial Germany. Its destruction, however, caused a fundamental change in him: idealism in Erhard Milch was extinguished forever. From this period on, Milch became more and more the slave of his own ruthless ambition."

"Recently I was discharged from the German army while in this prison and was informed that I am on the so-called war criminal list number seven. I haven't the faintest idea of what war crime I could have committed. The main thing is that I have a clear conscience."

"The Russians were five times superior to us poor but brave Germans, both in numbers and in the superiority of their equipment. My immediate commander was Hitler himself. Unfortunately, Hitler's advice in those critical periods was invariably lousy."

"It is interesting but it was tragic. If you receive a military order you must obey. That is where the big difference between a military and a political order comes in. One can sabotage a political order but to disobey a military command is treason."

"Ewald von Kleist was an officer and a gentleman in an era when such characteristics were liabilities."

"Hitler had a great dislike for the Danes for the following reason: the Danish king had been congratulated by Hitler on his birthday, and the king answered cryptically with 'Many thanks.' Hitler was said to have had an attack of rage. And ever since then Hitler hated Denmark."

"One night a German officer was shot in the back and the army asked for reprisals, but Best tried to impose money fines. Pancke became afraid of Himmler and ordered me to shoot several Danes at once. I told him I didn't know who, we just could not go on the street and shoot Danes. He ordered me to take political prisoners. Three internees, Communists, should be brought before a court-martial and shot while escaping. It was to be prearranged. Himmler was to be informed that three Danes were shot while escaping."

"Sabotage became more frequent. On December 18, I went on a furlough and was supposed to return on January 5. When I arrived home I got a wire to be back in Copenhagen on December 29. It came from Pancke through his deputy. I later learned the reason through the deputy. Best, Pancke, Hannekan, and Kaltenbrunner were all called to Hitler's headquarters on December 30 for lunch. I went to Berlin, reported to Mueller on December 28 and 29, and told him that because I didn't execute countersabotage orders these people were to be scolded by Hitler. Mueller said: 'Comrade Mildner, watch yourself. Himmler is angry with you.'"

"Present at the lunch with Hitler were Hannekan, Best, Pancke, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and Himmler. Ribbentrop was ill at the time. The lunch took three hours and not because it was an elaborate meal. Hitler explained his plans for Denmark and said it could only be made peaceful through intensive countersabotage. In other words, murder and explosion. It shouldn't be kept at all secret. If a Dane who worked for the Nazis was murdered or a Danish factory working for Germany damaged, on the very same day a Danish factory or prominent person should be murdered, and the papers should carry the story prominently the next day. A prominent Danish scientist was murdered by unknown men, or a factory blown up, the papers should read, with satire and irony. In other words, it was not to be made secret anymore. The Danes were to know."

"Hitler explained quietly that he wanted these things done. It is of interest that no one objected or talked back. It was law and it was genius speaking."

"At present, there are hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Germany of all nationalities and degrees, partly in camps, but for the most part, however, as workers...The dangers of inter-mixing and bastardizing of our people are extraordinarily grave. They lie to a great extent in the almost unlimited lack of knowledge throughout our nation of the problems of blood."

"He was a powerless tool in the hands of Himmler, of whom he was afraid, and by whom he was treated poorly. Himmler insulted Pancke like a schoolboy. Pancke was about forty-eight to fifty years old, came from northern Germany."

"Pancke gave me orders to blow up a museum in Copenhagen, where students gathered, and some other places. I declined and said I needed a written order by Himmler. Pancke was angry, but it was not done. Another example: The State Police were billeted. These billets included the offices of Best, my own, Pancke, and staff, and commissioner of the Ordinary Police and his staff. Near it was a big tourist hotel. Pancke ordered that property blown up as an act of countersabotage. I asked why. The reason was that once in that hotel Pancke's secretary couldn't get a meal served after 7 p.m."

"In Copenhagen, there was an associate of Best, Paul Barandon. Pancke asked that I put an explosive in Barandon's desk or house. Barandon was a German. Pancke and Barandon had served in the same regiment in the last war; they had had an old quarrel years before, and that was enough for Pancke. It wasn't done."

"I don't hold it against the men who beat me because undoubtedly there are some ruffians of every nationality and the English are not exceptions."

"I assumed that some of the gold bars I received were melted gold teeth."

"I accept responsibility for the camps, but as far as measures against the Jews, I had nothing to do with them. Those orders came from the RSHA. Himmler sent orders to Kaltenbrunner, who transmitted them to Mueller of the Gestapo, and the latter had the entire extermination program under him. That was the way all of Himmler's orders went. I did not participate in the murder of the Jews."

"Himmler chose certain camps and, together with Kaltenbrunner and Mueller, ordered the commandants of these camps to carry out the extermination program. This was done in the chain of command as I have just told you. I emphasize that it was Himmler to Kaltenbrunner to Mueller to Gluecks, who was also one of my subordinate generals, to the individual concentration camp commandants, who had been selected by Himmler to perform the exterminations. Otherwise, Himmler would have had to give the orders to me because I was technically in charge of the concentration camps. What I am trying to bring out is that although I am responsible for the camps, and the extermination program took place within these camps, I am not responsible for the extermination program itself, because these orders did not go through me, but went through the chain of individuals I have just mentioned."

"I had eleven main concentration camps under my command. From these eleven camps, internees were sent to other so-called labor camps. That was my job. I had nothing to do with the final solution of the Jews. That was an act done by camp personnel such as the commandants. Of course, the center of all those orders for the extermination of the Jews was Mueller of the Gestapo, who received his orders from Kaltenbrunner, who carried out the plans of Himmler."

"What can I say? If I knew in 1934 what I know now, I would have remained in the navy. I didn't know that this was going to happen and I didn't know that Germany was going to lose the war and be in ruins."

"I would have left all the Jews in Germany, but put them on an alien status, under alien law, and naturally closed them out of jobs like doctor or lawyer. But why execute them? In that way, strong Jewish influence would have been cast aside and there would be no need for atrocities. Whenever we would have discussions in our own circle, I would mention my solution, whereupon Himmler would say to me, 'Pohl, you are too soft.' Therefore, I did my best to keep out of the whole final solution of the Jewish problem."

"I can only be responsible for my orders. I cannot be responsible for all the acts of Himmler."

"Well, it was war - I could not have carried on as an administrative officer if I had let myself be swayed emotionally by my feelings."

"Ach! If Hitler had given me an immoral order I would have refused. Think of it! To break teeth out of a dead body! Think of it! Why, if I had been only a simple soldier, I would not have obeyed. I would have said that it was against my religious conviction. That dog Pohl knew all about it."

"Pohl I did not know at all except, of course, that I had heard of him and perhaps I did see him occasionally at the Fuhrer's headquarters or at large meetings. But that a man could be in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany, Himmler's right-hand man without a doubt, making him one of the great criminals of our age - what sort of man is he? Does he talk? Does he proclaim innocence like Kaltenbrunner? I really can't understand such people."

"In my case, though I had an idea of what was going on - I purposely didn't see it."

"For instance, against the tremendous resistance of Hitler and Kaltenbrunner, and at first Himmler too, I managed to save nine thousand Norwegians and Danes, whom I had released from concentration camps."

"Many of my personal enemies picture me as a cold type - a person who acts according to a certain line, a calculating type."

"In my opinion, a war between England and Germany was a war between brothers. In my inner self I admired the English government and political system."

"I could not tell Himmler everything because he was too false and two-faced."

"No one. That was the difficulty of my position. Any day something might happen to me. Himmler told me at the end of April 1945, after I had held a conference with the Zionist leader in Sweden, that he felt sorry for what he had done in his life, regretted his sneakiness toward other people, and excused himself for that. He said, to quote Himmler from my memory: 'If I had only listened to you, Schellenberg, in 1943, there still would have been time to do something for the German people.' I always had the impression that Himmler was under the influence of Hitler. Himmler was suggestible - could easily have been under the influence of Hitler. Himmler conspired with me too much for it to be true that Hitler was under Himmler's influence. Himmler and I plotted against Hitler too much for that. Toward the end of 1943 Himmler actually talked with me about killing Hitler. That was the danger in my position. Should someone change his mind, it would be the end of me. It became even more obvious after the Attentat of July 20, 1944, when Kaltenbrunner worked more and more closely with Hitler. Kaltenbrunner conspired against Himmler."

"When in the summer of 1941 he (Hitler) gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view."

"Not justified - but Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews."

"There is a difference. If you kill to take money or rob, it is plain murder, but if you kill because of political reasons, that is a political murder."

"We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, when it was woven into special fittings for gaskets."

"You become hard when you carry out such orders."

"One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: 'How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?' One old man, as he passed me, hissed: 'Germany will pay a heavy penance for this mass murder of the Jews.' His eyes glowed with hatred as he said this. Nevertheless he walked calmly into the gas-chamber."

"This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all those detailed to do this monstrous "work," and who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events. Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked; is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler's order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jews had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries. There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler's order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts."

"Those not able to work were marched to the farmhouses. These were a good kilometer from the side track. There they were made to undress. At first they had to undress in the open, where we had erected walls made of straw and branches of trees that kept them from onlookers. After a while we built barracks. We had big signs, all of which read 'To Disinfection' or 'Baths.' That was in order to give the people the impression that they would merely receive a bath or be disinfected, in order not to have any technical difficulty in the extermination processes."

"I believed that crematoriums could be erected fast and so wanted to burn the corpses in the mass graves in the crematory, but when I saw that the crematory could not be erected fast enough to keep up with the ever-increasing numbers exterminated, we started to burn the corpses in open ditches like in Treblinka. A layer of wood, then a layer of corpses, another layer of corpses, et cetera. To start the fire, we used a bundle of straw dipped in gasoline. The fire was usually started with about five layers of wood and five layers of corpses. When the fire was going strong, the fresh corpses which came from the gas chambers could merely be thrown on the fire and would burn by themselves."

"Burning 2000 people took about 24 hours in the five stoves. Usually we could manage to cremate only about 1700 to 1800. We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor."

"They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time, Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead."

"Though it was the most efficient, Auschwitz was not necessarily the cruellest of the Nazi death camps. The first people to be gassed by the Third Reich were, as we have seen, German mental patients; they had been asphyxiated with pure carbon monoxide gas. This method was then exported to Eastern Europe, but using exhaust fumes, first in specially converted vans, then in static gas chambers equipped with large diesel engines. This was how people were killed at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, the camps set up to implement the 'Action Reinhard' in the autumn of 1941. Compared with inhaling Zyklon B, which killed most victims within five to ten minutes, this was a slow way to die. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, regarded his own methods as 'humane' compared with those of his counterpart at the last of these camps, the notoriously sadistic Christian Wirth."

"He struck me as a normal person that's the horrible thing about it. If he had been a monster you know if he'd gone in there like "I did.. I killed all these people. It was my war duty." But he just acted like an unimportant individual. He just answered the questions. Without emotion. Without emotion. Not in the slightest apologetic. Though I think there was a sense of pride. A sense of pride."

"The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health service are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practise abortion, the more, the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to one hundred. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy."

"Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his death, whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!"

"National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable."

"My darling girl, Unfortunately, this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh. All the same, or precisely for this reason, it is happiness and comfort for us men to have a precious sweetheart - and I have the most precious, the dearest and best of all!"

"Situation very serious... Those ordered to rescue the Führer are keeping silent... Disloyalty seems to gain the upper hand everywhere... Reichskanzlei a heap of rubble."

"There are people who have a true talent to spoil my every joy."

"Next to Himmler the most sinister member of Hitler's entourage was Martin Bormann. He was a thick-set, heavy jowled, disagreeable, conceited and bad-mannered man. He hated the army, which he regarded as the eternal barrier to the limitless supremacy of the Party, and attempted, with success, to do it harm whenever he could, to sow distrust, to prevent necessary measures from being taken, to drive all decent person away from Hitler's entourage and from positions of authority and to replace them with his creatures. Bormann saw to it that Hitler was not kept informed of the real internal political situation. He prevented even the Gauleiters from seeing Hitler. Thus a grotesque state of affairs by which the Gauleiters- in particular Forster of West Prussia and Greiser of the Warthegau- came for me, the representative of the military they so distrusted, and asked for my help in arranging that they be allowed to see Hitler since Bormann consistently prevented them from obtaining interviews through normal Party channels."

"The sicker that Hitler grew and the worse the military situation became, the fewer were the number of people who could reach the dictator. Everything had to be done through this sinister guttersnipe, Bormann, and thus his methods became increasingly successful. I had repeated angry altercations with him, because over and over again he would sabotage the taking of necessary military measures for the sake of the obscure political game that he was playing. He would also attempt to interfere in matters that purely concerned the Army, always with unfortunate results. Bormann was the éminence grise of the Third Reich."

"The powerful men under Hitler were already jealously watching one another like so many pretenders to the throne. Quite early there were struggles for position among Goebbels, Goering, Rosenberg, Ley, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Hess. Only Roehm had been left by the wayside, and before long Hess was to lose all his influence. But none of them recognized a threat in the shape of trusty Bormann. He had succeeded in representing himself as insignificant while imperceptibly building up his bastions. Even among so many ruthless men, he stood out by his brutality and coarseness. He had no culture, which might have put some restraints on him, and in every case he carried out whatever Hitler had ordered or what he himself had gathered from Hitler's hints. A subordinate by nature, he treated his own subordinates as if he were dealing with cows and oxen."

"It was only when Bormann's disappearance became a matter for serious conjecture, and intelligence agents began to go into the ugly details, that an incredible episode in Hitler's life came to light. This explained exactly how Martin Bormann was able to gather into his hands all the strings required to make Hitler dance to his tune."

"It is natural that people do not want to be involved with us too much. There is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve. Regarded in this way we are, if a joke is permitted, looked upon as a cross between a general maid and the dustbin of the Reich."

"To take the place of emigration, and with the prior approval of the Führer, the evacuation of the Jews to the East has become another possible solution. Although both courses of action emigration and evacuation, must, of course, be considered as nothing more than... temporary expedients, they do help to provide practical experience which should be of great importance in view of the coming Endlösung (Final Solution) of the Jewish question."

"So far you have been treated as an officer and a gentleman, but don't think that this will go on if you don't behave better than you have done. You have two hours left in which to confess everything. If you don't, I shall hand you over to the Gestapo, who are used to dealing with such gangsters and criminals — you won't enjoy their methods a bit."

"We will Germanize the Czech vermin."

"The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum."

"He was very young, very handsome, save that his eyes were too close-set; an outstanding example of that blond mixture of effeminacy and toughness which may be observed in any Teutonic night-club. He had immense drive, which was liable to carry him too far; total ruthlessness in the attainment of his own ends, which were wrapped up in personal ambition; no active enjoyment of cruelty except sometimes, perhaps, almost as an afterthought; and a devilish sense of humor. Vain as a peacock, but mockingly aware of his vanity, clever, perhaps too clever by half, and contemptuous of the clumsiness of most of his colleagues and superiors, he nevertheless could be clumsy in his use of force and, unlike Himmler, was liable to over-reach himself. He was dynamite, like a character in an American gangster story; and in the S.S. he was able to canalise his nihilism into a constructive purpose."

"What ever actions he took he carried them out as a National Socialist and an SS man, from the very bottom of his heart and through his blood, he carried out felt and understood Adolf Hitler's world vision."

"One of the best national socialists, one of the best believers in the German ideology, and one of the greatest opponents to all enemies of the Third Reich."

"Truth and goodness had no intrinsic meaning for him; they were instruments to be used for the gaining of more and more power. To debate whether any action was of itself right appeared so stupid to him that it was certainly a question he never asked himself."

"He was a terribly ambitious man with a great craving for power. This desire for power was measureless, and he was extraordinarily clever and cunning."

"Himmler was a rival of Bormann, and Heydrich played both against each other. Heydrich pretended to be friendly with Bormann, but Bormann realized that Heydrich was a follower of Himmler. Bormann was trying to use Heydrich. Himmler saw what was happening. Between Himmler and Bormann, Heydrich grew bigger and bigger, until he was personally received by Hitler. But both Bormann and Himmler recognized Heydrich's threat."

"I believe that Heydrich was the worst criminal of them all. I myself saw him and he looked with such a glance of hatred that I shall never forget it."

"Heydrich had an incredibly acute perception of the moral, human, professional and political weaknesses of others. His unusual intellect was matched by the ever-watchful instincts of a predatory animal. He was inordinately ambitious. It seemed as if, in a pack of ferocious wolves, he must always prove himself the strongest and assume the leadership."

"The irreplaceable loss of the most radical and successful persecutor of all enemies of the state."

"Don't worry about those Jewish bastards. You'll soon be on your way up the chimney and your troubles will be over."

"I was an idealist in my profession. If I used such expression as 'Jewish bastard' or 'Jewish sow,' it simply meant that this official language had become so much a part of my flesh and blood that I saw nothing unusual in it. I never used anything but spiritual weapons in dealing with offenders."

"This creature, this Baab, with his spiritual weapons, was in the end found guilty on fifty-five counts of murder, on twenty-one counts of attempted murder, on thirty counts of assault and battery, and a variety of lesser offences."

"He had beaten and tortured, dragged shrieking children away from their mothers, despatched his quotas of human cargo in sealed box-cars to the frontier, until finally he was able to declare that there were no more Jews in Frankfurt."

"There was one young man who sat regularly in a spectator's seat about whom it was later testified that not one thread of his under or outer garments had retained its original color, so drenched were they by his own blood after a visit to Heinrich Baab in 1942."

"Ethical obligation has to subordinate itself to the totalitarian nature of war."

"There can't be two smart peoples in the world. We're going to win the war, so only the Aryan race will stand."

"Even the Russians are fighting us. They've brought in Jewish pilots, nurses, and doctors. Everybody's ganging up on us. We didn't think it would happen this way."

"The Jewish people, no matter where they are, they become the best in the world."

"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it."

"Away with this shit!"

"Mengele was known as a manic collector of things human, including dwarf corpses, gallstones, and eyes. His fascination with eyes led to the infamous experiments in which he injected various substances into the eyes of brown-eyed Jewish children in an attempt to make them Nordic (blue)."

"I have never accepted that Mengele believed he was doing serious medical work … He was exercising power. Major surgery was performed without anaesthetic. Once I witnessed a stomach operation — Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anaesthesia. It was horrifying."

"I was given five injections. That evening I developed extremely high fever. I was trembling. My arms and my legs were swollen, huge size. Mengele and Dr. Konig and three other doctors came in the next morning. They looked at my fever chart, and Dr. Mengele said, laughingly, "Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live...""

"The Allied airborne operation in Sicily was decisive despite widely scattered drops which must be expected in a night landing. It is my opinion that if it had not been for the Allied airborne forces (82nd) blocking the Hermann Goering Armd. Div. from reaching the beachhead, that division would have driven the initial seaborne forces back into the sea. I attribute the entire success of the Allied Sicilian Operation to the delaying of German reserves (by the 82nd ABN Div.) until sufficient forces had been landed by sea to resist the counterattacks by our defending forces, the strength of which had been held in mobile reserve."

"Hitler was very upset by the heavy losses suffered by the parachute units, and came to the conclusion that their surprise value had passed. After that he often said to me: "The day of parachute troops is over." He would not believe reports that the British and Americans were developing airborne forces. The fact that none were used in the St. Nazaire and Dieppe raids confirmed his opinion. He said to me: 'There, you see! They are not raising such forces. I was right.' He only changed his mind after the Allied conquest of Sicily in 1943. Impressed by the way the Allies had used them there, he ordered an expansion of our own airborne forces. But that change of mind came too late - because by then you had command of the air, and airborne troops could not be effectively used in face of a superior air force."

"The limitations of our strength compelled us to concentrate on two objectives - the points which seemed the most essential to the success of the invasion. The main effort, under my own control, was directed against the bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk by which the main route from the south was carried across the mouths of the Rhine. Our task was to capture the bridges before the Dutch could blow them up, and keep them open until the arrival of our mobile ground forces. My force comprised four parachute battalions and one air-transported regiment (of three battalions). We achieved complete success, at a cost of only 180 casualties. We dared not fail, for if we did the whole invasion would have failed. The secondary attack was made against The Hague. Its aim was to get a hold upon the Dutch capital, and in particular to capture the Government offices and the Service headquarters. The force employed here was commanded by General Graf Sponcck; it consisted of one parachute battalion and two air-transported regiments. This attack did not succeed. Several hundred men were killed and wounded, while as many were taken prisoner."

"I have never seen such a defiance of death."

"Kurt Student was a German professional soldier, typical of the best of his kind, totally devoted to his calling and to his country, though by no means in full sympathy with Nazi leadership."

"General Kurt Student was a German of the almost obsessively meticulous order and was determined to ensure that every unit involved in the forthcoming operation was kept fully briefed."

"The time is not far distant when I shall be able to say that one doctor, with, perhaps, ten assistants, can probably effect several hundred if not one thousand sterilizations in a single day."

"...Block 10 was made up of mostly married women between the ages of 20 and 40, preferably those who had not borne children. There was a constant fear in Block 10 of being killed, sterilized, or inseminated by Clauberg. He would often tease the female prisoners that they would all undergo sexual intercourse with a male prisoner chosen especially for this purpose. At least one of the Orthodox Jewish women who heard that Clauberg selected her to be a Block 10 prostitute decided to poison herself. After he inseminated the women, Clauberg would often taunt the strapped-in women by stating that he had inseminated their wombs with animal sperm and that monsters were growing in their wombs. Ultimately, 300 women prisoners were experimented on in Cell Block 10..."

"Thank God that sow's gone to the butcher."

"You will have very large quantities of clothes to disinfect, ten or twenty times as much as the "Textiles Collection," which is only being carried out in order to camouflage the origin of the Jewish, Polish, Czech, and other items of clothing. Your second job is to convert the gas- chambers, which have up to now been operated with exhaust gases from an old Diesel engine, to a more poisonous and quicker means, cyanide. But the Führer and Himmler, who were here on August 15, that is, the day before yesterday, gave orders that I am to accompany all persons who visit the installations."

"This is one of the most highly secret matters there are, perhaps the most secret. Anybody who speaks about it is shot dead immediately. Two talkative people died yesterday."

"Gentlemen, if ever a generation will come after us which is so weak and soft-hearted that it doesn't understand our task, then indeed the whole of National Socialism has been in vain. To the contrary, in my opinion one should bury bronze plates on which it is recorded that we have had the courage to carry out this great and so necessary work."

"I know that you observe Christmas Day as you learned it at home. I do not observe it. However, as assistant director of this prison, I allow all the Catholics to observe freely and with some joy this day in this home."

"Perhaps you think that any fool could become a member of the SS. Do you really know what an SS soldier is? He is a superman. He is a professional chosen personally by Hitler. A soldier whose antecedents are analyzed for four generations back before he is given the honor of being allowed to join this elite organization."

"If there were mistakes, there were mistakes. But a man has to have a line of work, no?"

"If I think of all those homosexuals in Germany today, I think I'd hand my German passport back, if I had one."

"Don't worry. Your friends are dead and you are going to join them."

"I admire you, but in the end everybody talks."

"When I stand before the throne of God, I shall be judged innocent."

"...Had the eyes of a monster. He was savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."

"...pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage."

"There is only one certainty in life... A strong man stands above and conquers all!"

"After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel."

"In 1943, when the Germans began to crack down on saboteurs in grim earnest, the Alliance network was a chief target. Scores of agents were arrested in successive waves. Among them were women tortured by Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon," who burned their breasts with cigarettes."

"We found a round figure of three million Jews in Poland, and then immediately after that came the Russian campaign and we found another five million Jews in Russia. How on Earth could we manage to emigrate this eight million by using long and tiresome official methods if we could not, as was planned somehow or other after the war organise a general and mass-protected and organised emigration to Madagascar? We had conquered France, after all, and we could have compensated France adequately from our other colonial possessions so we could have used Madagascar — the island was big enough to accommodate such a number of Jews — but in the war we were cut off. We had no other choice."

"My Führer, if it's not possible for you to give me a date for the wonder weapons, we Germans must approach the Anglo-Americans and seek peace."

"My Führer, I know, it is obvious from interrogations for one thing and from evidence I have from my particular field, that there are naturally differences among these unnatural Allies, but please do not be offended if I say that I do not believe the alliance will split up of itself without our own active intervention. Before that happens we shall be dead or beaten to the ground, and that must not happen — we must do something first."

"If you repeat to the Führer the story of the radio message from your agent, I won't go to the gallows alone. You and the Reichsführer will hang beside me."

"I was understandably deeply disappointed that the highest National Socialist leaders did not stand up and answer for the deeds they had done in the past and left those of us who could not be made personally responsible in the lurch."

"The unity of blood and soil must be restored."

"The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space."

"The United States is at present so demoralized and so corrupted that, like France and England, it need not be taken into consideration as a military adversary."

"As soon as we beat England we shall make an end of you Englishmen once and for all. Able-bodied men and women between the ages of 16 and 45 will be exported as slaves to the Continent. The old and weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilised; a million or two of the young women of the Nordic type will be segregated in a number of stud farms where, with the assistance of picked German sires, during a period of 10 or 12 years, they will produce annually a series of Nordic infants to be brought up in every way as Germans. These infants will form the future population of Britain. They will be partially educated in Germany and only those who fully satisfy the Nazi's requirements will be allowed to return to Britain and take up permanent residence. The rest will be sterilised and sent to join slave gangs in Germany. Thus, in a generation or two, the British will disappear."

"1. Political officials and leaders are to be liquidated. 2. Insofar as they are captured by the troops, an officer with authority to impose disciplinary punishment decides whether the given individual must be liquidated. For such a decision the fact suffices that he is a political official. 3. Political leaders in the troops (Red Army) are not recognized as prisoners of war and are to be liquidated at the latest in the prisoner-of-war transit camps."

"If one looks back at the short period of time of the Badoglio government, one must remember that the Italian longing and need for peace was no secret to the German command. Since the German retreat at el Alamein in November 1942 and the collapse of the Italian Army on the eastern front, the Italians had repeatedly stated their weariness of battle and had made certain suggestions. In steadily increasing numbers, measures were being taken by the German military command out of fear for the Axis loyalty of Italy. As the course of events showed, the view on betrayal dominated all other German reflections, nourished by the fall of Mussolini and his style of leadership."

"This decision is absolutely contrary to my understanding of what the plan was to be in the event of an invasion."

"You must attack as soon as possible."

"The Fuhrer has decided to raze the city of St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there will be not the slightest reason for the future existence of this large city."

"Hitler's large-scale demands for the Mediterranean meant that...the plans for...an 'Eastern Wall' were overtaken by the increasingly rapid advance of the Red Army."

"I was convinced before the war started that it was a great disaster, a great wrong. Even after the campaign in Poland my conviction didn't change because on 3rd September, the third day of our going to war, the Western Powers had declared war on Germany. After the campaign in France in 1940 my conviction became uncertain, but when I heard one or two months after the armistice with France that now Hitler was to go with Russia, the old conviction came up again and it was at this moment that I changed the place of living for my family, moved them from Berlin to the place where they are today."

"Keitel, Jodl and Warlimont had never been in the war....Their lack of fighting experience tended to make them underrate practical difficulties, and encourage Hitler to believe that things could be done that were quite impossible..."

"Warlimont became renowned, with Keitel and Jodl, as one of the German officers most loyal to Hitler and was accordingly sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment in 1949 as a minor war criminal..."

"Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors - in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner - and inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions."

"It was perfectly clear to me that this order spelled the death of millions of people. I said to Eichmann, 'God grant that our enemies never have the opportunity of doing the same to the German people', in reply to which Eichmann told me not to be sentimental; it was an order of the Fuhrer's and would have to be carried out."

"Eichmann told me that the words "final solution" meant the biological extermination of the Jewish race... I was so much impressed with this document which gave Eichmann authority to kill millions of people that I said at the time: "May God forbid that our enemies should ever do anything similar to the German people". He replied: "Don't be sentimental – this is a Führer order". I realized at that time that the order was a death warrant for millions of people and that the power to execute this order was in Eichmann's hands subject to approval of Heydrich and later Kaltenbrunner. The program of extermination was already under way, and continued until late 1944. — SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 3 January 1946."

"The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in execution of this plan...He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz."

"It wasn’t Hitler, it wasn’t me [Wisliceny], it was the mufti... I am not sure if Wisliceny ever met the mufti. I doubt it, but it’s doesn’t matter. It’s clear that his account is untrue: the Germans had started annihilating the Jews half a year before Hitler and the mufti met."

"I once spent an hour and a half trying to explain a situation to "Sepp" Dietrich with the aid of a map. It was quite useless. He understood nothing at all."

"In all my years as a soldier, I have never seen men fight so hard."

"Other visits (to the front) showed me that efforts were being made on the Western Front to arrive at understandings with the enemy on special problems. At Arnhem, I found General Bittrich of the Waffen-SS in a state of fury. The day before, his Second Tank Corps had virtually wiped out a British airborne division. During the fighting the general had made an arrangement permitting the enemy to run a field hospital situated behind the German lines. But party functionaries had taken it upon themselves to kill British and American pilots, and Bittrich was cast in the role of a liar. His violent denunciation of the party was all the more striking since it came from an SS general."

"Dear Reichsführer, among 10's of millions of Jews in Europe, there are, I figure, at least 2-3 millions of men and women who are fit enough to work. Considering the extraordinary difficulties the labor problem presents us with, I hold the view that those 2-3 millions should be specially selected and preserved. This can however only be done if at the same time they are rendered incapable to propagate. About a year ago I reported to you that agents of mine have completed the experiments necessary for this purpose. I would like to recall these facts once more. Sterilization, as normally performed on persons with hereditary diseases is here out of the question, because it takes too long and is too expensive. Castration by X-ray however is not only relatively cheap, but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time. I think that at this time it is already irrelevant whether the people in question become aware of having been castrated after some weeks or months, once they feel the effects. Should you, Reichsführer, decide to choose this way in the interest of the preservation of labor, then Reichsleiter Bouhler would be prepared to place all physicians and other personnel needed for this work at your disposal. Likewise he requested me to inform you that then I would have to order the apparatus so urgently needed with the greatest speed. Heil Hitler! Yours, Viktor Brack."

"It was no secret in higher Party circles that the Jews were to be exterminated."

"My guilt is that I am still here...I should have died. That is my guilt."

"I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass...they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips."

"No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible."

"Cargo. They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity-it couldn't have; it was a mass-a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo."

"He was a Dragoner (one of the imperial elite regiments). Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him."

"My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty..."

"Our men taking part in the executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who were to be shot."

"The nervous strain was far heavier in the case of our men who carried out the executions than in that of their victims. From the psychological point of view they had a terrible time."

"The executions of agents, partisans, saboteurs, suspicious people, indulging in espionage and sabotage, and those who were of a detrimental effect to the German Army, were, in my opinion, completely in accordance with the Hague Convention."

"Every spy and saboteur knew what he had to expect when he was arrested."

"Out of the total number of the persons designated for the execution, fifteen men were led in each case to the brink of the mass grave where they had to kneel down, their faces turned towards the grave. When the men were ready for the execution one of my leaders who was in charge of this execution squad gave the order to shoot. Since they were kneeling on the brink of the mass grave, the victims fell, as a rule, at once into the mass grave."

"I have always used rather large execution squads, since I declined to use men who were specialists for shots in the neck (Genickschussspezialisten). Each squad shot for about one hour and was then replaced. The persons who still had to be shot were assembled near the place of the execution, and were guarded by members of those squads, which at the moment did not take part in the executions."

"After each firing order, when the shots were addressed, somebody looked at the victims, because the victims were then put into the grave when they did not fall into the grave themselves, and these tasks were in the field of tasks of the men of the individual Kommandos. The edge of the grave had to be cleaned, for instance. Two men who had spades dealt with this. They had to clean it up and then the next group was led there."

"I would not say that they were happy. They knew what was going to happen to them. Of course, they were told what was going to happen to them, and they were resigned to their fate, and that is the strange thing about these people in the East."

"Here lie my thirty-thousand Jews."

"I die in the faith of my people. May the German people be aware of its enemies!"

"Ah, my brave Arabs! If I could only gather them in from all their desert ways, and arm them properly... But I fear it cannot be. They are drifting in by tens and scores, where I need hundreds and thousands."

"The plans of all of the powers have always been entirely selfish as far as Turkey was concerned. For years Russia has coveted Constantinople, to say nothing of the rest of Turkey along the Black Sea and south of the Caucasus, and Britain has endeavored to keep us just strong enough to prevent Russia from realizing these ambitions. Finally came the Kaiser with his scheme of a chain of German-controlled states from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf. Russia would wipe us off the map, England would keep us weak, and Germany would make us strong. All selfish motives on the face of them, no doubt, but- can you wonder which alternative is the least repugnant to us Turks, especially to us Young Turks, who have done our best to avoid being enmeshed in the nets of British and Russian diplomacy and intrigue which held helpless our predecessors? I think I will not need to say more to answer your question as to why it was Germany obtained the Bagdad railway concession, why the Hedjaz line was built by Germans, and why the Germans are recasting our military establishment."

"Real Turkish unification is my dearest wish, and any international political arrangement which will leave me a free hand to work for that, I will subscribe to. Turkey contains a great many Christians as well as Mohammedans. The latter I would regenerate from within, not from without. The West has little that we need save battleships and shrapnels, and if it would leave us alone we would not need even these."

"We are taking care of our troops today, hence their loyalty. Formerly a rifle was given to a man and he had to shift for himself."

"All who seek to enrich those who do not work should be destroyed."

"How could a person forget about the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia: this was beyond a person’s endurance. I am prepared to gladly sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Montenegrans."

"The transformation of the Islamic world into one of revolution, as His Majesty has desired, had been in preparation for some time and had now been put into action."

"The threat could be eliminated by removing the Armenians from the places where they lived and sending them to other places."

"If the Russians retreat, they are done."

"You are greatly mistaken. We have this country absolutely under our control. I have no desire to shift the blame onto our underlings and I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility myself for everything that has taken place."

"How can we furnish bread to the Armenians when we can't get enough for our own people? I know that they are suffering and that it is quite likely that they cannot get bread at all this coming winter. But we have the utmost difficulty in getting flour and clothing right here in Constantinople."

"We can then use Platonic means to quiet Armenians and Greeks, but in time of war we cannot investigate and negotiate. We must act promptly and with determination. I also think that the Armenians are making a mistake in depending upon the Russians. The Russians really would rather see them killed than alive. They are as great a danger to the Russians as they are to us. If they should form an independent government in Turkey, the Armenians in Russia would attempt to form an independent government there."

"The Armenians had a fair warning of what would happen to them in case they joined our enemies. Three months ago I sent for the Armenian Patriarch and I told him that if the Armenians attempted to start a revolution or to assist the Russians, I would be unable to prevent mischief from happening to them. My warning produced no effect and the Armenians started a revolution and helped the Russians. You know what happened at Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs against government buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems. We knew that they were planning uprisings in other places. You must understand that we are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and that we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back. We have got to prevent this no matter what means we have to resort to. It is absolutely true that I am not opposed to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their intelligence and industry, and I should like nothing better than to see them become a real part of our nation. But if they ally themselves with our enemies, as they did in the Van district, they will have to be destroyed. I have taken pains to see that no injustice is done; only recently I gave orders to have three Armenians who had been deported returned to their homes, when I found that they were innocent. Russia, France, Great Britain, and America are doing the Armenians no kindness by sympathizing with and encouraging them. I know what such encouragement means to a people who are inclined to revolution. When our Union and Progress Party attacked Abdul Hamid, we received all our moral encouragement from the outside world. This encouragement was of great help to us and had much to do with our success. It might similarly now help the Armenians and their revolutionary programme. I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they would give up all their efforts to oppose the present government and become law-abiding citizens. We now have this country in our absolute control and we can easily revenge ourselves on any revolutionists."

"What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians."

"The Turkish elements here referred to were shortsighted, fanatical, and yet sincere in their belief. The public encouraged them, and they had the general approval behind them. They were numerous and strong."

"The Porte, acting under the same obligation, and wishing to secure the safety of its army and its citizens, took energetic measures to check these uprisings. The deportation of the Armenians was one of these preventive measures. I admit also that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere. In some places unlawful acts were committed. The already existing hatred among the Armenians and Mohammedans, intensified by the barbarous activities of the former, had created many tragic consequences. Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested. I confess it. I confess, also, that the duty of the Government was to prevent these abuses and atrocities, or at least to hunt down and punish their perpetrators severely. In many places, where the property and goods of the deported people were looted, and the Armenians molested, we did arrest those who were responsible and punished them according to the law. I confess, however, that we ought to have acted more sternly, opened up a general investigation for the purpose of finding out all the promoters and looters and punished them severely."

"We need to tranquilize our neighbors. State officials ought to remain in ignorance. Let the Armenians wait, opportunities will certainly come our way too. Turkey belongs only to the Turks."

"I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!"

"Necessary preparations have been discussed and taken for the complete and fundamental elimination of this concern, which occupies an important place in the exalted state's list of vital issues."

"These different blocs in the Turkish Empire...always conspired against Turkey; because of the hostility of these native peoples, Turkey has lost province after province - Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Egypt, and Tripoli. In this way, the Turkish Empire has dwindled almost to nothing."

"It is confirmed that the Armenians should be transferred to the indicated region as communicated in the February 13th telegram. As the situation has been evaluated by the state, the probability of rebellion and protest indicates the need to take action. The increasing possibility of Armenian uprisings requires that every effective means of suppression needs to be applied."

"To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This is strange, since the historical evidence of what happened is plentiful. Western observers like the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote detailed reports about what was being done - including the telling statement of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, that all the Armenians had to perish because 'those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'. Western missionaries too wrote harrowing accounts of what they witnessed. Their testimony formed an important part of the wartime report on 'The Treatment of the Armenians' compiled by Viscount Bryce, who had also investigated the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914."

"Mehmed Talat Pasha was one of the ‘Young Turks’, the nationalistic reformers who seized power in the Ottoman empire in 1908, but as one of the ‘Three Pashas’ who dominated the Turkish government he was the key architect of the Armenian massacres perpetrated between 1915 and 1916, which cost the lives of over 1 million people."

"I shall not return to Constantinople until I have conquered Egypt!"

"In the program of the Turkish government, nothing is said of a Turkification of the Arabs. I have never intended anything like that nor even thought of it. Our sole purpose is to strengthen the feeling of fraternity between the Ottoman-Turkish and the Ottoman-Arab elements and to make the latter understand that the national interests of the Arabs are identical to those of the Turks and that any harm to one of them necessarily means harm to the other. The Ottoman-Turkish and the Ottoman-Arab elements have to rally to the caliphate without afterthoughts if they want to survive."

"With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks."

"Our sole aim was, by virtue of this war, to rid ourselves of the lot of them, however many international decisions there were. Each one represented a blow to our...independence...And, just as it was our dearly held goal to lift the Capitulations and the Mt. Lebanon concessions, we also desired to destroy the signed understanding concerning the reforms in Eastern Anatolia..."

"There is nothing in the world that could make me turn from the law. With a clear conscience, I am prepared to answer for each and every one of my political and administrative orders and actions, and to do so before the court of public opinion..."

"We are against dependence on a change in the international situation for the solution of the China Incident."

"I retained no records and I am not a good writer anyhow. So the best approach is for historians like you to extract the facts directly from people like me."

"Asia, in cooperation with Europe, is about to take simultaneous action towards realization of a New World Order."

"The kind of slaughter and violence that we have seen in this war, was in my experience very rare during the Russo-Japanese war. In modern war, the whole people are mobilized. Hence the majority of the troops correspond to the people as a whole. An army in which scandals and atrocities occur in great numbers, must surely reflect a decline in public morality?"

"As the rising sun melts thinly frozen ice, so the Japanese Army is overcoming Chinese troops."

"I will take responsibility for all operations."

"We should not miss the present opportunity or we shall be blamed by posterity."

"Now that the Emperor has accepted the Potsdam Declaration, we must lay down our arms. Obeying the Emperor's order, we shall not fight. We must keep peace and order and we shall not make any trouble."

"I am convinced that in times such as these, every man must be a soldier, in substance as well as in name."

"The conflict between Japan and Chiang is little affected by the fall of the Wuhan cities and Sino-Japanese hostilities have just started."

"It is a place rich in natural resources, having everything we need for national defense, a crucial place for the empire's self-reliance. The place is crucial too for our wars with China, Russia, and the U.S."

"We hope the peace will last for twenty years. Then we will be here again."

"The war will continue a long time. Chiang Kai-shek may attempt to continue hostilities throughout his ifetime and as long as Chiang continues, Japan must continue."

"The Chinese courts have tried many Japanese officers for their crimes against the Chinese. These men committed thousands of crimes against Koreans. They killed and persecuted thousands of our people for refusing to help the Japanese war effort. They forced Koreans into the coal mines as slave laborers and let them die of tuberculosis and neglect."

"I am convinced of the necessity to take an effective measure of self defense."

"I was carrying out my duty, as the Japanese high commander of the Japanese Army in the Philippine Islands, to control my army with the best of my ability during wartime. Until now, I believe that I have tried my best for my army. As I said in the Manila Supreme Court that I have done everything with all my capacity, so I wouldn't be ashamed in front of the Gods for what I have done when I have died. But if you say to me "you do not have any ability to command the Japanese Army," I should say nothing in response, because it is my own nature. Now, our war criminal trial is going on in the Manila Supreme Court, so I wish to be justified under your kindness and righteousness. I know that all your American military affairs always have had tolerant and rightful judgment. When I had been investigated in the Manila court, I have had good treatment, a kind attitude from your good-natured officers who protected me all the time. I will never forget what they have done for me even if I die. I don't blame my executioners. I'll pray that the Gods bless them. Please send my thankful word to Col. Clarke and Lt. Col. Feldhaus, Lt. Col. Hendrix, Maj. Guy, Capt. Sandburg, Capt. Reel, at Manila court, and Col. Arnard. I thank you. I pray for the Emperor's long life and prosperity forever."

"How could we win when you had all that?"

"We have just received your reply. The Japanese Army will consider nothing but surrender."

"In order to carry out orders from the southern army I sent 50,000 troops to Leyte, but due to air and submarine attacks half of them were lost."

"All I want to hear from you is Yes or No!"

"And [the attack on Pearl Harbor] was merely the opening salvo. Thereafter, Japanese forces fanned out across the Pacific and South-East Asia in a vast centrifugal offensive that achieved breathtaking speed and success. On December 8, the first Japanese troops landed on the eastern side of the Malay peninsula, followed two days later by the rest of General Yamashita Tomoyuki's 25th Army. Naval aircraft based in Saigon smashed the British naval force off Malaya, sinking the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse. Lieutenant-General Iida Shôjirô's 15th Army stormed up the Kra isthmus into the heart of Burma, routing better-armed but less mobile British forces. British Borneo was invaded on December 16; a month and three days later it surrendered. Hong Kong's garrison of 12,000 held out for barely a week after Japanese troops landed there on December 18; it surrendered on Christmas Day. Meanwhile the 25th Army was advancing down the Malayan peninsula towards Singapore, using bicycles to speed down the well-tended plantation roads. On February 15 Lieutenant-General Arthur E. Percival and his garrison of 16,000 Britons, 14,000 Australians and 32,000 Indians surrendered, unaware of the exhausted condition of their 30,000 adversaries, who had all but run out of food and ammunition. Here was a humiliation even worse than that of May 1940, and there was more to come. Rangoon fell in March, despite Chinese attempts to assist Burma's beleaguered British-Indian defenders; Mandalay followed on May 1, along with the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. As General Henry Pownall admitted, the British had been 'out-generalled, outwitted and outfought . . . by better soldiers'."

"There's no solution except to break the power of Chiang Kai-shek by capturing Nanking. That is what I must do."

"The China Incident [of 1937 onwards] has resulted in massive loss of life through the mutual killing of neighboring friends. This is the greatest tragedy of the last one thousand years. Nevertheless this is a holy war to save the peoples of East Asia.... Invoking the power of Avalokitesvara, I pray for the bright future of East Asia."

"Prince Asaka had joined the army only about ten days before its entry into Nanking and in view of the short time he was connected with this army I do not think he can be held responsible. I would say that the Division Commanders are the responsible parties."

"Orderly discipline and morale within an army was the responsibility of the Division Commander."

"The Japanese army is now prepared to use every means within its power to subdue its opponents. The objectives of the Japanese Expeditionary Forces are, as clearly set forth in statements issued by the Japanese Government, not only to protect the vested interests of Japan and the lives and property of the Japanese residents in the affected area, but also to scourge the Chinese Government and army who have een pursuing anti-foreign and anti-Japanese policies in collaboration with Communist influences."

"I am confident that the day is not far distant when the light of peace shine again."

"Japan will not abandon the fight for the Philippines even if Tokyo should be reduced to ashes!"

"Now I am master of Shanghai."

"The Tribunal is satisfied that Matsui knew what was happening. He did nothing, or nothing effective to abate these horrors. He did issue orders before the capture of the city enjoining propriety of conduct upon his troops and later he issued further orders to the same purport. These orders were of no effect as is now known, and as he must have known. It was pleaded in his behalf that at this time he was ill. His illness was not sufficient to prevent his conducting the military operations of his command nor to prevent his visiting the City for days while these atrocities were occurring. He was in command of the Army responsible for these happenings. He knew of them. He had the power, as he had the duty, to control his troops and to protect the unfortunate citizens of Nanking. He must be held criminally responsible for his failure to discharge this duty."

"If you want to maintain the superiority of your state at the present time, you must quickly enter into a coalition with Germany and Italy and thus restrain Europe and create a firm foundation for imperial policy in the Far East."

"As you can see, I'm in good health. I have no message; just tell them, please, that I went to my death quietly and in good health."

"I am having a very difficult time. Things happen unexpectedly."

"Japan cannot remain indifferent to anyone's taking action, under any pretext, which is prejudicial to the maintenance of law and order in st Asia for which she, if only in view of her geographic position, has the most vital concern."

"Other powers will continue to enjoy an equal right to trade in and develop the natural resources of the occupied territory, for the economic development of which the investment of foreign capital is very desirable."

"We have successfully built up our national strength and prestige, accepting and adding to our civilization the art and science of the West. Now, I believe, the time has come for us to carry our art and culture to other countries."

"I investigated reported Japanese atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eyewitnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many in cold blood."

"Fire on anything that moves on the river."

"The world is facing a historic turning point because the system of materialistic liberalism has come to a deadlock."

"Follow the road behind the Emperor. We must build the world for Japan's sake, heaven ordered Japan to achieve this great mission."

"The west has always shown a sympathetic, although patronizing, appreciation of the old Japan. Many a foreign observer would remark with a sigh: 'What a pity that things of the past, of beauty and joy forever, should be so mercilessly sacrificed on the altar of modernism!'"

"We are not imitating Hitler and Mussolini. They are imitating us. They have just discovered what we knew for centuries: that a corporate, collectivist system pays."

"The most serious menace to Japan comes from the Soviet Union. Numerous European countries will eventually embrace Communism. So will China and India if we just watch them with folded arms."

"The greatest reason for Japan's participation in the Triple Alliance lies in the fact that the three signatory powers, at this time of great change in the world situation, have the same position, the same interest, and entertain the same political views. China is not Japan's real enemy in the present incident. In reality Japan is fighting Britain and America. The first thing we are now required to do is to carry out our southward advance."

"The war has now moved from China to South Eastern Asia, and is about to enter the stage of the war for all Asia."

"...the three Powers, discarding the ideologies of individualism and democracy, have adopted the principle of dealing with human society from the totalitarian point of view."

"Japan's true aim was to drive the white man out of Asia."

"Germ warfare against the United States would escalate to war against all humanity."

"With luck we will be able to repulse the invaders before they land. At any rate, I can say that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading force. That is, we will be able to inflict extremely heavy damage on the enemy."

"The certain way to victory...lies in making everything on Imperial soil contribute to the war effort...combining the total material and spiritual strength of the nation..."

"It is all very well to be cautious, but if we are too cautious we will miss our opportunity."

"It is not possible to foretell the reaction of certain elements in the Army and Navy."

"I can say with confidence that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading force."

"The sword is our steel Bible!"

"In order to have enough of the raw materials...which will be lacking in wartime, we should plan to acquire and use foreign resources existing in our expected sphere of influence, such as Sakhalim, China, and the Southern Pacific."

"Now the opportunity to destroy the USSR has arrived."

"According to our belief, Japan was founded by the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, who is revered by the entire nation for her all-pervading virtue, and from whom our Imperial House is descended."

"A war minister is able to force the adoption of any measure desired by the Camp or to block any measure that meets his disapproval."

"If we have a thousand bamboo spears, there's nothing to worry about a war with the Soviet Union."

"Give me a Japanese division armed with bamboo spears and I'll wipe out the entire Russian Far Eastern Army."

"Frivolous thinking is due to foreign thought. Japan must no longer let the impudence of the white peoples go unpunished. It is the duty of Japan to fulfill her natural destiny, to cause China to respect the Japanese, to expel Chinese influence from Manchuria, and to follow the way of imperial destiny."

"The spirit of the Japanese nation is, by its nature, a thing that must be propagated over the seven seas and extended over the five continents. Anything that may hinder its progress must be abolished, even by force."

"We have no hesitation in declaring that we are a military nation- in the cause of Kodo and the highest morality."

"What sort of government is it that permits so many children to go to school hungry, without even a morsel of food in their stomachs? It cannot be! It must not be!"

"Let the League of Nations say whatever it pleases, let America offer whatever interference, let China decry Japan's action at the top of her voice, but Japan must adhere to her course unswervingly."

"It is Japan's mission to be supreme in Asia, the South Seas and eventually the four corners of the world."

"Unless you remove the weeds, a good crop will be ruined."

"Setbacks there and at home will only increase our strength..."

"The foundations of our Empire are now based more firmly than ever! The birth of a Crown Prince shows that the prosperity of the Imperial Household is increasing many times."

"It is now time for our nation to frustrate the wild dreams of the whites."

"In appointing our Ambassador to the United States at this important time, with the 1936 crisis ahead, such considerations as dignity, past career, equity and sentiment must be discarded and a man of ability chosen in the interests of the country. In the light of these considerations, we find Hiroshi Saito, present Minister of Holland, the right person for the post."

"I ask you to remember that the Japanese troops are a strictly disciplined force and perform their duties with as little harmfulness as possible."

"I was a Nazi and I remain one...The Germany of today is no longer a great nation, it has become a province of Europe."

"It's so long ago now. Even I don't know the truth. If I had ever known it, I have long forgotten it. All I know is that I took the blame as a good CO should have been and was punished accordingly."

"I admit willingly that after the Normandy battles, my unit was composed of young fanatic soldiers. Many of them had lost their parents, or brothers and sisters in the bombardments. Some had seen for themselves at Cologne where thousands of bodies were crushed after the terrorist raids. Their hatred of the enemy was such that I admit that I could not always control them. At Malmédy, there were, no doubt, some excesses."

"My boys may charge me with all they want. The main thing is, it helps them. They are not evil and no criminals. They are the products of total war, grown up on the streets of scattered towns without any education! The only thing [they] knew was to handle weapons for the Dream of [the] Reich. They were young people with a hot heart and the desire to win or to die, according to the word: right or wrong—my country!"

"When seeing today the defendants on the dock, don’t believe them to be the old Combat Group Peiper. All my old friends and comrades have gone before! These people who plead for mitigating circumstances are only the negative selection! The real outfit is waiting for me in Valhalla!"

"History is always written by the victor and histories of the vanquished belong to a shrinking circle of those who were there."

"Yasuji Okamura, commander of the Japanese forces in China, had this to say about the Chinese Nationalist Army: "The center of resistance was neither the four hundred million Chinese civilians, nor the two million-strong ragtag army composed of local troops. Instead, it was the Central Army, led by the young officers of the Whampoa Military Academy, with Chiang Kai-shek at its nucleus. In numerous major battles, the Central Army not only was the main force engaged in combat, but also oversaw the local troops who were increasingly losing the will to fight. The Central Army kept the local troops from wavering. As seen, training by Whampoa was thorough, and it was impossible to resolve the China Incident peacefully with the existence of such an army."

"Guns are not only for soldiers. Every person can own a gun. If they shoot, you shoot back."

"If you do not like it here, you can leave, but under the earth, not over it."

"Though it was the most efficient, Auschwitz was not necessarily the cruellest of the Nazi death camps. The first people to be gassed by the Third Reich were, as we have seen, German mental patients; they had been asphyxiated with pure carbon monoxide gas. This method was then exported to Eastern Europe, but using exhaust fumes, first in specially converted vans, then in static gas chambers equipped with large diesel engines. This was how people were killed at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, the camps set up to implement the 'Action Reinhard' in the autumn of 1941. Compared with inhaling Zyklon B, which killed most victims within five to ten minutes, this was a slow way to die. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, regarded his own methods as 'humane' compared with those of his counterpart at the last of these camps, the notoriously sadistic Christian Wirth."

"Wirth was a gross and florid man. My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time and often came back. Whenever he was there he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the necessity of this euthanasia operation, he was not speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr. Werner at T-4 had described it to me. He laughed. He spoke of 'doing away with useless mouths', and that 'sentimental slobber' about such people made him 'puke'."

"From my activity in the camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, I remember that Wirth in brutality, meanness, and ruthlessness could not be surpassed. We therefore called him 'Christian the Terrible' or 'The Wild Christian'. The Ukrainian guardsmen called him 'Stuka'. The brutality of Wirth was so great that I personally see it as a perversity. I remember particularly that on each occasion, Wirth lashed Ukrainian guardsmen with the whip he always kept..."

"If only someone had had the courage to kill Christian Wirth — then Aktion Reinhard would have collapsed. Berlin would not have found another man with such energy for evil and nastiness."

"To tell the truth, one did become used to it... they were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [extermination area] in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of black-blue corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity — it could not have. It was a mass — a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo."

"...We bow to the closest Slav, brother Czech, to apply our sovereignty as a small nation together with him in the common state. We are ready to stand guard over its life and to lay all the sacrifices on its altar. (...) However, we should be aware that our sovereignty is applied within the scope defined by the common agreement, otherwise, we have to apply a principle: a nation is more than a state."

"People ask whether what is being done with the Jews is Christian. Is it human? Is it not robbery? ... I ask is it Christian when the nation wants to free itself from its eternal enemy—the Jew? ... Love of self is a command from God, and this love of self commands me to remove ... everything that damages me or that threatens my life. I don't think I need to convince anyone that the Jewish element threatened the lives of Slovaks. ... It would have looked even worse if we hadn't pulled ourselves together in time, if we hadn't purged them from us. And we did so according to divine command: Slovak, cast off your parasite."

"The question [now] is how long will [Tiso’s] political convictions and especially his conscience as a priest let him march hand in hand with the National Socialist masters. Naturally, he does not like to do it, but is only compelled by circumstances. He is convinced, or at least he hopes, that if he stays in power then he can protect what he can and that, in putting into effect National Socialist methods, it will not come to extreme consequences. Only later will it be possible to judge if he calculated correctly."

"Everyone understands that the Holy See cannot stop Hitler. But who can understand that it does not know how to rein in a priest?"

"It is interesting how this little Catholic priest—Tiso—is sending us the Jews!"

"It's odd about war crimes. We seem to have tried people only if they've lost the war."

"He just didn't understand it, the captain. Killing people in war's something new? Now what in the hell else is war than killing people? And destroying their homes and their farms and their way of life: that's war! And who in the hell is hurt besides civilians? I sat and I heard the captain talk and I could almost cry: I thought of the thousands of men, thousands of women, thousands of children, thousands of babies slaughtered in Vietnam, the bodies rotting away. The captain didn't seem to know about them. I did: I had been to Vietnam."

"We thought, We will go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphies. Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst- kill. And get a big kill ratio in Vietnam. Get a big kill count. One thing at OCS was nobody said, "Now, there will be innocent civilians there." Oh sure, there will in Saigon. In the secure areas, the Vietnamese may be clapping the way the French in the '44 newsreels do, "Yay for America!" But we would be somewhere else: be in VC country. It was drummed into us, "Be sharp! Be on guard! As soon as you think these people won't kill you, ZAP! In combat you haven't friends! You have enemies!" Over and over at OCS we heard this, and I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone's bad."

"A village is the last damned place to RON: to remain overnight in. There would be Vietnamese all around us. Old mamasan might come with an AK-47 to show us whose hooch we were really in, with a VC battalion behind her."

"Everyone said eliminate them. I never met someone who didn't say it. A captain told me, "Goddamn it. I sit with my starlight scope, and I see VC at this village every night. I could go home if I could eliminate it." A colonel: he told me about a general's briefing where the general said, "By god, if you're chasing dead VC and you're chasing them to that village, do it! I'll answer for it! I'll answer for it!" The general was in a rage, saying, "Damn, and I'll lose my stars tomorrow if I tell those politicians who haven't been out of their bathtubs that." Americans would say, It's wrong, if American women fought in Vietnam, but the VC women will do it. And the VC kids: and everyone in our task force knew, We have to drop the bomb sometime. And still people ask me, "What do you have against women?" Damn, I have nothing. I think they're the greatest things since camels. And children: I've nothing against them. "Why did you kill them?" Well damn it! Why did I go to Vietnam? I didn't buy a plane ticket for it. A man in Hawaii gave it to me. "Why did you go? Why didn't you go to jail instead?" Oh, you dumb ass: if I knew it would turn out this way, I would have."

"We had a Plan, Medina was telling everyone now. And went to a Jeep: and taking a shovel out, he drew in the sand beneath him a map of our operation area. From left to right, this was Mylai Four, Mylai Five, Mylai ix, and Mylai One: or Pinkville, on the China sea. Pinkville now was the VC basecamp, Medina said, but we didn't want to get fired on from behind and we would start at Mylai Four. And continue on to Mylai Five, Mylai Six, and Mylai One. "We mustn't let anyone get behind us," Medina said, as I remember it. "Alpha and Bravo got messed up because they let the VC get behind them. And took heavy casualties and lost their momentum, and it was their downfall. Our job," Medina said, "is to go in rapidly and to neutralize everything. Kill everything." "Captain Medina? Do you mean women and children, too?" "I mean everything.""

"I know you'll say, "All right: if Medina said to kill everyone in Atlanta, would you?" And someday an Army officer may, the way this country is going now. I say this: if this were a hundred years ago, if I were a Union lieutenant and if Sherman told me, "Kill everyone in Atlanta," I guarantee I would have to. I once got a letter on Mylai saying, "My god! Why are the Yankees upset?" It said in the CIvil War, the Yankees were up against guerrillas, too. All the South's men, women, and children were out to defeat them. A very smart man in Missouri said, "If the Yankees come through here, do whatever you can. And poison the horses, and poison everyone's food. And invite the GIs-" I mean, "And invite the Yankees in, let them sleep with all your daughters, and if they're in the latrine for a pee: then shoot them. Let them believe you and kill them." The same as Vietnam: the people became guerrillas then. And used unconventional warfare: but the North wasn't about to sit in its trenches worrying, Gee, can I feed my horses here? It wasn't about to live afraid, and Sherman said if they wouldn't let the Army be, then there wouldn't be a Southerner left. He ordered his men to burn, to kill, and as soldiers say: to rape, pillage, and plunder the South. And there was no stopping him. The tactic worked. If you're a Yankee, you'll tell me, "Sherman's great," and you'll put a statue of Sherman in Central Park. As for me, I'd hate to see a monument to Calley's March to the Sea. But damn it! Sherman knew the solution to unconventional warfare."

"I don't wish to see anyone hurt: or anyone die for anyone else's sins. Not President Johnson or General Westmoreland or Captain Medina: I don't want to defame anyone to defend myself. I'm sorry about it: sometimes, my attorneys did to Medina what the prosecutor would do to me. "Now, wasn't the real villain in Mylai Captain Medina? And not that poor sweet lieutenant?" But the lieutenant wasn't all so sweet, and the captain was no more villain than any American from the President down. The guilt: as Medina said, we all as American citizens share it. I agree. I don't believe in goats, or pigeons, or patsies. I just don't believe they're in America's interest. For years, we Americans all have taken the easy way out. And been hypocritical fools. And gone around saying, "I'm nice. I'm sweet. I'm innocent." "You starved a thousand people today." "Who me?" "You threw away the scraps from the dinner table." "Aw-" "You killed a thousand people today." "Who me?" "You sent the Army to Mylai and-" "That wasn't me! That was Lieutenant Calley!" No, that isn't right for America. I say if there's guilt, we must suffer it. And learn. And change. And go on. For that is what guilt must be really for."

"In war, the dead people don't cry. The ones who are still alive do."

"Americans like to think that war is John Wayne. To get a grenade and a VC's throat, to shove the grenade right down it. Americans sit at television sets and say, "One hundred bodies. Boy!" And they think, Great, and they think that I'm the ugly one. I tell you, a hundred bodies still are a hundred people, and if they're dead their guts are just hanging out. And that's pretty horrible: I had once thought, Oh, war is hell. And then I saw war, and I could only sit and cry. And ask, Why did I do it? Why didn't I stand on a corner and say, "It's wrong." Why didn't I burn my draft card, and I wouldn't have had to go? I don't know."

"Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to thing that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things."

"The divergent views of Calley as a martyr by some and a murderer by others was reflective of a deeply divided U.S. citizenry, those for the war and those against it. Those who supported the war tended to see it as a means of stopping the spread of atheistic communism and protecting the people of South Vietnam from the oppression of a totalitarian government. Those who opposed it viewed it as variously a no-win war of attrition that was claiming the lives of tens of thousands of America's young men, an immoral war where hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians- ninety percent of whom were women and children- were being killed in bombing raids and through other means by military people from both sides wih callous disregard for the value of human life."

"The gap between those in the U.S. who were for the war and those against it widened as the Calley trial got underway in November of 1970. A hue and cry to "Free Calley" was heard from throngs of people from one side of the nation to the other, with the loudest voices coming from the Southern and Midwestern states. There were bumper stickers on countless cars and trucks, resolutions of support for the accused from half a dozen legislators, letters and telegrams by the boxful being received at the White House and at Calley's quarters at Ft. Benning, where he was under house arrest. A "Rally for Calley" was put on by the American Legion of Columbus, Georgia. A theme song that portrayed him as a martyr and scapegoat, titled "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley," could be heard on radio stations throughout the land."

"The widespread and highly emotional campaign to free Calley brought him a substantial degree of comfort, so much so that he was starting to think he had been acquitted. But a jury of his peers thought otherwise, and, in March of 1971, declared him guilty of murdering twenty-two "Oriental human beings" and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. The jury, by and large, regretted having to do it, but the evidence was overwhelming, the crime heinous. Calley seemed stunned. A large percentage of the American public was outraged, angry and loud in expressing disapproval of the verdict. Thompson felt that at least in thise one case justice was finally done, or so it seemed, for now. But President Richard Nixon- who had literally cringed over the idea that U.S. soldiers would be court-martialed in connection with war crimes in Vietnam- stepped in immediately as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to release Calley from the stockade, pending the approval of his conviction. Calley was placed under house arrest and allowed to live in his bachelor quarters at Ft. Benning. The announcement of the guilty verdict brouht on a convulsion of anger and protest among many U.S. citizens and a flood of emotionally charged letters and telegrams to President Nixon, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and other top-ranking government officials."

"After all was said and done, in the effort to court-martial those who were responsible for the murder of five hundred and four Vietnamese civilians, and the coverup which followed, only one man was found guilty of anything whatsoever in a court of law."

"Calley was convicted, Nixon had made it easy on him, five hundred and four people were dead in Vietnam, it was a war crime, no one paid for it."

"UK-based researcher Justin Brummer started studying songs of the Vietnam War while preparing his PhD. It soon became his main focus of interest, and today he has catalogued some 5,000 songs, including 91 that specifically reference the massacre. The vast majority of them deal with Lieutenant William Calley, the man who commanded the troops at My Lai and gave the order to kill civilians."

"Recalled to the United States over a year after the events took place, Calley was court-martialed beginning on November 10, 1970. Whatever horror the American public may have felt in learning about the killings, it didn’t initially extend to the man who ordered them. Calley’s conviction — the only one in connection with My Lai — caused a national uproar. President Richard Nixon received 5,000 telegrams on the subject, nearly all them in support of Calley. Meanwhile, a poll conducted by Louis Harris and Associates in April 1971 found that 77 percent of those surveyed thought Calley had been singled out as a scapegoat, and 65 percent disagreed with the conviction. That sentiment was clearly reflected in the music of the day. Brummer reports that from 1969 to 1973, pro-Calley songs outnumber anti-Calley songs 2-1. They justify his actions in a variety of ways: Calley was under attack, Calley was confused, and, perhaps most significantly, Calley was just following orders."

"Convicted for the premeditated murder of 22 civilians, Calley was initially sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end, he was saved from that fate by popular sentiment. Overwhelmed by the public’s demand to “free Calley,” President Nixon had him removed from the army stockade and placed under house arrest. His sentence was reduced twice; on November 9, 1974, less than three years after his conviction, Calley was released on parole. But the Lieutenant’s acclaim seemed to die as quickly as it came. Brummer hasn’t found a single pro-Calley song recorded after 1973; the post-war songs appear to be unanimous in their condemnation. In time, history found new heroes to tell stories about. And so you end up with songs about Hugh Thompson."

"Fifty years after the My Lai Massacre, Americans are still talking — and singing — about it. Back then, people praised the soldier who “followed orders” and condemned the soldier who listened to his own conscience. Today, they do the opposite. New songs shape old memories of an event that seems impossible to come to terms with. “People look back on it from a contemporary perspective and you get songs about a Hugh Thompson,” says Brummer. “They’re trying to correct it.”"

"It's hard to apologize for murdering so many people. But at least there's an acknowledgment of responsibility."

"We're a sick, sick, sick society If we don't set Lieutenant Calley free."

"William L Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty:’ The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and- destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Gong stronghold known as “Pinkville.” Calley has formally been charged with six specifications of mass murder. Each specification cites a number of dead, adding up to the 109 total, and charges that Calley did “with premeditation murder… Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.” The Army calls it murder; Calley, his counsel and others associated with the incident describe it as a case of carrying out orders... One man who took part in the mission with Calley said...We were told to just clear the area. It was a typical combat assault formation. We came in hot, with a cover of artillery in front of us, came down the line and destroyed the village. There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation. He isn’t guilty of murder.”"

"The whole operation took about 30 minutes, Meadlo said. As for Calley, Meadlo told of an incident a few weeks before Pinkville. “We saw this woman walking across this rice paddy and Calley said, ‘Shoot her,’ so we did. When we got there the girl was alive, had this hole in her side. Calley tried to get someone to shoot her again; I don’t know if he did.” In addition, Calley and Medina had told the men before Pinkville, Meadlo said, “that if we ever shoot any civilians, we should go ahead and plant a hand grenade on them.” Meadlo is not sure, but he thinks the feel of death came quickly to the company once it got to Vietnam. “We were cautious at first, but as soon as the first man was killed, a new feeling came through the company...almost as if we all knew there was going to be a lot more killing.”"

"In November 1970, Lt. William Calley (a Florida native born in 1943) went on trial for his life. He was being court-martialed by the U.S. military for his participation in the My Lai Massacre and was accused of killing twenty-two civilians. Even though twenty-six officers participated and an estimated five hundred South Vietnamese were killed, Calley was the only man tried and convicted. The debate surrounding Calley’s actions intensified after politicians became involved. Georgia governor and future President Jimmy Carter instituted “American Fighting Man’s Day,” and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their headlights on in support of Calley. Alabama governor George Wallace visited Calley in the stockade and personally requested that President Nixon issue a pardon. Edgar Whitcomb, the governor of Indiana at the time, asked that all state flags be flown at half-staff for Calley."

"Musicians around the country also came to Calley’s aid and wrote songs in his defense. “Big Bill” Johnson wrote a song called Set Lt. Calley Free, which stated “We’re a sick, sick society, we’ve nailed Lt. Calley to a tree…We Americans are tired of a war that can’t be won, where a soldier is charged with murder if he uses his gun.” Another song by C Company, featuring Terry Nelson, titled The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley features lyrics like “I’ve seen my buddies ambushed…all the rules are broken…it’s hard to judge the enemy”. The artist also criticised the anti-war movement, claiming that those “marching in the street…were helping our defeat”. Nelson Truehart wrote a song called Morning in My Lai, which asked Americans not to judge Calley because “after all, he’s just fighting for you and me.” While most of the songs were country and performed by southerners, many songs of multiple genres went beyond defending Calley and portrayed him as a scapegoat. Even anti-war songs like Hang Lt. Calley and The Cry of My Lai were more critical of the government than they were Calley."

"The fact is that Calley had just been following orders. There had been increasing pressure from commanders for higher kill counts, and his exact orders when entering My Lai were to search and destroy. No American volunteered or was drafted for the purpose of killing civilians. In fact, when Calley and his men first arrived, they tried very hard to win over the South Vietnamese. As time went on, they noticed the locals were purposefully not helping them fight the Vietcong. Soldiers faced violence from men, women, and children of all ages during combat. The Vietcong were also heinously murdering captured soldiers. On one occasion, Calley recalled a soldier who had been captured, skinned alive, and bathed in a salt solution. The next day, they found the man’s skin ripped from his body and strung on a pole, with his penis having also been cut off."

"The time has come to reconsider Lt. William Calley. He may not have been a saint, but he was following orders and certainly was not the only man who killed civilians. While he does not deserve a monument, his actions are important because they raise questions about our military and government. Does the United States only involve itself in just wars? What are the real, long term consequences of Sherman’s march and the total war tactics of The “Civil” War? Will the United States ever stop fighting wars and rebuilding foreign countries? These are just a few major points that make Calley’s story important from a historic perspective."

"My name is William Calley, I'm a soldier of this land I've tried to do my duty and to gain the upper hand But they`ve made me out a villain they have stamped me with a brand As we go marching on"

"C Company featuring Terry Nelson, "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley" (1971), Plantation Records, written by Julian Wilson & James M. Smith"

"I'm just another soldier from the shores of U.S.A. Forgotten on a battle field a thousand miles away While life goes on as usual from New York to Santa Fe As we go marching on"

"With our sweat we took the bunkers, with our tears we took the plain With our blood we took the mountains and they gave it back again Still all of us are soldiers, we`re too busy to complain As we go marching on"

"When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun And the great commander asks me, 'Did you fight or did you run?' I'll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun And this is what I`ll say: Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could It`s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good Yet there`s not a man among us would not have understood"

"As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon would pardon Calley."

"I'm going to go over and get them out of the bunker myself. If the squad opens up on them, shoot 'em."

"There is no need for a constitution regulating the conduct of the affairs of state. One thing suffices in the National Socialist state: a fanatical will based on faith in the Fuhrer."

"National Socialism has disappeared and today it would have no chance of returning. There were no gas chambers in the concentration camps (...) only huge kitchens. Already during the war, the Allies began to fabricate false evidence of Nazi crimes. Even today, if we take the thousand richest and most powerful people in the world, we find that a significant proportion of them are Jews. The first laws, defined as Hitler's racial laws, did not restrict the rights of Jews any more than those of blacks in various US states. The British and French did not behave very differently towards their subjects in their colonies. Hitler encouraged them in every way to leave Germany."

"I interviewed Erich Priebke. For me, he was always a human being, not a monster. And I still think he was created as the “Monster of the Ardeatine” and a “victim of a justice system driven by hatred”, as I have written many times. I also think that the scene of the crowd kicking his coffin – any coffin – is disgusting. I wanted to highlight the process of media transformation of a person into a monster, beyond his responsibilities. I mean that he was never seen as a defendant, but immediately as a monster. It was a caricature of him. That said, I have always believed that the Fosse Ardeatine massacre was a crime committed by both sides. Before the reprisal, there had been a terrorist act by the gappisti, ordered by the Italian Communist Party, which wanted to incite the Romans to rise up."

"I look at the prison where he is locked up awaiting a new trial [...]. One cannot help but admire the dignity with which he accepts, more than half a century after the crime of which he is accused, the entire solemn ritual of justice. [...] It was war. And war has nothing moral about it. Why hate? [...] Drop your sticks. And respect the wounded wolves of the world."

"And if Priebke had refused to obey Kappler, he would have been a hero. But he was not Salvo D'Acquisto, he was not a hero. He was a man with the intellectual and moral depth of a servant dressed in a soldier's uniform. And I would really like to see who, among those journalists, opinion makers and television presenters who today act so tough and “beautiful souls”, would have dared in 1944 to resist an order that came directly from Adolf Hitler."

"You could say he's my friend. [...] I consider him a German citizen, a Catholic Christian, a loyal soldier. [...] And then he's the only person over 70 behind bars who is innocent. It's scandalous, scandalous how Priebke has been treated. That's the scandal in Italy, not the dignified way in which refugees are being taken in at Lampedusa. Shame on you."

"Do not kill those cockroaches with a bullet - cut them to pieces with a machete."