Military Leaders From Germany

"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?"

"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?"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

"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?!'"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"I will simply not do penance."

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

"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.'"

"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.""

"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"."

"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."

"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 [[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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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"."

"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."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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;…"

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

"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."

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

"Regret is something for little children."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."