People Indicted For War Crimes

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

"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."

"Fate will not be confined by paragraphs."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."