Prisoners

"There are tough men but let me tell you I know from experience that really dangerous men have no pity. I'm not an unreasonable man but if you are a man and you take a liberty with me or cross me, then believe what I say: When it comes to retribution I have no pity or conscience. If that makes me the devil, then the devil I am, but I haven't got horns sticking out of my head or cloven hooves and a tail but if you're unlucky enough to have me come after you, beware cos hell's coming with me."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You must attack as soon as possible."

"This decision is absolutely contrary to my understanding of what the plan was to be in the event of an invasion."

"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."

"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..."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"A very clever man though perhaps not a very strong character."

"He is at pains to avoid making enemies. He is slow, but very methodical. He displays marked tactical ability, though he is inclined to spend overmuch time on his appreciation."

"What hurts me the most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction... a man like that besmirches the heroism of so many others at the last moment. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow."

"Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world."

"Hitler might have waged his war against the Soviet Union more intelligently. Again, he might have listened to the experts (Halder and Guderian among them), who advised him to concentrate German efforts on capturing Moscow rather than diverting Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group southwards towards Kiev. In a similar vein, Hitler might not have squandered his 6th Army so profligately at Stalingrad; Alan Brooke's fear was that Paulus might instead conquer the Caucasus, opening the way to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oilfields."

"The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Führer and Fatherland unto the end."

"Troops without ammunition or food. Effective command no longer possible. 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs. Further defence senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops."

"You are talking to dead men here."

"Everything you say, Reichenau, is totally unmilitaristic."

"Soldiers were and will remain soldiers. They fight, carrying out their duty, not thinking about the reasons, true to their military oath. And the beginning and the end of war is the business of politicians, to whom the situation at the front dictates these or other decisions."

"The unity of blood and soil must be restored."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If I think of all those homosexuals in Germany today, I think I'd hand my German passport back, if I had one."

"If there were mistakes, there were mistakes. But a man has to have a line of work, no?"

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"There is only one certainty in life... A strong man stands above and conquers all!"

"...pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage."

"...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."

"When I stand before the throne of God, I shall be judged innocent."

"I admire you, but in the end everybody talks."

"Don't worry. Your friends are dead and you are going to join them."

"Tyrannical towards himself, he must be tyrannical towards others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kind ship, love, friendship, gratitude and even honor must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and single minded passion for revolution."

"Its twenty-six articles [of Nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism], setting out the principles of the professional revolutionary, might have served as the Bolshevik oath. [Only might?] The morals of that party owed much to Nechaev as they did to Marx."

"He [Nechaev] was, in short, a Bolshevik before the Bolsheviks."

"In revolutionary circles, the word Nechaevism was long to be a term of harsh condemnation, a synonym for risky and reprehensible methods of attaining revolutionary goals. Lenin was to hear himself accused hundreds of times of ‘Nechaevist’ methods by his opponents."

"To weld the people into one single unconquerable and all-destructive force – this is our aim, our conspiracy, and our task."