"The first concentration camps sprang up like mushrooms during Hitler's first year of power. By the end of 1933 there were some fifty... mainly set up by the S.A. to give its victims a good beating and then ransom them to their relatives of friends for as much as the traffic would bear. It was largely a crude form of blackmail. Sometimes, however, the prisoners were murdered, usually out of pure sadism and brutality. ...[B]efore the end mercifully came, millions of hapless persons were done to death and millions of others subjected to debasement and torture more revolting than all but a few minds could imagine. But at the beginning—in the Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany probably never numbered more than from twenty to thirty thousand at any one time, and many of the horrors later invented and perpetrated by Himmler's men were as yet unknown. The extermination camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where the inmates were used as guinea pigs for Nazi "medical research," had to wait for the war."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
William L. Shirer, Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1959)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Concentration camp
56 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Concentration camp →
Related Quotes
"Total loyalty to the movement, which is the psychological basis for total domination, can be expected, Arendt contend…"
"Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible…"
"... nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so re…"
"This is a history of the : a history of a vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and …"
"The Gulag had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the forced-labor brigades... in Siberia from the seventeenth century …"
"Eastern Prussia was a battlefield during World War I years. And right from here, on September 1, 1939, began the spar…"
"...[T]here remains time to turn back the constitutional clock and roll back excessive post-9/11 powers before we turn…"
"Once a refugee, forever a refugee. Roads back to the lost (or rather no longer existing) home paradise have been all …"
"The hallmarks of a regime which flouts the rule of law are, alas, all too familiar: the midnight knock on the door, t…"
"Until the very end... Foucault continued to investigate the "process of subjectivization" that, in the passage from t…"