World War Ii

"The atomic age began on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped its first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, killing more than seventy thousand people, injuring an equal number, and destroying four square miles of Japan’s eighth-largest city. Three days later the United States dropped an equally destructive bomb on Nagasaki. At the time Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons to end the war quickly was scarcely questioned. Yet almost immediately afterward, the world public recognized a quantum change in modern warfare: a device threatening human life and the earth itself. Truman’s supporters insisted that the bomb had saved the hundreds of thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an amphibious invasion of the Japanese mainland and pointed to the even worse bombing atrocities during the war. His critics protested the callous and even unnecessary destruction of an enemy about to collapse, when either a demonstration test or a blockade could have convinced Japan to capitulate. Some also suspected that this US show of force was designed to intimidate Stalin and check Soviet designs in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world."

"The majority of primary data on radiation-induced cancers in humans come predominantly from atomic bomb and nuclear accident survivors, as well as the medically exposed. A number of studies on survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan demonstrated a greatly increased incidence of various cancers among survivors (Folley et al., 1952; Watanabe et al., 1972; Wakabayashi et al., 1983; Carmichael et al., 2003)."

"If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people must unite, or they will perish."

"I gave careful thought to what my advisors had counseled. I wanted to weigh all the possibilities and implications... General Marshall said in Potsdam that if the bomb worked we would save a quarter of a million American lives and probably save millions of Japanese... I did not like the weapon... but I had no qualms if in the long run millions of lives could be saved."

"Socialist physicians wanted to legalize abortion; Nazi physicians saw abortion as a feminist plot designed to sap the strength of the nation."

"The Nazi medical community also published special journals designed either to popularize the new racial ideal or to keep Nazi physicians abreast of social and racial policy. “Ziel und Weg” was the primary journal responsible for articulating Nazi philosophy in the sphere of medicine. In 1931 it began publishing in editions of 3,000 copies; by 1934 this number had grown to 16,000; and by 1939 the journal was publishing 40,000 copies twice a month. The Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) published the popular health magazine “Neues Volk” (New people), issued as the successor to the pre-Nazi journal “Das Horrohr”, in editions that ran as high as 360,000 copies (in 1939); the office also published an in-house journal called the “Informationsdienst” (Information service) to keep its members informed on issues of racial policy. Circulation of the “Informationsdienst” was deliberately limited to 5,000 copies in order to be able to include confidential information; readers were asked not to repeat information published in the journal unless they withheld the source. Published from 1934 to 1944 the “Informationsdienst” today serves as one of the most revealing sources of information on Nazi racial policy."

"Why did physicians join the Nazi party in such numbers? Professional opportunism certainly played a role: many reasoned that by driving out the Jews, jobs could be created for non-Jewish physicians-an important motive, given the overcrowding and financial stress suffered by the profession in the years before the rise of the Nazis (see Chapter 6). The traditionally conservative character of the medical profession was another factor. Prior to 1933, many German physicians identified with the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, a conservative and nationalistic party that eventually threw its support to Hitler. Most physicians shared a strong sense of national pride: in the spring of 1933, for example, the “Deutsches Arzteblatt” noted that most German physicians had taken part in World War I and that 1,000 had died “on the field of honor.” In the years preceding the triumph of the Nazis, physicians were faced with a series of economic shocks that moved many to realign their politics. Impoverishment after the war and economic collapse during the final years of the Weimar Republic polarized the profession politically. At the same time, physicians warned of a “crisis in medicine,” a crisis variously construed as the bureaucratization specialization, or scientization of medicine-problems blamed on the socialists, the Jews, or the numerous quacks that eternally plague the profession. Physicians expressed a desire to win back “the confidence of the people.”"

"The Nazis found biology and medicine a suitable language in which to articulate their goals; scientists found the Nazis willing to support many of their endeavors. Furthermore, racial hygiene was not “imposed on” the German medical community; physicians eagerly embraced the racial ideal and the racial state. This in fact was perceived by observers at the time. In 1933 Fritz Lenz noted: Whatever resistance the idea of racial hygiene may have encountered in previous times among German doctors, this resistance exists no longer. The German core [Kern] within the medical community has recognized the demands of German racial hygiene as its own; the medical profession has become the leading force in making these demands. Lenz than cited the words of Gerhard Wagner, leader of the German medical profession: Knowledge of racial hygiene and genetics has become, by a purely scientific path, the knowledge of an extraordinary number of German doctors. It has influenced to a substantial degree the basic world view of the State, and indeed may even be said to embody the very foundations of the present state [“Staatsraison”]."

"The single most important classes of journals that, generally speaking did “not” survive the Nazi seizure of power were those publishing in the field of social hygiene (“Sozialhygiene”). These were journals concerned primarily with broader social or public health aspects of medicine, often from a socialist or communist point of view. The journal “Soziale Medizin”, for example, folded in the first year of Nazi rule, as did “Der Sozialistische Arzt”, the official journal of the Association of Socialist Physicians."

"We should not allow our judgment of the ethical character of Nazi medical practice to hinge entirely on whether we consider it to have been based on “genuine science”. One cannot (or at least should not) radically divide the practice of science from its product science is, among other things, a social activity, and the politics of those who practice it is part of that science. Furthermore, we miss something if we assume at the outset a fundamental hostility between science and a form of political practice such as National Socialism. This was not how scientists themselves viewed the matter[..]"

"The Nazi medical experiments and even the program for the destruction of “lives not worth living” represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg. In fact, the ideological structure we associate with National Socialism was deeply embedded in the philosophy and institutional structure of German biomedical science long before the beginning of the euthanasia program in 1939-and to a certain extent, even before 1933. The published record of the German medical profession makes it clear that many intellectuals cooperated fully in Nazi racial programs, and that many of the social and intellectual foundations for these programs were laid long before the rise of Hitler to power. What I want to argue in addition to this, however (and here I shall be drawing upon a growing body of recent German scholarship on this question) is that biomedical scientists played an active, even leading role in the initiation, administration, and execution of Nazi racial programs. In this sense the case can be made that science (especially biomedical science) under the Nazis cannot simply be seen in terms of a fundamentally “passive” or “apolitical” scientific community responding to purely external political forces; on the contrary, there is strong evidence that scientists actively designed and administered central aspects of National Socialist racial policy."

"American eugenicists rejected the entire concept of birth control because it was associated, in their view, with an “antibaby strike” on the part of emancipated women. Curiously, at the same time that racial hygienists warned of a declining population, conservative apologists for the Pan-German League argued that overseas colonies were needed to relieve the “overcrowding” caused by Germany’s rapidly growing population. Similar contradictions would persist in the Nazi period. Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in 1933 thus found it possible to warn of “race suicide” (caused by the declining birthrate) in one breath and then to call for the need to acquire “Lebenstraum” for Germany’s growth, in the next. Such pronouncements make one suspect that population concerns were (then as now) more the product of political interests than of incontrovertible facts."

"As the Nazi regime moved toward war, Hitler authorized state and party planners to proceed form the exclusionary policies of emigration, incarceration, and sterilization to the most radical exclusionary solution of killings. The first group targeted were the handicapped. They were excluded by being institutionalized, but this was not enough. Hostile to their existence, institutions reduced services and sought to cut the costs of caring for mental and disabled patients. Excluded, incarcerated, sterilized, and neglected, the handicapped were viewed as expendable, and thus a logical progression led to the killing of the handicapped in the so-called euthanasia program. The other group of undesirables-the “Asozialen” were treated similarly: those committed to institutions by the courts were among the first killed; others were later selected for killing when euthanasia was applied within the concentration camps."

"The Nazi regime issued numerous laws and regulations during the 1930s to implement its eugenic and racial program, and, as we shall see, the practitioners of race hygiene-anthropologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, and physicians-were involved in drafting and applying them. Of course, their role had changed. They profited from being governed by a regime that favored race hygiene, but they also had to accommodate themselves to the regime’s political needs. They continued to consider the Nazis “vulgar and ordinary” and Nazi anti-Semitism somewhat extreme, but they accepted, even applauded, Nazi policies because they reflected an ideology they as individuals and as scientists had long supported. But even though they may have tried to maintain a certain scientific detachment, their assistants and students enthusiastically embraced all aspects of Nazi ideology. At times, however, Nazi ideology made life inconvenient for the race scientists. Fritz Lenz discovered the futility of objecting to one of Heinrich Himmler’s pet projects. At a committee meeting attended by Himmler, Lenz opposed equality for illegitimate children because he believed it would have a negative impact on the quality of the transmitted germ plasm. Himmler disagreed. The powerful Reich leader SS argued that illegitimacy was not a disgrace in the “real world” and that equality was needed to assure a high birthrate and to prevent the spread of homosexuality and abortion. German science was rapidly synchronized (“gleichgeschaltet”) with Nazi ideology after 1933, especially after scientists opposed to the new regime, as well as those with the wrong ethnic background, were fired. There was no effective resistance. Still, not all science was dominated by Nazi ideology in disregard of the German scientific tradition. For example, the attempt to establish an Aryan physics failed as older traditions reasserted themselves. Such restraints did not apply in the biological sciences concerned with the questions of race and heredity. There Nazi ideology and German scientific tradition complemented each other. Without hesitation, the race scientists fired their Jewish colleagues."

"Against the handicapped, the regime enacted into law the program long advocated by race scientists to control a population considered degenerate and inferior. The so-called sterilization law, promulgated in July 1933, served throughout the Nazi period as the model for all eugenic legalisation. It introduced compulsory sterilization for persons suffering from a variety of mental and physical disorders and in the process defined the groups to be excluded from the national community. This legislation was followed in October 1935 by the Marriage Health Law, which mandated screening the entire population to prevent marriages of persons considered carriers of hereditary degeneracy, particularly those covered by the sterilization law. Numerous ordinances defining and enlarging these two laws followed. As race hygiene had always linked the handicapped to criminal and antisocial behavior, the bureaucrats drafting this legislation believed that their eugenic laws should also cover “inherited criminal traits.” To accomplish this, the regime enacted in November 1933 the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and the Law on Measures of Security and Reform. The new provisions- articles 220a and 42a-m of the penal code-gave the courts substantial new powers to confine and punish persons considered habitual criminals. In addition to the penalties already provisioned by the penal code, the court were authorized to commit the ”Asozaielen” to state hospitals, to impose protective custody or longer prison terms on habitual criminals, to mandate castration for sexual offenders, and to prohibit defendants from practicing their professions or occupations."

"Hereditary theory remained a point of political contention throughout the period of Nazi rule (and indeed, for some time after). In 1939 the Moscow Anthropological Museum sponsored an exhibit on “Race and Race Theory” attacking the Nazi ideal of Nordic supremacy as part of an “effort by the German ruling class to justify its domination over subjugated classes as ‘natural’.” Nazi physicians reporting on the exhibit claimed that by virtue of their support for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Soviet biologists had abandoned the goal of “pure science”; Nazi physicians also suggested that the Soviets hoped, with the help of the Lamarckian doctrine, to “disprove the existence of racial boundaries” and thereby “facilitate the assimilation of Jews into the country.” By this time, however, Russia was not the only country issuing official proclamations on the nature of heredity. In 1937 the Nazi party published its official “Handbook for the Hitler Youth”, issued as required reading for the 7 million members of this organization. The “Handbook” presented a chapter titled “Race Formation: heredity and Environment,” including discussions of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection, and the Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics."

"The Nazi definition of the role of women actually expanded and contracted with party needs. Prior to Hitler’s ascension to power, men and women worked together. Following 1933, Hitler made employed women give up jobs to return to the home and raise families. After 1936, however, when he needed them to work, he put them in factories. Because of Hitler’s war preparation, the Nazis moved to improve the employment of women in the workplace. Despite all of these changing roles, however, at no time did women have any demonstrable influence over policies that affected themselves, their families, or the Nazi Party. They were not placed in positions where they wielded political power or party and state responsibility."

"From its inception, the Nationalist Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP Nazi Party) had no place for women in its ranks. At its first general meeting in early 1921 a unanimous resolution passed that stated that women could never be accepted either into the leadership of the party or into any governing committee. National Socialism viewed German women as wives and mothers who did not wish to work in factories or offices or even represent themselves in the government. A cozy home, a beloved husband, and a multitude of happy children were their only aspirations. Hitler believed in suppressing the drive for women’s emancipation by emphasizing the differences between men and women and the woman’s role as the preserver of the biological inheritance, domestic virtue, and even eternal morality."

"The Nazis were strongly opposed to feminism and held that feminists were unduly influenced by both Jews and Marxists, had an unhealthy preoccupation with their sexuality, and were determined to destroy Christian-German life. The Nazis discouraged dieting, cosmetics, smoking, and foreign dress. German couples needed medical examinations to marry, and the fear of “hereditary defects” led to a black market in documents proving Aryan ancestry. Wives of SS men were forced to attend special bride schools. Almost 28,000 so-called undesirable women underwent forced sterilization by 1934. Aryan men were encouraged to divorce Jewish wives, and their children were taken from the mother. In 1939, it was announced that Jewish women could seek abortions, but non-Jewish women could not. Non-Jewish women who did not marry or have children were harassed."

"The tragedy is not that nonviolence did not work against the Nazis, but that it was so seldom utilized ...The churches as a whole were too docile or anti-semitic, and too ignorant of the nonviolent message of the Gospel, to act effectively to resist the Nazis or act in solidarity with the Jews."

"For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German."

"Strictly speaking, the message of National Socialism was not radically different from that of other forms of egalitarianism and socialism: strong antibourgeois sentiments expressed through a radical empowerment of a selected group of people at the expense of other groups… What made National Socialism novel and different from earlier forms of socialism was an attempt to blend the ideas of social justice and revolutionary nationalism."

"The response of the Christian faithful to racism was not uniform. A population as enormous as that of Christian women could not be socially, politically, or temperamentally monolithic. Michael Phayer states that Protestants were more tolerant toward Nazi racism than Catholics. Protestant women were more nationalistic than Catholics, which made them more receptive to National Socialism. Some Protestant women, however, also fought National Socialist ideology and the paganism it espoused. Scholt-Klink promoted her own women’s organization by playing Catholic an Protestant’s women’s organizations against each other. The experiences of German women living under Nazi rule varied. As pointed out in “When Biology Became Destiny”, Nazism did not begin with overt attacks against the emancipation of women. It was cloaked in extreme nationalism calling for love of the country, reduction of the unemployment by keeping women out of the workforce, and reversion of women back to the role of motherhood. What can be said of the attitude of German women toward the racism of Hitler? A great deal of information has been derived from studying the most prominent organizations of women. Many Protestant and Catholic leaders were aware that if Germany were victorious, there would be a showdown between Christianity and the neopaganism of National Socialism. Some courageous women dared to challenge the establishment. For example, Agnes von Grone and Helene Weber both spoke out against anti-Christian elements in Nazism. Ultimately, faith, not feminism, made Nazi women reject Nazi neopaganism. Institutional and religious elements overwhelmed social factors."

"One of the leading research efforts of Germany’s racial hygiene institutes was twin studies (for example, studies of identical twins raised apart) designed to determine the relative importance of heredity an environment. Suggestions that the study of twins might be used for this purpose date back at least as far as Francis Galton’s 1875 “History of Twins as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture.” In the Third Reich, twin studies were lavisihly funded as part of an effort to prove that heredity was the key to many human talents and imperfections. Twin studies purportedly demonstrated the heritability of everything from epilepsy, criminality, memory, and hernias to tuberculosis, cancer, schizophrenia, and divorce. In 1933 Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer published a book purporting to provide exact ratios of the relative influence of heredity and environment in a wide range of bodily traits; he derived his data from the study of several thousand identical and nonidentical twins. (see Figure 8). Verschuer’s studies were followed by hundreds of others. By 1936 Otto Reche’s Institute for the Study of Race and Volk had examined 12,50 pairs of twins, recording forty-two separate physical or physiognomic traits for each pair. Eugen Fischer called twin studies “the” single most important research tool in the field of racial hygiene; Verschuer called twin research the “sovereign method for genetic research in humans” Racial hygienists were able to convince Nazi authorities that twin studies warranted substantial government support: in 1939 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick ordered the registration of all twins, triplets, or quadruplets born in the Reich, for the express purpose of research to isolate the effects of nature and nurture in the formation of the human racial constitution."

"For the Nazis, race conflict was the driving motor of history. Hard, vigorous, masculine struggle against degenerate races, and against the degenerate members of their own group, marked the synthesis of race-based history and anthropology, a particularly radical, Nazi version of Social Darwinism. Each group, in this view, had an inherent drive to flourish, which necessitated expanded living space and continual conflict with other races. Out of the harshness of struggle, a still more vital and creative race would emerge. Since nature is “aristocratic” in essence, it favors the victory of the strong while it demands the “annihilation or unconditional surrender of the weaker.” Indeed, Judaism is nature-destroying, because its ideology, Marxism, “rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.” History was fast approaching that cataclysmic moment of decision, a fateful clash worthy of Revelations."

"All this would change when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 because his deductions from the war differed in important respects from those of others. War had been an intended and even a preferred part of National Socialist policy from the beginning, not so much out of a preference for fighting for its own sake, but from the entirely accurate conviction that the aim of German expansion could be secured only by war. Germany was to seize the agricultural land needed to feed its population, a population that would grow further as it obtained such land, and which would accordingly expand its needs and its lands into the indefinite future. This crude Social Darwinism, in which racial groups fought for land which could provide the means of subsistence, expelling or exterminating but never assimilating other groups, was derived from a view of history as deterministic as that of Marx, but substituting race for class as the key to understanding.’ Its application had internal as well as external implications."

"The total state led by the Fuhrer was, however, never simply a dictatorship of one man. The new politics advocated by the Nazis, the vast project of social and biological engineering that they instigated, required popular participation. Goebbels, as minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, made clear that the regime, the express “will” of the nation, also had to win to its side those elements of the national community that still resisted the siren song of National Socialism. They could not just be “terrorized” but had to be won over through hard work, including propaganda. But dissent could not be tolerated. The claims of the Nazi movement and state upon the individual were total. The National Socialist Revolution, asserted Goebbels, “does not stop for [the realm] of private life.” These totalizing ambitions required not just obedience but also participation. The state had to “set the masses in motion,” as Goebbels put it. If Hitler did not deign to intervene directly in every policy matter, Hitler’s followers believed that “working toward the Fuhrer,” pursuing his goals without his express orders, placed them in accord with the movement of history. Nazi views on the total state and popular mobilization concurred with strategic doctrine, Hitler’s as well as the Wehrmacht’s. In Nazi doctrine, war would allow the race to flourish; to pursue the war successfully, the race had to be purified. Since the coming conflict was never simply a campaign of territorial conquest but always a racial, ideological war, the links between domestic and foreign policy were particularly tight in Nazi Germany."

"Nazism, for all its revolutionary jargon, represented in its essence a reaction against the nineteenth-century faith in human progress. It was an attempt to seize history by the collar and frog-march it in a direction determined primary by the selfish interests and obsessive beliefs of those in power. From the outset it wan an movement, offering its adherents the spurious solidarity of the street gang and the prospective enjoyment of stolen booty."

"Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism."

"As soon as he became Chancellor... Hitler prevailed upon President Hindenburg to call new elections. ...[H]e hoped to gain enough strength in the Reichstag to pass an Enabling Act, which would allow him to . ...During the campaign, the NSDAP ...exploited the fact that they now had some control... Prussian Minister of the Interior Goering established a 50,000-strong auxiliary police force, including 25,000 SA members and 15,000 SS men. This both legitimised National Socialist terror against their political opponents—especially the Social Democrats and the Communists—and shifted the burden for funding... the NSDAP’s machine... to the state.. claiming it was needed to forestall an imminent revolt from the left. ...[T]his ...heightened the ...hysteria among the electorate, which ...boosted support for the NSDAP."

"The gentlemen of the National Socialist party call the movement they have unleashed a national revolution, not a National Socialist one. So far, the relationship of their revolution to socialism has been limited to the attempt to destroy the social democratic movement, which for more than two generations has been the bearer of socialist ideas and will remain so. If the gentlemen of the National Socialist Party wanted to perform socialist acts, they would not need an Enabling Law. They would be assured of an overwhelming majority in this house. Every motion submitted by them in the interest of workers, farmers, white-collar employees, civil servants, or the middle class could expect to be approved, if not unanimously, then certainly with an enormous majority."

"Soon [Nazi] Germany will not be any different from Bolshevik Russia; the heads of enterprises who do not fulfill the conditions which the ‘Plan’ prescribes will be accused of treason against the German people, and shot."

"Having first robbed the Jews, the Nazis are beginning to rob the Church, and later will almost certainly expropriate what is left of the bourgeoisie property."

"Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed Nation Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food-stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism."

"[B]oth the communists and fascists revolutions definitely abolished laissez-faire capitalism in favor of one or another kind and degree of state capitalism."

"In no way was Hitler the tool of big business. He was its lenient master. So was Mussolini except that he was weaker."

"And now the beginning of the expropriation of church lands in Austria, have all revealed the true face of National Socialism, which more and more among pious Germans is called, under their breaths, ‘the brown Bolshevism.’"

"Marxism would be a phenomenon of little more than historical interest, seeing that it has failed even in its principal stronghold, were it not so closely akin to National Socialism. National Socialism would have been inconceivable without Marxism."

"It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy, for if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. In actuality, however, we face a totally different situation. At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one's fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies."

"In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official , is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community."

"Today people commonly use the word "fascism" instead of "national socialism." Presumably this is what you are asking. No. Hitlerism had racism as its essential dogmatic foundation. But in a multiethnic country, such an ideology has no chance of success. And Russia has never had such a movement. But if we speak about the rampage of militant chauvinism, then it exists--and in bloody form--in several republics of the former U.S.S.R., but certainly not in Russia. And if one were to count all the instances of violence perpetrated on nationalist grounds and in local wars, all of them took place outside of Russia and were not perpetrated by Russians."

"Is it really true that German fascist troops are invincible, as is ceaselessly trumpeted by the boastful fascist propagandists? Of course not! History shows that there are no invincible armies and never have been. Napoleon's army was considered invincible but it was beaten successively by Russian, English and German armies. Kaiser Wilhelm's German Army in the period of the first imperialist war was also considered invincible, but it was beaten several times by the Russian and Anglo-French forces and was finally smashed by the Anglo-French forces. The same must be said of Hitler's German fascist army today. This army had not yet met with serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance. And if, as a result of this resistance, the finest divisions of Hitler's German fascist army have been defeated by our Red Army, it means that this army too can be smashed and will be smashed as were the armies of Napoleon and Wilhelm."

"When the Nazis invaded and occupied other countries in Europe, particularly those considered Aryan, they began to claim for the Third Reich children fathered by German troops. A few Lebensborn homes were established outside Germany. In some cases, mothers were kidnapped with their children. As time went on, a vast operation of baby snatching to supply the foreseeable need for manpower was carried out under Himmler’s direction. The children were selected according to strict physiognomic rules and measurements based on race. The undesirables were sent to labor camps or simply eliminated-by allowing them to freeze to death, for example. Severe discipline, brandings, and injections to hasten maturity were common. The preferred children were separated from their mothers indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, adopted by German families, and repossessed at puberty by the state. By this large-scale breeding and resettlement project in positive eugenics, Himmler and his associates exploited scientific research for social purposes-to augment the German birthrate and to monitor the racial purity of the population. According to Hillel and Henry, these goals were never achieved, despite Himmler’s personal interest. Little wonder. Not only did this mad Faustian raid on scientific knowledge violate the sanctity of human life, it relied on erroneous science."

"He continued with a leer: “If some of you girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will be glad to assign you one of my adjutants for whose ancestry I can vouch I can promise you a thoroughly enjoyable experience” (quoted in Richard Hanser, “A Noble Treason, 220). Giesler’s performance inspired foot-shuffling, murmurs, heckling, whistles, women and men walking out, and, finally, a full-fledged protest. SS men at the doors could not control the demonstration, which spilled out into Ludwigstrasse. Arm in arm, the students sang and chanted slogans in the only open display of political defiance that ever occurred in Nazi Germany. A month later, three uncowed student distributors of the pamphlets, the leaders of the White Rose Resistance group, were beheaded by guillotine on Himmler’s explicit orders."

"Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending 'special contributions' to the party, the businessmen, who had to welcome Hitler's regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned... Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party,... recognized that the 'Nazi regime has ruined German industry.'"

"The enemy is cruel and implacable. He is out to seize our lands, watered with our sweat, to seize our grain and oil secured by our labor. He is out to restore the rule of landlords, to restore Tsarism, to destroy national culture and the national state existence of the Russians, Ukrainians, Byelo-Russians, Lithuanians, Letts, Esthonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanians and the other free people of the Soviet Union, to Germanize them, to convert them into the slaves of German princes and barons. Thus the issue is one of life or death for the Soviet State, for the peoples of the USSR; the issue is whether the peoples of the Soviet Union shall remain free or fall into slavery."

"I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more."

"I have a message to the neo-Nazis, to the white nationalists, and to the neo-Confederates: Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause. And believe me, I knew the original Nazis, because you see, I was born in Austria in 1947, shortly after the Second World War. And growing up, I was surrounded by broken men, men who came home from a war filled with shrapnel and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you: that these ghosts you idolize spent the rest of their lives living in shame and right now, they’re resting in hell."

"A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do things that to us would seem horrifying. The Nazis were more scientific than the present rulers of Russia, and were more inclined towards the sort of atrocities that I have in mind."

"Though we know that National Socialist power must be broken by military means, we are trying to achieve a renewal from within of the severely wounded German spirit. This rebirth must be preceded, however, by the clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves, and by an uncompromising battle against Hitler and his all too many minions…"