Executed People

"I had nothing to do with concentration camps - Himmler's work. There was a labor minister, Ley, whose position is like your John Lewis in America. My duties were to assign POW and foreign labor to factories or whatever work had to be done. I had nothing to do with punishment, criminals, and so forth. That's Himmler's work. If someone had told me as a seaman I should have engaged in politics I would have taken it as an insult. After my return from France, when I found the workers in the Schweinfurt factory all divided up into groups, many parties - I want to give you an honest reason - that's why I became a National Socialist. In 1922-23 I knew, by fate, I must find a solution to the labor and social problem."

"Only Communists and Social Democrats who acted against the state were incarcerated. Most of the Communists and Social Democrats I had known became Nazis later. Only those who were doing anything against the state were thrown in concentration camps."

"America is so big that it cries for work. In Germany, if you tried to find work, you couldn't. In America, it was a strange economy which caused unemployment. German unemployment was due to the boycott of German goods. Not an official boycott. The world market refused to accept German goods. France, England, and America refused. Germany had no colonies and she had to export manufactured goods for grain. We had nothing to speak of. We managed to live during the war by rations. We all lived on a strict ration - even ministers in the government like myself - and we lived on things from the conquered countries, including Africa and Russia."

"That man who is responsible for slave labor in Germany does not have my sympathy. I did not like the whole idea of what he did. After all, there are limits to what one can do with foreign populations in the forced labor business. In the first place, the whole idea is completely unproductive. One needs three or four men to watch one compulsory worker. Sauckel deserves the severest punishment."

"Bedell Smith: Well, in any case, you are going to be shot. Seyss-Inquart: That leaves me cold. Bedell Smith: It will."

"Himmler, Bormann, and Goebbels, they were probably bad fellows."

"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."

"Although as a sailor I despised politics - for I loved my sailor's life and still love it today - conditions forced me to take up a definite attitude towards political problems."

"Most of these handpicked leaders were lawyers, and a few were physicians or educators; most had earned doctoral degrees. Among the more exotic specimens were Otto Ohlendorf, a handsome but argumentative young economist who had fallen into disfavor with Himmler."

"Now, the prosecution will probably bring up Ohlendorf, who worked for me and who admitted before his tribunal he killed ninety thousand Jews. I was quite upset when I heard Ohlendorf. I didn't know things like that existed. And secondly, I didn't know Ohlendorf was involved."

"I'm a sailor, not a politician."

"I always had the feeling that Ohlendorf was spiritually depressed. I mentioned several times to my wife, when we had Ohlendorf to dinner, that he seemed like a man who just could not be happy. Ohlendorf must have been very depressed on account of that experience. He could not laugh heartily - and a man who cannot is either depressed, or sick, or bad. I thought he had something in his soul which bothered him."

"The treatment of the Germans by the Allies was at least as bad as the shooting of those Jews. The bombing of cities with men, women, and children burning with phosphorus - these things were all done by the Allies."

"Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the State."

"I surrendered my moral conscience to the fact that I was a soldier, and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine."

"Those Jews stood up, were lined up, and were shot in true military fashion. I saw to it that no atrocities or brutalities occurred."

"There were a large number of Jews who held more favorable positions than they should have, according to their percentage of the population. Germans should have held those positions."

"Fascism is a purely stately principle. Mussolini said in 1932, 'The first thing is the state - and from the state are derived the rights and fate of the people. Humans come second.' In National Socialism, it was the opposite. People and humans come first, and the state is secondary."

"The men of my group who are under indictment here were under my military command. If they had not executed the orders which they were given, they would have been ordered by me to execute them. If they had refused to execute the orders they would have had to be called to account for it by me. There could be no doubt about it. Whoever refused anything in the front lines would have met immediate death. If the refusal would have come about in any other way, a court martial of the Higher SS and Police Leader would have brought about the same consequences."

"There was no distinction made between Gypsies and Jews, the same order applied to both."

"In order to provide the German housewife, above all mothers of many children...with tangible relief from her burdens, the Fuhrer has commissioned me to bring into the Reich from the eastern territories some four to five hundred thousand select, healthy, and strong girls."

"In the child, we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently."

"I always had the impression that Rosenberg embodied German mysticism. I felt that he belonged to the Romantic era and that there was only a slight whiff of modernity about him. There was nothing unified or organized about the man. Now I want to say something terrible, which is not for the trial. This pure theoretician carries the main guilt of all those who sit here on the defendants' bench, although he carries that guilt to a certain extent innocently. In my opinion, he had a tremendous influence on Hitler, during the period when Hitler still did some thinking - later that stopped. I mean about between the years 1923 and 1928 Rosenberg influenced Hitler. Let me explain. Hitler was a man who lived in the present and was a tremendously active individual. Rosenberg's importance exists because his ideas, which were only theoretical, became in the hands of Hitler a reality and actually transpired."

"I am dying innocent. The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany! God protect my family!"

"Rosenberg was completely areligious. That was the deepest of his defects. Rosenberg has a one-track mind. He is a pedant. One gathers the impression certainly that he never obtained knowledge from his surroundings, which would be necessary in order to form new philosophic ideas, but he obtained his ideas from books and from his own mind, which was not subject to the influences of reality. Rosenberg had less influence among the old National Socialists than one would believe. But among the youth his ideas played a great part because they were utilized in every school. The tragic thing is that Rosenberg's fantastic theories were actually put into practice."

"A party philosopher who was interested in historical research and had no idea of the violence which his philosophy was inciting in the twentieth century."

"Rosenberg now envisaged not only a German protectorate over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia ('Baltica'), but also an expanded Ukraine, a Caucasian federation - perhaps even a Crimean Muftiate and a 'Pan-Turanic' bloc in Soviet Central Asia. Appeals were directed at ethnic minorities, notably the Chechens, Karachai and Balkars, in the hope of stripping away all Russia's imperial possessions, to leave nothing more than a rump Muscovy. In truth, neither Hitler nor Goebbels had ever sincerely believed in harnessing the power of East European nationalism. A far truer indication of Nazi intentions were the various versions of the 'General Plan East' {Generalplan Ost) devised to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south (the so-called A-A Line). One draft, by SS Oberfiihrer Professor Konrad Meyer, proposed establishing three vast 'marcher settlements' ('Ingermanland', 'Memel-Narew' and 'Gothengau') with around five million German settlers. A rival scheme drawn up by the Reich Main Security Office envisaged twice as many settlers and the expulsion of an estimated forty-five million of the existing inhabitants. In fact, as was punctiliously pointed out by Erhard Wetzel, the racial ex pert in Rosenberg's Ministry, this estimate included between five and six million Jews and failed to take into account high Slavic birth rates, so that the total unwanted population would be closer to fifty or even fifty-seven million, assuming that 15 per cent of Poles, 25 per cent of Ruthenians and 3 5 per cent of Ukrainians would need to be retained as agricultural labourers, the rest being deported to Siberia. The Russian population would wither away through the use of contraception, abortion and sterilization. The Jews would be exterminated."

"The Myth is the Myth of the Blood, which, under the sign of the Swastika, released the World Revolution. It is the Awakening of the Soul of the Race, which, after a period of long slumber, victoriously put an End to Racial Chaos."

"If Rosenberg was to decide … we would only have rite, thing, myth and such kind of swindle."

"It was Rosenberg, the intellectual high priest of the "master race," who provided the doctrine of hatred which gave the impetus for the annihilation of Jewry, and who put his infidel theories into practice against the Eastern Occupied Territories. His woolly philosophy also added boredom to the long list of Nazi atrocities."

"Many years before, I had left a beautiful country and a rich nation and I returned to that country six years later to find it fundamentally changed and in a state of upheaval, and in great spiritual and material need."

"I never burned down synagogues. It was a revolution, and Russians burned churches during their revolution. If there are many different nationalities in a country, the leadership should be divided among people by percentages. In finance, press, radio - the Jews had taken over positions. That feeling existed before Hitler."

"For the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - some sixty million of whose citizens at some time or other came under Nazi occupation - a different but equally resonant note could now be struck. As an Estonian, Alfred Rosenberg well understood the visceral hostility felt by many East European peoples towards Stalin's Soviet Union, which had inflicted immense cruelties on them behind a façade of national self-determination. It was not only the (relatively few) ethnic Germans who welcomed the advancing Wehrmacht. German troops were feted when they marched into Lwôw and Riga. Ukrainian peasants saw the black crosses on the invaders' panzers as the insignia of a holy crusade against the Antichrist of Moscow. At Hrubieszôw the people greeted the Germans with bread and salt."

"I didn't say that the Jews are inferior. I didn't even maintain they are a race. I merely saw that the mixture of different cultures didn't work."

"We let 50,000 Jewish intellectuals get across the border. Just as I wanted Lebensraum for Germany, I thought Jews should have a Lebensraum for themselves - outside of Germany."

"...a plenipotentiary for the war economy who secretly marshaled the entire economy for armament, but had no idea it had anything to do with war."

"As I said, I am grateful that you do take notes, but I do wish that you take them accurately and not misrepresent my rather complex theories and reasoning. After all, I am a philosopher and a student, and my thoughts may be complex. If at any time you don't follow me, please interrupt and I will explain further. I have to smile when some of the defendants say in court that they never read my books or works, because it is a reflection on their inabilities to follow a philosophic trend of thought, which to the common man is much too deep and profound. It is difficult for one to express important opinions and theories scientifically and at the same time use simple construction. However, I have always tried to be as lucid as possible and I never strived to make my work or writings beyond the comprehension of the normally intelligent man."

"Anti-Semitism is the unifying element of the reconstruction of Germany."

"Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space... Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the continent."

"Death by hanging...well, in view of the whole situation, I never expected anything different. It's all right."

"I would adopt a standpoint, irrespective of whether someone was for or against it, if I felt deeply that it was right for the movement."

"I have the feeling that this Moscow Pact will at some time or other exact vengeance upon National Socialism."

"My chief qualification for the job is that I have been in almost every cell in the Moabit Prison in Berlin."

"The tribunal here and your American newspapers talk so much about our sharp Nazi methods, but do you realize that within the past year, since the defeat of Germany, 1 million Germans have been evicted from what was originally German territory and which has now been given to Poland? No League of Nations or other body intervened."

"...ignoring the potential force possessed by a homogeneous race, bemused by the slogans of human equality, all parliaments adopted the dogma of infinite toleration. Tolerance toward the alien, the hostile, and the aggressive was seen as a highly humanitarian achievement, but was, as the history of the nineteenth and especially of our present century shows, merely an ever-greater abandoning of ourselves."

"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."

"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."

"Fate will not be confined by paragraphs."

"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."

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