Quotes of the Key Figures
     
Introduction

Chronology

Key Figures

Key Influences

Quotes from the Key Figures

Implications

Possible Outcomes

Images of Evil

Professor Comment Page

 

WORDS OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE THERE

A Little Child wrote in to Der Sturmer

"People are so bothered by the way we're treating the Jews. They can't understand it, because they are God's creatures. But cockroaches are also God's creatures, and we destroy them."

(This was written by an 8-year-old child!)

Hitler told his followers

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?"

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gives a speech

"...The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character.

Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfahrer-SS, chief of the German Police gives speech

Himmler gives a speech on Hitlers order to exterminate the Jews.  Himmler spoke firmly. "...It is one of those things which is easy to say. 'The Jewish race is to be exterminated, 'that's clear, it's part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we'll do it.'

Nazi newspaper "Der Sturmer"

"The Jewish people ought to be exterminated root and branch. Then the plague of pests would have disappeared in Poland at one stroke."

Eyewitness Account of Einsatz Executions

"I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot."

(This eyewitness was a brother to the Nazi worker who conducted the executions in the camp, and was surprised at what he saw.  Later, he reported the above.)

President Roosevelt's Statement to Nazis

"It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished. The United Nations have made it clear that they will pursue the guilty and deliver them up in order that justice be done. That warning applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment."

 

Professor Comments:

This is a powerful page... I am moved by it's statements.  Of coures the eight year-old quote above is not a key figure, but her statement is significant as an indicator of the power of Nazi propaganda.  Awesome, in a deadly way.

One suggestion for this page: include the sources of the quotes.  That is, let us know where the quotes came from, even supplying the readers with biographical info (like the little lines I added next to the 8 yr.-old quote and the brother who became an eyewitness).

Nice work.