German Ss Quotes

Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA -- ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State.

Could you see yourself sitting down to tea with these girls? Will it surprise you to learn that one of them went on to gun down three unarmed German prisoners? Will it shock you to learn that one lit her cigarette from the flames of a burning German SS officer?

Heidrich and Himmler tried to eliminate obesity among the SS, Professor Saeki said. Himmler's dream was that one day, all Germans would be vegetarians

The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They’re normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz,” he told his sister.

Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies, the yellow, pink and brown triangles, were the prisoners who suffered most frequently and most severely from the tortures and blows of the SS and the Capos. They were described as the scum of humanity, who had no right to live on German soil and should be exterminated… but the lowest of the low in this "scum" were we, the men with the pink triangle.

There was no going forward—in front of the column, from the slope of a field, ten German tanks blasted away. There would be no retreat—behind the American column, another five German tanks shot down from a hilltop, silhouetted by the moon. The woods were a killing zone too. The tree line blinked with small-arms fire from SS infantry stationed at both ends of the route. With nowhere to run, all that remained for most Americans was to hide.

The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They’re normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz,” he told his sister. “Do you think that, given the opportunity, you’d also behave like a monster, Samuel?” “I don’t think it, Alma, I know it. I’ve been a soldier all my life. I’ve been to war. I’ve interrogated prisoners, a large number of them. But I assume you don’t want details.

In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe. And indeed some of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the German task forces that perpetrated some of the murders, were tried at Nuremberg and later in West German courts. But even these trials were a kind of minimization of the scale of the crime. Not the SS commanders alone, but essentially all of the thousands of men who served under their command were murderers.

I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth saving. The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offense received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation. But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.

There’s no truth in the idea that the Germans had closed ranks, or that they were terrorised by the SS and the Gestapo. Not at all: 60 per cent of the people were Nazis themselves.

The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more. Heinrich

All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is natural that they should take care that the gold does not leave the camp.

Aloïs Hudal was an Austrian native, an anti-Semite, and a fervent Nazi. He used his position as rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome, to help hundreds of SS officers escape justice, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.

Atlantean Underworld had created European Fascism and, especially, German National Socialism, as a vehicle for a restoration of Atlantis. They saw the Nazis, particularly the SS, as Kshatriyas who would build a pyramid for them to ascend as the Brahmins of a New World Order.

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. 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. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck… I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47

One day, I noticed that my father’s uniform had changed from a smart, light green colour with silver edging on the shoulder straps to a black uniform with SS markings and runes on the collar. I asked him why this was, and he told me that he was still a policeman, but now worked for the Schutzpolizei.

On the Auschwitz platform, the Germans shoved them into a freight train and sent them with a group of women to Germany. It was a voyage of hunger, of thirst, of mothers separated from their children, of daughters without mothers. When they opened the stock car in Hamburg, the SS found a container full of broken dolls.

Former American Bar Association president R William Ide, III revealed himself as an enemy of Constitutional government by creating a project to assist cities, counties, and states in drafting new and increasingly restrictive disarmament laws. He vowed that the lawyer’s cartel would fight any challenge to such laws. He urged supporters of the Constitution to “admit there is no Second Amendment guarantee” of an individual’s right to own firearms. His words would have fit seamlessly on the lips of Heinrich Himmler, who proclaimed that “Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or SA—ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the state.

The idea of treating war as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence is ridiculous,” he challenged the army commanders. “Every war costs blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war exists only in bloodless brains.” A field marshal who attended the conference reported Hitler warning them “that he would proceed against the Poles after the end of the campaign with relentless vigor. Things would happen which would not be to the taste of the German generals.

More often and more insistently as that time recedes, we are asked by the young who our "torturers" were, of what cloth were they made. The term torturers alludes to our ex-guardians, the SS, and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries, some frantically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient. All of them had been subjected to the terrifying miseducation provided for and imposed by the schools created in accordance with the wishes of Hitler and his collaborators, and then completed by the SS "drill." Many had joined this militia because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence, or even just to escape family problems. Some, very few in truth, had changes of heart, requested transfers to the front lines, gave cautious help to prisoners or chose suicide. Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all were responsible, but it must bee just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that the great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the "beautiful words" of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.

The train, I was later told by my mother, only had about ten carriages to it, and there were hundreds of people fighting to get on. I don’t think anybody knew where the train was going, only that it was leaving Strausberg and would take us away from the Russians, who were now arriving on the far end of the platform. Some German SS soldiers and Police were shooting at the Russian troops, and many people – men, women and children – were hit by the flying bullets.

There might be a war on, there might be Nazi tanks on the Champs Elysées and Jews rounded up in the Marais, but this is still Paris, damn it. There are still fresh baguettes baking across the arrondissements, and if the cinemas have to occasionally show a German film to please the troops – H.A. Lettow and Ernst Schäfer’s documentary of the SS expedition to Tibet, Lhasa-Lo – Die verbotene Stadt, for instance – then so be it. Paris is still gay, there is still music in the cafés and wine in the brasseries, and aren’t some of those German soldier-boys handsome?

With German tanks climbing behind the lone platoon and without any means of antitank defense, Solis seized some of the gasoline from the Francorchamps dump, had his men pour it out in a deep road cut, where there was no turn-out, and set it ablaze. The result was a perfect antitank barrier. The German tanks turned back to Stavelot-this was the closest that Kampfgruppe Peiper ever came to the great stores of gasoline which might have taken the 1st SS Panzer Division to the Meuse River. Solis had burned 124,000 gallons for his improvised roadblock, but this was the only part of the First Army's POL reserve lost during the entire Ardennes operation.

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium. The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths. The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro. Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never been close to getting nuclear weapons after all. And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.

countries under the unyielding rule of Berlin and the discipline of the SS and the Gestapo. It was Churchill in particular who opposed all compromise, who talked to his fellow cabinet members for days on end and finally won over Chamberlain, who, after 1938, was also convinced of Hitler’s evil intentions. ‘Hitler’s terms, if accepted, would put us completely at his mercy,’ Churchill believed. And: ‘Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.’ In May 1940 it would have been blindly optimistic to think that Great Britain could defeat the Germans without massive support from the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British were persuaded that Germany would once again encounter difficulties due to

and state. But for the time being, in summer 1940, she saw a continent that was genuinely impressed by this unprecedented German vitality: ‘Hitler, Europe felt, was a smart guy – disagreeable, but smart. He had gone far in making his country strong. Why not try his way?’ That was how many Europeans felt, and they all expressed it in their own way. In France they spoke of the ‘Pax Hitlérica’. In the upper circles of society, it quickly became fashionable to invite young SS and Wehrmacht officers to dinner. They represented a dynamism that had never been seen before, that could perhaps breathe new life into stuffy old France. The leader of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), the former prime minister Hendrik Colijn, wrote in June 1940: ‘Unless a true

Heydrich's life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly ‘normal’ middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of radically transforming the world.

A recent publication of secret reports on German public opinion during the war (from 1939 to 1944), issued by the Security Service of the SS (Meldungen aus dem Reich. Auswahl aus den Geheimen Lage berichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1939-1944, edited by Heinz Boberach, Neuwied & Berlin, 1965), is very revealing in this respect. It shows, first, that the population was remarkably well informed about all so-called secrets-massacres of Jews in Poland, preparation of the attack on Russia, etc.-and, second, the "extent to which the victims of propaganda had remained able to form independent opinions" (pp. XVIII-XIX). However, the point of the matter is that this did not in the least weaken the general support of the Hitler regime. It is quite obvious that mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brain washing.

St Alexander, his friends, and mentors opposed National Socialism primarily from the standpoint of their Christian faith. They perceived Nazi ideology as an assault on Truth. In the ambition of the Nazi creed to destroy the existing order of society, in its fierce determination to annihilate Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and all whom it deemed unworthy of existence, the White Rose saw an assault on the very concept of Man who was created in God’s image. It was an assault on God himself. The authors of the White Rose leaflets, Alexander and Hans, ascribe a spiritual significance to their resistance to Nazism, which they call “the dictatorship of evil.”255 In their fourth leaflet, they present this resistance as a struggle against “the National Socialist terrorist state … the struggle against the devil, against the servants of Antichrist.” It is of utmost importance, they continue, to realize that everywhere and at all times, demons have been lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in the order of Creation as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, separates himself from the powers of a higher order and, after voluntarily taking the first step, is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating pace. One must therefore cling to God, as “of course man is free, but without God he is defenseless against evil. He is like a rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.” The accuracy of the young people’s perception of the fundamental antagonism of National Socialism to Christianity was corroborated by the Nazis themselves (although, like the Communists in Russia, they made efforts to disguise and deny this). In a secret circular of June 9, 1941, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s second in command, divulged the fact that the repressive measures against the Churches of Germany were aimed against Christianity itself. The circular opened with the following words: “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”256 In a private conversation, the head of the dreaded SS, Heinrich Himmler, boasted that “We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.

We know that these clashes with Asia and Jewry are necessary for evolution. They give the cue for the European Continent to unite. These clashes are the only evolu-tionary possibility which will enable us one day, now that Fate has given us the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, to create the Germanic Reich. They are the necessary condition, for our race, and our blood to create for itself and put under cultivation, in the years of peace, (during which we must live and work austerely, frugally and like Spartans), that settlement area in which new blood can breed, as in a botanical garden so to speak. Only by this means can the Continent become a Germanic Continent, capable of daring to embark, in one or two or three or five or ten generations, on the conflict with this Continent of Asia which spews out hordes of humanity. Perhaps we shall also have to hold in check other coloured peoples who will soon be in their certain prime, and thus preserve the world, which is the world of our blood, of our children and of our grandchildren. Now it is just this world we like the best, the Germanic world, the world of Nordic life. We know that this conflict with the advancing pressure from Asia, with the 200 million Russians, is necessary.

The Malmédy massacre would have repercussions reaching far wider than one might expect of a single battlefield atrocity in a long and bitter war. This "incident" undoubtedly stiffened the will of the American combatants (although a quantitative assessment of this fact is impossible); it would be featured in the war crimes trials as an outstanding example of Nazi contempt for the accepted rules of war; and it would serve a United States Senator as a stepping-stone toward a meteoric career. But the Malmédy massacre and the other murders of 17 December did not complete the list chargeable to Peiper and the troops of the 1st SS Panzer Division. By 20 December Peiper's command had murdered approximately 350 American prisoners of war and at least 100 unarmed Belgian civilians, this total derived from killings at twelve different locations along Peiper's line of march. PEIPER'S TROOPS ON THE ROAD TO MALMÉDY So far as can be determined the Peiper killings represent the only organized and directed murder of prisoners of war by either side during the Ardennes battle.136 The commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army took oath in the trials of 1946 that, acting on Hitler's orders, he issued a directive stating that the German troops should be preceded "by a wave of terror and fright and that no

To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.

Chemotherapy, the third main prong in cancer treatment after surgery and radiation, came about by similarly unlikely means. Although chemical weapons had been outlawed by international treaty after World War I, several nations still produced them, if only as a precaution in the event that others did likewise. The United States was among the transgressors. For obvious reasons, this was kept secret, but in 1943 a U.S. Navy supply ship, the SS John Harvey, carrying mustard gas bombs as part of its cargo, was caught in a German bombing raid on the Italian port of Bari. The Harvey was blown up, releasing a cloud of mustard gas over a wide area, killing an unknown number of people. Realizing that this was an excellent, if accidental, test of the mustard gas’s efficacy as a killing agent, the navy dispatched a chemical expert, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander, to study the effects of the mustard gas on the ship’s crew and others nearby. Luckily for posterity, Alexander was an astute and diligent investigator, for he noticed something that might have been overlooked: mustard gas dramatically slowed the creation of white blood cells in those exposed to it. From this, it was realized that some derivative of mustard gas might be useful in treating some cancers. Thus was born chemotherapy.

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In

Two thousand Jews, for example, lived in and around the small town of Tykocin, northwest of Warsaw on the road to Bialystok in eastern Poland, worshiping in a square, fortified synagogue with a turreted tower and a red mansard roof, built in 1642, more than a century after Jewish settlement began in the region. Lush farm country surrounds Tykocin: wheat fields, prosperous villages, cattle in the fields, black-and-white storks brooding wide, flat nests on the chimneys of lucky houses. Each village maintains a forest, a dense oval stand of perhaps forty acres of red-barked pines harvested for firewood and house and barn construction. Inside the forests, even in the heat of summer, the air is cool and heady with pine; wild strawberries, small and sweet, strew the forest floor. Police Battalions 309 and 316, based in Bialystok, invaded Tykocin on 5 August 1941. They drove Jewish men, women and children screaming from their homes, killed laggards in the streets, loaded the living onto trucks and jarred them down a potholed, winding dirt road past the storks and the cattle to the Lopuchowo village forest two miles southwest. In the center of the Lopuchowo forest, men dug pits, piling up the sandy yellow soil, and then Police Battalions 309 and 316, out for the morning on excursion from Bialystok, murdered the Jews of Tykocin, man, woman and child. For months the forest buzzed and stank of death. (Twenty miles northwest of Tykocin in the village of Jedwabne, Polish villagers themselves, with German encouragement, had murdered their Jewish neighbors on 10 July 1941 by driving them into a barn and burning them alive, a massacre examined in Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors.)

The man who is to die in front of us today in some way took part in the revolt. They say he had contacts with the rebels of Birkenau, that he carried arms into our camp, that he was plotting a simultaneous mutiny among us. He is to die today before our very eyes: and perhaps the Germans do not understand that this solitary death, this man’s death which has been reserved for him, will bring him glory, not infamy. At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody understood, the raucous voice of before again rose up: “Haht ihr verst and en?" Have you understood? Who answered “Jawohl?" Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed resignation took body by itself, as if it turned into a collective voice above our heads. But everyone heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced through the old thick barriers of inertia and submissiveness, it struck the living core of man in each of us: “Kamaraden, icb bin der Letzte!" (Comrades, I am the last one!). I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and grey, our heads dropped, and we did not uncover our heads until the German ordered us to do so. The trap door opened, the body wriggled horribly; the band began playing again and we were once more lined up and filed past the quivering body of the dying man. At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well finished. The Russians can come now: there are no longer any strong men among us, the last one is now hanging above our heads, and as for the others, a few halters had been enough. The Russians can come now: they will only find us, the slaves, the worn-out, worthy of the unarmed death which awaits us. To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement. Alberto and I went back to the hut, and we could not look each other in the face. That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another metal than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us, could not bend him. Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue and cold, even if we return home. We lifted the menaschka on to the bunk and divided it, we satisfied the daily ragings of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

As the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in Germany in 1933, preparing the ground for the horrors of the Second World War, both the United States and Britain benefitted from the arrival on their shores of philosophers and scientists fleeing for their lives. Eventually, the United States would be the first nation to develop a nuclear weapon using the science brought there by German refugees, including Albert Einstein (1879–1955). When the war was over and the US and Soviet victors moved in to cherry pick the best Nazi scientists to come and work for them, the United States got Wernhervon Braun (1912–77). Braun was the physicist and rocket designer who created the deadly long-range V-2 rocket that rained death and destruction on London. But he was not merely a rocket designer; he was also a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer. The Americans grabbed him before the Soviets could, giving them the edge in ballistic missiles with which to project thermonuclear weapons at targets several thousand miles away. Braun was responsible for the rocket science that made the United States the first nation to put a man on the moon.

In 1958 Fritz Bauer, an ex-lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis, was appointed Attorney General in the state of Hesse and decided to bring the camp commandant and a number of SS guards to face justice in Germany. But he was up against a conspiracy of silence within sections of the post-war administration and the collective amnesia of the general population. The crimes committed at Auschwitz were perpetrated in Poland outside the jurisdiction of German courts, so the federal court had to be convinced that the interests of justice would be served by authorizing the regional court of Hesse to indict the accused. The defendants would seek to evade personal responsibility by claiming they were soldiers acting under orders and the testimony of surviving witnesses was assumed to be unreliable after 20 years. Furthermore, German law required irrefutable evidence of murder. Mere cruelty was not considered to be a serious enough offence. Eight thousand SS men had served at the camp from May 1940 to its liberation in January 1945 and identifying those who had committed individual acts of murder was thought to be practically impossible. They had melted into the community, leaving Bauer and his small team of young, idealistic lawyers (Georg Friedrich Vogel, Joachim Kugler and Gerhard Wiese) to track them down.

In all, 22 former SS members appeared in the dock to answer charges before a packed court, including the world’s press, although only 17 were ultimately convicted and received nominal sentences. But the trial was not just about the fate of the guilty individuals. It was to put on record what had taken place at Auschwitz and other concentration camps and to give surviving victims a voice. German schoolchildren and students were among the 20,000 attendees who heard harrowing testimony from eyewitnesses, and so over the course of the trial – which ran from 20 December 1963 until 19 August 1965 – the conspiracy of silence was finally broken and the German public forced to confront it past.

Churchill was an acute judge of German political culture: A threat from the Western Allies that suspected Nazi criminals would be sent back for judgment to the “countries … where their crimes had been committed”—which for many suspects meant to the Soviet Union—was a message that even the dullest SS man could not miss.

It had been Wolff who lobbied the German transportation minister to ensure that the SS had an ample supply of railroad cars to ship Jews to the death camp at Treblinka, in spite of competing demands from the Wehrmacht, which wanted the freight cars to move military supplies to the front.

Konrad Adenauer, post-war Germany’s first chancellor and an ardent anti-Nazi, called for ‘an end to this sniffing out of Nazis’ because he believed the new democratic administration needed experienced ministers regardless of their previous misdeeds. For that reason he appointed Hans Globke as his senior state secretary. Globke was the lawyer who had helped draft the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which denied German and Austrian Jews their civil rights. He was so adept at playing both sides that he had the dubious distinction of appearing for both the prosecution and the defence at Nuremberg. The report also disclosed that the German domestic intelligence service (Bfv) knowingly hired former SS and SD men who had worked for the Gestapo as surveillance experts. However, they were employed as freelancers to keep them at a respectable distance, because they were considered ‘tainted’.

A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the USSR during June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now followed close behind the advancing German army. Within thirty-six months, these Einsatzgruppen and their subunits, the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, shot about two million people, according to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal.

All German government agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan; it was to be the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe.”10 Heydrich’s assistant, Adolf Eichmann, estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jews to be “cleaned up” in this fashion;

By dividing up responsibility for extermination into explicable, functional parts, the Nazi party and SS enlisted and united the German state and most of German society in the countless little tasks necessary to conduct mass murder.

From mid-1942 on, the SS became a major provider of slave labor to industry. German corporate leaders assiduously courted the SS to obtain labor, contracts, and influence

its requisitioning. Plans for the conversion were apparently overseen by no less a personage than architect Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production,25 with the actual construction supervised by SS-Second Lieutenant Ludwig Petz.26 A member of Dachau’s facilities branch, he arrived at Itter on February 8 with twenty-seven prisoners—twelve from Dachau and fifteen from Flossenbürg27—all of whom had before their arrests been carpenters, plumbers, and the like.28 Petz also took along some ten members of Dachau’s SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) unit29 to act as a security detail during the conversion work; they would be replaced by

TO PUT IT SIMPLY, SS-Captain Sebastian “Wastl” Wimmer was a nasty piece of work. A native Bavarian, he was born in 1902 in Dingolfing—a small town some fifty miles northeast of Munich. In 1923 Wimmer joined the latter city’s police department as a patrolman and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant in spite of, or perhaps because of, a reputation for securing quick confessions by beating suspects nearly to death during interrogation. Barely literate, unkempt, and given to violent drunken rages, he

Although it is unknown whether this ban was ever enforced, it is remarkable that such a measure was even suggested.56 In principle, pro-Nazi engagement was not supposed to constitute a Bekenntnis to German Volkstum; yet this is precisely how applications from Blagorodovac were to be judged. While the villager Johann A., who had served in the Waffen-SS, was accepted as an Aussiedler in 1959, those who had fought the German occupying army in Yugoslavia had allegedly renounced their Germanness—despite the fact that the people in question had at no point denied being German and were still registered as Germans in their passports.57 In fact, Blagorodovac was the symbol of a specifically German resistance to Nazi occupation and supposedly the place where the partisan army’s German-manned Thälmann battalion had first raised its banner.58 At this point, the meaning of Bekenntnis transforms into a strong political statement. This testifies to a politicized view of what and who was supposed to be German that neatly combined an apologetic view of the Nazi past with the anticommunist raison d’état of the West German state. An ethnic German after 1945 was supposed to have been a victim of communism, not a communist.

For us the question of blood was a reminder of our own worth, a reminder of what is actually the basis holding this German people together.

In addition, one thing is quite obvious. All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Führer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us.

For us the question of blood was a reminder of our own worth, a reminder of what is actually the basis holding this German people together. Just as is the case in the years between 1938 and 1943, in exactly the same way as now, the same ill-founded reproaches were made then: well, if you bring the Nordic man so much to the fore, you're creating a new split, a new class-distinction,-it's a new class hatred. We're overcoming the social barriers, so I've been told by important party members, and now you're setting up racial ones. My reply to these people has always been: If you want to look at things in a negative way, there is nothing in the world which you cannot see in a negative way. From the negative angle, of course, you can argue that way. I see it differently, for I see it on this plane: What is the binding factor which holds the man in East Prussia and the man in the Black Forest together, the man in Schleswig-Holstein and in Hamburg and the man in Munich, in Graz, in Pomerania, in Berlin and in the Rhineland? What is then the factor or the element which contains all that is dear and precious and valuable to us? It is in fact what we Germans call inherent culture, it is this Germanic, this Nordic component of our blood.

When the "mass man" arises on the other side with 1 to 1.5 billion people, well-ordered, hard-trained on a perimeter extending to the Urals or beyond the Urals then in 100 years, a Germanic people with its, I hope, 250 to 300 million people, together with the other European peoples, for a total of 600 to 700 million people, will carry on its battle for life.

We want to be worthy of being the Führer Adolf Hitler's first SS Men in the long history of the Germanic people, which stretches before us. Now let us honour the Führer, our Führer Adolf Hitler, who created the Germanic Reich, and will lead us into the Germanic future.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 percent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 percent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily—the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth

The inmates of Colditz might have lost their freedom but they knew their legal rights, and so did the Germans. The paramilitary SS operated the concentration camps with an inhuman disregard for international law, but in the army-run POW camps most senior German officers saw it as a matter of soldierly pride to uphold the Convention, and took offense at any suggestion they were failing to do so.

Prokhorovka became the kernel of the legend of Kursk as the “greatest tank battle of all time,” in which, Soviet accounts claimed, the vaunted Wehrmacht lost 2,900 tanks including 700 Tigers—a claim embraced by a popular Western historian in the 1974 study The Tigers Are Burning.21 The real story was nothing like this. By the time Hausser’s Second SS Panzer Corps engaged the Russians at Prokhorovka, his three armored divisions contained all of 211 operational tanks, of which only 15 were Tigers and none were Panthers. German losses at Prokhorovka between July 11 and 13, during the most intense fighting, amounted to 48 panzers, against Soviet losses of between 400 (Rotmistrov’s own estimate) and 650 tanks—a ratio favoring the Germans by nearly ten to one. Even the low-end Soviet estimate is now 1,614 tanks lost in the Kursk sector up to July 23, while some specialists believe the correct figure is 1,956. This compares to German panzer losses of 252 (low end) and 278 (the high estimate). The armor-loss ratio in this supposedly crushing Soviet victory thus favored the Germans by at least eight to one. The story was similarly lopsided in the air: the VVS saw somewhere between 459 and 1,961 warplanes knocked out of action, against Luftwaffe losses of 159.

Deutschland über alles (The Sonnet) If the germans have no right to take pride in their past, neither do the british or the americans. In fact, the scale of british and american atrocities, surpasses the SS many folds. 'Deutschland über alles' is 'jingle bells', compared to british and american holocaust. Yet germany had the human decency to dump its horrific national anthem, while colonial pride is still dominant, across much of america and england. Radical inhumanity warrants radical reparations, a concept yet foreign to Buck House and Uncle Sam. When you are the largest manufacturer of massacre, making amends should be your existential anthem.

No matter the subject or literary quality, Aleks believed that each creation held an absolute truth, an urgent testimony, be it appalling or uplifting, created by a human under circumstances as bleak and grim as anyone could have imagined. And he struggled to preserve these testimonies at all costs. Aleks knew that these men had become pawns of the German state, as had he, useful only until the SS had wrung out of them every last bit of their strength. For many of them, a song or poem might be the only thing that remained—the sole evidence of a life lived.

Sophie said. “SS and Gestapo are devils, but they frighten the hell out of the ordinary German soldier as much as they do anyone else. In any case, we’ve got those among our own people who are as bad as the Gestapo. Daman’s milice. Frenchmen who work with the Nazis to betray Frenchmen.” “That’s terrible,” Sarah said. “It’s life, child, and what it means is you can never really trust anyone. Now get dressed and come downstairs and we’ll have some

1945 Elsie, I hope this letter finds its way to your good hands. Tobias and I are among friends in Zurich. The news of the Allied invasion of Garmisch is bittersweet. Though we are German, our Fatherland is no longer a welcoming place. The Jewish families I hid for over a year—the Mailers and the Zuckermanns—lost nearly all their extended family members over the course of these wretched years. Thanks to your engagement ring, we were able to bribe the SS guards and smuggle Nanette Mailer, her friend, and the Zuckermanns’ niece, Tabita, from KZ Dachau before the march. Unfortunately, Tobias’s sister, Cecile, succumbed to

The SS and local Ukrainian collaborators discovered a series of mass graves of Ukrainian rebels that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, had murdered in Lvov, Vinitsia, and Dubno, near what is today the Ukrainian-Polish border. The Germans aggressively publicized the NKVD killings to divert attention from the new executions undertaken by their own Einsatzkommando squads.2 The Soviets vehemently denied the German claims, but the Germans turned out to be telling the truth about the NKVD murders, even as they lied about their own.

The murder program accelerated in the spring of 1943. German troops entered the Warsaw ghetto and killed thousands of Jews in street fighting. In the south, the Nazis began deporting Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. In the north, they deported Dutch Jews to Sobibor, gassing about 34,000 people there as they arrived. The SS also arranged a special transport for 3,000 Jewish mothers and children from the Netherlands; they murdered all of them.11

German business fed on forced labor throughout the war, exploiting the SS extermination-through-work programs to fulfill military production contracts. Contrary to postwar claims, the initiative for these programs came from industry, not from the Nazi state.

TABLE OF GERMAN COMPANIES AND MAIN SS CONCENTRATION CAMPS REPORTED TO BE ACTIVE IN EXPLOITATION OF FORCED LABOR DURING THE THIRD REICH Auschwitz AEG (electronics) [5] Barthl (construction) [5] Bata Schlesische Schuhwerke (leather, shoes, and factory construction) [10] Benton-Monteur-Bau (construction) [10] Berle Hoch- und Tiefbau (construction) [10] Berliner Baugesellschaft (construction) [10] BRABAG (mining, synthetic fuel) [3] Breitenbach Montanbau [10] Borsig-Koks-Werk (coal processing) [10] Charlottengrube (Hermann-Göring-Werke) (tunnel construction) [10] Concordia Kohlenbergwerk (coal processing) [10] Deutsche Gasrusswerke, Gleiwitz [5] [8] Dyckerhoff & Widman (construction materials) [5] Egefeld (construction) [10] Emmerich Machold (textiles) [10] Energie-Versorgung-Oberschlesien AG (electrical construction for Elektrizitätswerk “Walter”) [10] Erdöl Raffinerie Trzebinia GmbH (oil refining) [10] Fürstengrube GmbH (coal mining) [10] Fürstlich Plessische Bergwerks AG (coal processing) [10] Godula (factory construction) [10] Grün und Bilfinger (construction) [10] Gute Hoffnung Janinagrube (coal mining) [10] Heinkel (aircraft components, munitions) [5] [10] Hubertushütte (coal processing) [10] IG Farben—Buna Werke (construction, synthetic fuel) [3] [4] [5] [8] [10] Junkers (aircraft) [5] Klotz und Co. (construction) [10] Königshütte Metallwerke (metal works) [10] Königs- und-Bismarckhütte AG (armored cars and tanks) [10] Krupp (munitions) [4] [5] Krupp—Laurahùtte (munitions) [8] Lasota (tunnel & road construction) [10] Oberschlesische Gerätebau GmbH [10] Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke (construction of synthetic gasoline works) [5] [8] [10] Ölschieferanlagen (oil refinery construction) [8] Ost-Maschinenbau GmbH (OSMAG) (cannon) [2] [5] [8] [10] Pfitzner und Kamper (munitions, loading) [10] Philipp Holzmann (construction) [10] Pluschke und Grosser (construction) [10] Portland-Zement-Fabrik AG (construction materials) [10] Riedel (tunnel and roadbuilding) [10] Rheinmetall-Borsig (munitions) [3] Schuchtermann und Kremer Bau AG (construction) [10] Schweinitz (construction) [10] S. Frankel—Schlesische Feinweberei AG (textiles) [10] Siemens-Schuckert (electronics for aircraft) [2] [3] [10] Union Metallindustrie (munitions) [4] [5] Vacuum Öl (oil refinery) [5] [10] Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke (aluminum) [5] Wayss und Freytag (construction) [10] Zieleniewski (munitions) [10] Zwirnfabrik G. A. Buhl und Sohn (textiles) [10]

In October 1938, after reading Infantry Attacks, Hitler selected Rommel to be his escort during his march into the Sudetenland. In this position, Rommel had charge of over 300 men and received a promotion to colonel after completing his service to the Fuhrer.  As colonel, he would take up a new teaching position at the war school south of Vienna.[59]  When he was called back to guard duty for Hitler after the full German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, Rommel seemed to believe his fortunes were improving and described for his wife how he “persuaded [Hitler] to drive on [in face of a missing SS escort] under my personal protection.  He put himself in my hands.” An impressed Rommel then ventured a question: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have this man?

On October 14, 1944, German generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel visited Rommel in his home in Herrlingen. Outside, SS troops stood by, having been instructed to kill Rommel if he attempted to escape. Rommel was told that he had been accused of associating with conspirators, and had been implicated in the July 20th assassination plot against Hitler. They gave him the choice to die by his own hand, or face a public trial. Rommel was promised that the Nazis would report his death as an accident, and that his family would be left alone. He would leave with the generals, and on his way to Ulm would drink poison

But Hitler couldn’t simply attack. He must first make it look like self-defense. So on August 22, he told his generals, “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war; never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth.” The plan was for the SS, dressed in Polish uniforms, to attack a German radio station on the Polish border. To make the whole thing authentic, they would need German “casualties.” They decided to use concentration camp inmates, whom they vilely referred to as Konserven (canned goods). These victims of Germany would be dressed as German soldiers. In the end only one man was murdered for this purpose, via lethal injection, and afterward shot several times to give the appearance that he had been killed by Polish soldiers. The deliberate murder of a human being for the purposes of deceiving the world seems a perfectly fitting inaugural act for what was to follow. This took place on schedule, August 31.

From the beginning, the SS Deutschland was beset by problems, She was known as the “Cocktail Shaker” when she was first launched in 1923. On her trials, it was noticed that the ship had a serious vibration problem due to an imbalance in her twin shafts or perhaps her massive bronze propellers. Because of a lack of funding, this vibration was accepted and remained so for the first six years of her existence. It was an embarrassment to have a ship represent the German Merchant Marine, Handelsmarine, that was handicapped from the start. However, she was still considered the pride of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a company with rich traditions that was founded in 1847. So, when the Deutschland left Hamburg for the first time on March 27, 1924, she moved slowly down the Elbe River past Blohm und Voss, the massive dockyard where she had been built. At the time of her maiden voyage, the entire city celebrated when the Deutschland headed down the Elbe River towards the North Sea. Other ships in the harbor fittingly saluted her by blowing their deep throaty whistles, as small craft such as tugboats and fireboats pumped frothy white streams of the brackish river water high into the air. By the time I boarded her for my voyage to the United States in November, 1934, the SS Deutschland was over 11 years old and, although she was still Hamburg-Amerika Line’s flagship, she was beginning to show her age. Germans, who prided themselves in their knowledge of science and engineering, were falling behind other European countries. Paying retribution to the victors of World War I had drained the German treasury and as a nation, they resented it. Hostility had increased and the pressure it put on the people was obvious. Many looked to Hitler to make “Germany great again.

Private German banks and businesses used the SS registration data to take over about 5,000 of the most prosperous Jewish companies in less than eighteen months, according to contemporary SS reports, and liquidated about 21,000 smaller Jewish businesses to make room for competing German enterprises.

There were 5 million Jews to murder in the Nazi-occupied USSR, according to his list, and 2.3 million more in the former territories of Poland. Long-range plans called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the German troops arrived.

And, of course, there was the Muslim SS, who I think were from Yugoslavia; it was known that they were very devout believers of their faith. Very devout indeed. I heard that they were very conscientious in their prayer times and fasting and so on. By the way, those Muslim SS men were considered very ruthless and effective troops indeed. We were glad to have them.

The Latvians wanted to storm the ghetto. They wanted to kill the Jews. So the Germans had to protect us—the German army or SS or whatever it was. It is paradoxical.

When the Germans conquered Paris they confiscated the grand houses of the French nobility. One such grand house was that of Philippe de Rothschild, and its new occupier was an SS general, a General Halle. Rothschild spent much of the war years in England with the Free French Forces, and when he returned to Paris at the war’s end his mansion was restored to him. ‘Felix,’ said Rothschild to his old butler, who had remained in domestic service in the mansion throughout the war – ‘Felix,’ he said, ‘the house must have been very quiet during my absence. What did you do?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ answered Felix, ‘it wasn’t quiet at all.’ ‘Not quiet?’ asked Philippe de Rothschild. ‘No sir,’ said Felix respectfully. ‘The SS general hosted receptions every night.’ ‘Every night?’ asked Rothschild, baffled. ‘But who came?’ ‘The same people who used to come to your receptions before you fled, sir,’ answered Felix. ‘The very same people.

The Luftwaffe effectively “rented” slave labor from the SS both to build facilities and to operate manufacturing lines making V-2 rockets and other high-tech weaponry. The SS actually charged a per-day fee for each slave worker, set well below the average wage of a regular German citizen, and provided all services, such as guards, food, and so on. Perhaps not surprisingly, the workers used for the programs underwent shockingly brutal treatment, regardless of whether they built V-2 rockets in underground manufacturing facilities or constructed wind tunnels in frigid, windswept alpine valleys in Austria. The SS preferred to spend the least amount possible on their slaves to maximize their profits, feeding the men very little, dressing them in thin rags, and providing no medical treatment. The guards motivated the victims to work with shouting, threats, and constant blows and beatings.

In addition to the Selbstschutz, several Einsatzkommandos (‘task forces’) were deployed in Poland. Their main task was to round up the Polish intelligentsia; it was the intention of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to decapitate Polish society, leaving a pliable mass of relatively unskilled workers for German exploitation. Lists of victims had been prepared in advance, and the Einsatzkommandos acted swiftly to execute their orders, in a very real sense. Their

Take hold of kettle, broom, and pan, then you’ll surely get a man! Shop and office leave alone, Your true life’s work lies at home. —COMMON GERMAN RHYME OF THE 1930S   “Who will ever ask in three or five hundred years’ time whether a Fräulein Muller or Schulze was unhappy?” —HEINRICH HIMMLER, REICHSFÜHRER OF THE SS AND CHIEF OF THE GERMAN POLICE, CIRCA 1941

Danny’s life strategy of not trusting himself. “His defining emotion is doubt,” said one of his former students. “And it’s very useful. Because it makes him go deeper and deeper and deeper.” Or maybe he just wanted another line of defense against anyone hoping to figure him out. In any case, he kept at a great distance the forces and events that had shaped him. He might not trust his memories, but he still had a few. For instance, he remembered the time in late 1941 or early 1942—at any rate, a year or more after the start of the German occupation of Paris—when he was caught on the streets after curfew. The new laws required him to wear the yellow Star of David on the front of his sweater. His new badge caused him such deep shame that he took to going to school half an hour early so that the other children wouldn’t see him walking into the building wearing it. After school, on the streets, he’d turn his sweater inside out. Heading home too late one evening, he saw a German soldier approaching. “He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others—the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers,” he recalled, in the autobiographical statement required of him by the Nobel Committee. “As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.” He

The SS Usaramo discharged her enthusiastic passengers in die Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Germany, in the Spring of 1937. We no sooner arrived in Mannheim when we heard of the Hindenburg disaster, which happened on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Tensions were running high and many people believed that the magnificent German airship had been brought down by an act of sabotage. From 1934 through 1938, Nazi Party events were held throughout Germany, especially at rallies at the parade grounds in Nuremberg. Many films were made there to commemorate these events, the most famous of which is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Amazingly, many people in Germany had become fanaticized and believed the vile propaganda that was being generated by SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his revoltingly talented staff.

but the British had knowledge of the mass murders at an early stage. Beginning in 1939 and escalating in 1940 and 1941, British intelligence services decoded the messages of the German police and the SS. For instance, according to a British report in 1941, a German police battalion “liquidated 1,059 Jews at or near Slavuta [Ukraine] on August 19-22.” Another police battalion “participated in killing 367 Jews on August 23 and another 468 Jews the next day around Kowel [Ukraine]. The German police suffered no losses.” On August 25, another police battalion killed 1,342 Jews in a “cleansing action, while the First SS Brigade shot 85 prisoners and 283 Jews.”5 The British reaction was to seal away the reports under the warning “Most Secret” and “Never to Be Removed from This Office.” Some fifty years later, the British government declassified the files.

the SS men aiming below the waste to cause a slow death.

But a change of personnel — the capable Austrian Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic in place of Reinhardt, and General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller for Hoßbach — could do nothing to alter the disastrous German collapse in the face of hopeless odds, in East Prussia as on the rest of the eastern front. This proved equally true in Hitler's replacement on 17 January of Colonel-General Josef Harpe, made the scapegoat for the collapse of the Vistula front, by his favourite, Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner, and his ill-judged appointment on 25 January of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in the teeth of Guderian's strident objections, to take command of the newly formed and hastily constituted Army Group Vistula which aimed to stave off the Soviet advance into Pomerania. The hope that 'triumph of the will' and the toughness of one of his most trusted 'hard' men would prevail rapidly proved ill-founded. Himmler, backed by courageous but militarily inexperienced Waffen-SS officers, soon found that combating the might of the Red Army was a far stiffer task than rounding up and persecuting helpless political opponents and 'racial inferiors'. By mid-February, Hitler was forced to concede that Army Group Vistula was inadequately led.

Denunciations to the SS were indeed frequent and could result in swift punishment—as in the Hanover-Misburg satellite camp, where a Belgian and a French prisoner were summarily executed in early 1945 after a German worker complained to the Camp SS supervisor that his sandwich had been stolen.

On August 31, 1939, SS men dressed in Polish uniforms took over a radio station inside Germany and broadcast messages urging Poles living in eastern Germany to rebel against the Nazis. The bodies of prison inmates were dressed in Polish uniforms and left on site as if they had perpetrated the act and had been killed by German police.8 The transparent ploy would be cited as a preemptive Polish hostile action by Germany. Despite this, British and French diplomats begged the Polish high command to retract the mobilization order. The next morning German troops stormed across the border and World War II in Europe began.

Oh, Mala’s fabulous.’ Naomi looked surreptitiously around but the SS were still staying away and even Klara was out, sitting in the sun with Pfani, ostensibly supervising the cleaning of blankets. ‘She’s a Polish Jew but she’s lived in Belgium for, like, forever and she can speak all these different languages. She’s very sophisticated too so the Germans use her as an interpreter and courier.’ She lowered her voice even further. ‘That means she gets in and out of the postal offices all the time and while she’s there she can… liberate letters.

MAY 7, 1945 REIMS, FRANCE 2: 41 A.M. The devil is being hunted. In a classroom of the École Professionelle technical school, Nazi chief of staff Gen. Alfred Jodl applies his signature to a sheet of foolscap, an oversize piece of paper, formally surrendering the German army after nearly six horrific years of fighting. Berlin has fallen. Nazi führer Adolf Hitler is dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, his body then doused in gallons of gasoline and set ablaze by his personal bodyguard. Troops from the Allied powers of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union now swarm unopposed throughout Germany, quieting the few remaining pockets of resistance.

The number 88. That was the numerical equivalent (the eighth letter of the alphabet being H) of “Heil Hitler.” Then the shamrock and the swastika, taken together, was often the mark of the Aryan Brotherhood. The Blood Drop Cross, which was the primary insignia of the KKK and known by the acronym MIOAK, meaning “mystic insignia of a Klansman.” And the initials KI, which might refer to another hate group, though Decker didn’t recognize them. Still, there were some Decker had had to Google. The Aryan Terror Brigade symbol, and Weiss Macht, which was German for “white power.” The sonnenrad, which was an ancient Indo-European sun-wheel and had been co-opted by the Nazis, who had placed the swastika dead center. Then there were the SS bolts, another Nazi symbol, and the triangular Klan symbol, which looked like three triangles within a triangle, but upon

Those who uttered doubts about Germany’s ultimate victory, who hung a white flag from their window, who opposed senseless acts of destruction or who tried to get their hometown to surrender without a fight had to fear for their life if they fell into the clutches of the SS, the Gestapo or fanatical Nazi supporters. The terror the regime had exported to the occupied countries of Europe was now being turned against the German populace.

Himmler and these men are all members of a Nazi paramilitary organization known in German as the Schutzstaffel.

The German penchant for detailed record keeping proved to be their undoing: the date and cause of death for each inmate was dutifully recorded.

By 1933, when Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party assumed power in Germany, the military was divided between the Wehrmacht—the traditional army, navy, and air force of the German state—and the SS, a paramilitary organization loyal to Hitler and the Nazi Party.

A stone wall twelve feet high now divides the city into east and west—Communist and capitalist. More than three hundred East German sentry towers line the wall. Those trying to escape from the austerity of East Berlin to the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll lifestyle of West Berlin are shot on sight. This division is a visible scar reminding the Germans that they are a conquered people.

The West German government is rife with former Nazis. The national security adviser, for example, is Hans Globke, who helped write the Nazi race laws that sought to destroy the Jews.5

In 1941, at some point still not determined by historians, Hitler decided on what the Nazis referred to as the Final Solution—the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of all European Jews. On January 20, 1942, at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, SS general Reinhard Heydrich and 14 other high-ranking SS officers and German officials met to discuss how to apply the Final Solution to the 9.5 million Jews across Occupied Europe.

German SS troops round up members of the Jewish resistance during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Women helped organize the revolt and fought alongside the men.

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The German people knew about and acquiesced in the genocide. There were 900,000 of them in the ss alone, plus another 1,200,000 involved in the railways. The trains were one giveaway. Most Germans knew the significance of the huge, crowded trains rattling through the hours of darkness, as one recorded remark suggests: ‘Those damned Jews, they won’t even let one sleep at night!’158