Heinrich Himmler Quotes

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My honor is my loyalty.
Heinrich Himmler
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.
Heinrich Himmler
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.
Heinrich Himmler
Their leader wore a Nazi helmet and had renamed himself Heimlich in honor of the man who ran the SS, not knowing he'd confused the Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choke victims and Heinrich Himmler.
William Kotzwinkle (The Bear Went Over the Mountain)
He was a strange mix of Heinrich Himmler and Barney the Dinosaur.
Jonas Eriksson (Everyday Psychopaths)
We are doing this for Germany, and above all for the man whom we all love, who has the hardest task on Earth, for our Führer.
Heinrich Himmler
The Nazi leaders cannot be voided from human society simply because it is pleasanter or more convenient to regard them now as outside the pale of humanity.
Roger Manvell (Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo)
Heinrich Himmler is such a mild little fellow when you talk to him, reminding you of a country school-teacher, which he once was—pince-nez and all. Freud, I believe, has told us why the mild little fellows or those with a trace of effeminacy in them, like Hitler, can be so cruel at times. I guess I would prefer my cruelty from great thundering hulks like Göring.
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
William Styron (Sophie's Choice)
Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.
Richard J. Evans (The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945)
We, however, who must live in this time, wish to prove ourselves worthy, every day and every hour, of the gifts which Fate has given us, through the fact that it sent us the Führer, to start with, and after two thousand years, who was, we might say, sent by God. As German men and German women, we wish to be thankful that we were born in precisely this age, that we are able to live in this age.
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s most important deputy, did not follow every twist of Hitler’s thinking, but he grasped the conclusions: Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler. To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future. Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.
Thomas Harding
We came to the question: How is it with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed – and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth.
Heinrich Himmler
I’ve seen the war criminal reformed because he gave the wife, of the person, who didn’t prosecute him, a mint at a funeral. I think if only Heinrich Himmler had carried Tic Tacs in his pocket all would have been forgiven. Bad paintings help humanize you even when you’re legacy rests on a pyre of bones.
Gary Floyd (Liberté: The Days of Rage 1990-2020)
(Actually, nobody at this time could even imagine the full extent of the Nazi barbarism that had washed across Europe—the millions who had disappeared into the gas chambers and furnaces of Heinrich Himmler’s aseptic crematoria, the millions who had been herded out of their countries to work as slave laborers, a tremendous percentage of whom would never return, the millions more who had been tortured to death, executed as hostages or exterminated by the simple expedient of starvation.) The great crusade’s unalterable purpose was not only to win the war, but to destroy Nazism and bring to an end an era of savagery which had never been surpassed in the world’s history.
Cornelius Ryan (The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day)
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.
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don’t cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial. Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps
Susan Griffin (A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War)
We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our people: the scale of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the starry sky above us and the world in us, the world that we see in the microscope. The essence of these megalomaniacs, these Christians who talk of men ruling this world, must stop and be put back in its proper proportion. Man is nothing special at all. He is an insignificant part of this earth. If a big thunderstorm comes, he can do nothing about it. He cannot even predict it. He has no idea how a fly is constructed - however unpleasant, it is a miracle - or how a blossom is constructed. He must once again look with deep reverence into this world. Then he will acquire the right sense of proportion about what is above us, about how we are woven into this cycle.
Heinrich Himmler
The Nordic race is decisive, not only for Germany, but for the whole world. If we succeed in establishing this Nordic race from and around Germany and inducing them to become farmers, and from this nursery we produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us. If Bolshevism wins, it will mean the extermination of the Nordic race.
Heinrich Himmler
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.
Elena Perekrestov (Alexander Schmorell: Saint of the German Resistance)
In our new world there are many emergent states and many longer established nations without the natural self-discipline to resist men similar in nature to the Nazi leaders should they emerge and either stride or slip to power. Such men are not always easy to recognize for what they are until it is too late. This certainly was the case with Himmler. Hitler at first appeared an absurd fanatic, Goebbels a posturing mob-orator, Göring a good-natured ass, Himmler a nonentity. Yet none of them proved to be what they had seemed, or they would never have won by their wits alone the supreme power in a great nation.
Heinrich Fraenkel (Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo)
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.
Amy-Jill Levine (Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi)
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
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife)
The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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.
Heinrich Himmler (Speech by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to SS Commanders in Kharkov, Ukraine. April 24, 1943)
Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded: “It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.” It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history. This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag. The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
When America stood on the threshold of World War II, Hoover continued a friendly relationship with the Nazis dominating Interpol, the Berlin-based international secret police. He’d been obsessed with the “Red menace” since 1919, when he took the helm of the Bureau’s General Intelligence Division. Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe and other Nazi fanatics were active in Interpol. Even after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Hoover ignored all evidence of Nazi death squads and atrocities and cooperated with the boys in Berlin. When France fell, Hoover exchanged lists of wanted criminals, enclosing autographed photographs of himself. It was not until three days before Pearl Harbor that he called a halt to the fraternization—and then only because he feared his image might be tarnished.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
Consider Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. One of the richest men in the world in the early twentieth century, Ford was a modern version of the kind of extremist demagogue Hamilton had warned against. Using his Dearborn Independent as a megaphone, he railed against bankers, Jews, and Bolsheviks, publishing articles claiming that Jewish banking interests were conspiring against America. His views attracted praise from racists worldwide. He was mentioned with admiration by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and described by future Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” In 1938, the Nazi government awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Yet Ford was also a widely admired, even beloved, figure in the United States, especially in the Midwest.
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
Charles Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal-defense planning for Presidents Johnson and Kennedy from 1961–66 and is now an associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described U.S. trainees in Latin America as “indistinguishable from the war criminals hanged at Nuremberg after World War II,”* adding that “for the United States, which led the crusade against the Nazi evil, to support the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads is an outrage.
Noam Chomsky (The Essential Chomsky)
Before the war, Hoover had maintained a number of friendly ties with Hitler's police officials. Among other examples, he sent Hitler's Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler a personal invitation to attend the 1937 World Police Conference in Montreal. The following year, he welcomed one of Himmler's top aides to the United States, and we now know that after the war he embraced "former" Nazis into his Red-hunting FBI apparatus.
Fred Jerome (Einstein on Race and Racism)
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.
Heinrich Himmler (Speech by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to Officers of the SS-Leibstandarte “Adolf Hitler” on the “Day of Metz.” September 9, 1940)
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.
Heinrich Himmler (Speech by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to SS Commanders in Kharkov, Ukraine. April 24, 1943)
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.
Heinrich Himmler (Speech by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to SS Commanders in Kharkov, Ukraine. April 24, 1943)
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.
Heinrich Himmler (SPEECH BY REICHSFÜHRER-SS HEINRICH HIMMLER TO SS MAJOR-GENERALS AT POSEN. OCTOBER 4, 1943)
We see into the distant future, because we know what it will be. That is why we are doing our duty more fanatically than ever, more devoutly than ever, more bravely, more obediently and more thoroughly than ever.
Heinrich Himmler
The racial hygiene laws created by the National Socialist state, of which you, the supreme judges, are the guardians, will bring about an unheard of change here for the future.
Heinrich Himmler
Let one thing be the guideline here: should anyone ever in your circle of comrades be disloyal to the Führer or the Reich, even if only in thought, you must ensure that he is expelled from the Order, and we will ensure that he is expelled from life.
Heinrich Himmler
Since everything, I already said this and I'll repeat it once again today, everything can be pardoned in this world, but there is one thing which cannot be pardoned among Germanic people, and that is disloyalty. It would be unpardonable, and it is unpardonable.
Heinrich Himmler
I have one last thing to say: You, Reinhard Heydrich, were truly a good SS man. On a more personal level I thank you for your unwavering loyalty and wonderful friendship, which united us in this life and death can not obliterate it!
Heinrich Himmler
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.
Heinrich Himmler
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.
Heinrich Himmler
Kurz nach der Casablanca-Konferenz hatte Dulles eines späten Winterabends in der Herrengasse 23 eine Unterredung mit einem Agenten von Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, einem geschmeidigen böhmischen Adligen, der seit vielen Jahren immer wieder in Dulles’ gesellschaftlichem Zirkel auftauchte und als »Naziprinz« bekannt war.
David Talbot (Das Schachbrett des Teufels: Die CIA, Allen Dulles und der Aufstieg Amerikas heimlicher Regierung (German Edition))
Woe, if the Germanic people should fail to resist in this struggle. That would be the end of beauty and culture, of the creative power of this earth. That is the distant future. That is what we are fighting for: it is our duty to pass on the heritage of our ancestors.
Heinrich Himmler (Himmler Speaks at Posen)
Though the idea was Hitler’s, originating in a scribbled note
Heinrich Fraenkel (Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo)
entry into the old imperial castle of Prague, the Hradschin. He described it as follows: ‘The Führer went into a barely furnished room, turned to your father, and embraced him, delighted that it had been granted to him to
Peter Longerich (Heinrich Himmler: A Life)
To put it at its simplest, the police had been placed under the control of the SS, run by SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. He in turn created a new organization, the Reich Security Main Office, under the command of SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, into which were placed the three elements of the Security Police, to wit: the Criminal Police (Kripo), the Secret Police (Gestapo), and the Party’s own intelligence service, the SD. So to be a detective was effectively to be a member of the SS also, and every Criminal Police rank had its equivalent in the SS.
David Thomas (Ostland)
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
Prit Buttar (Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany's Eastern Front 1944-45 (General Military))
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.
Ian Kershaw (Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis)
Reading was for him a narrowing, not a widening experience He saw himself as a teacher and reformer born to change the world.
Roger Manvell (Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo)
Due to falling birth rates and a desire to promote Nazi eugenics, it became evident that Germany had to implement programs to increase the population of pure Aryan children. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler built homes where women of acceptable bloodlines were to be bred with SS officers. These homes were called Homes for the Lebensborn. Women who became pregnant out of wedlock could go to one of these establishments and receive the finest of food and care during their pregnancies, with no stigma attached. In fact, they were honored because they were bearing a child for Hitler, for the Fatherland. There was only one stipulation. Once the child was born, if the father was unwilling to raise it, it must be given over to the Home for the Lebensborn. When a woman entered the home, she signed papers to this effect, and the policy forbade mothers from taking their children without marriage to an SS officer. These breeding farms were created in the hopes of repopulating the world with a perfect Aryan race once the Nazis had cleared out all of the undesirables, such as: Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, the physically or mentally handicapped, and anyone else Hitler saw fit to destroy.
Roberta Kagan (You Are My Sunshine (All My Love, Detrick, #2))
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
David R. Gillham (City of Women)
Heinrich Himmler was a mass murderer greatly concerned with decorum. He
Nikolaus Wachsmann (KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps)
Medical experiments were also held in Auschwitz, and were facilitated by SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. The experiments were planned to meet the needs of the army as well as to confirm the racial biases of the Nazis as to the superiority of the Aryan race. One particularly harsh example of medical experimentation was the search for the perfect method of mass sterilization which would make it possible for a large number of women to be sterilized in the shortest possible time. To achieve this goal, experiments were conducted at the women’s camp in Birkenau
Larry Berg (Auschwitz: The Shocking Story & Secrets of the Holocaust Death Camp (Auschwitz, Holocaust, Jewish, History, Eyewitness Account, World War 2 Book 1))
In 1940, Heinrich Himmler, wanting to extend SS influence to the rocket program, pressured Wernher von Braun into joining the organization despite his lack of political commitment. Von Braun joined chiefly to keep working on his passion, rocketry, but his eventual rise to the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) tainted his reputation and dogged him following the war. A few years later, Arthur Rudolph and several other leading Peenemünde figures began using slave labor at the facility in 1942. Contrary to their later claims that Himmler forced this move on them, their letters and memos at the time indicate nothing but enthusiasm among this group's members for the use of Soviet, Polish, and French POWs for coerced labor.
Charles River Editors (Operation Paperclip: The History of the Secret Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America During and After World War II)
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.
Hank Bracker (Suppressed I Rise)
My honour is my loyalty
Heinrich Himmler
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.” Heinrich Himmler
Stewart Anděl (Notorious Nazi Doctors (The Eclectic Collection Book 4))
I have always taken the position that we must get beyond the consciousness that is imprinted in the German brain by certain church institutions: "Oh God, what a poor, untraditional people we are," because it is not true. These were the reasons and are the reasons why I took up prehistory and many research matters especially after the seizure of power.
Heinrich Himmler
I may anticipate something here. The conviction that we are the oldest people.
Heinrich Himmler
When the history of this time will be written, one dogma will be expressed: Adolf Hitler was the greatest Aryan, not only the greatest Germanic, leader – and they will say about us, his henchmen: His Paladins were faithful, obedient and steadfast, they were worthy to be his comrades, to be his paladins.
Heinrich Himmler
So far, thank God, in our ranks no case has occurred in which a reputable SS Man was disloyal.
Heinrich Himmler
Cases like the Badoglio affair in Italy should, and never will, happen in Germany. The name Badoglio will in the future be a term of abuse for bad dogs, for four-legged mongrel curs, just as in ancient times Thersites was a term of abuse for traitors.
Heinrich Himmler
Reinhard Heydrich was born March 7, 1904 in Halle on the Saale. Fear and excessive caution were foreign to him, the greatest sportsman of the SS, a bold fencer, rider, pentathlon champion, and swimmer. With courage and energy he defended himself and shot twice at his attackers, though he had been gravely wounded. He has transmitted synthesis virtues to his sons, who honor his blood and heritage. His wife and children prosthesis deserve our attention and loving care. His memory will aid us when we have tasks to carry out for the leader and the Reich. He wants to be our companion in good times and bad. Therefore, he will be present when we are celebrating with our comrades. he wants to be with his old comrades: Weitzel, Moder, Herrmann, Mülverstedt, Stahlecker, and many others.
Heinrich Himmler
I may anticipate something here. The conviction that we are the oldest people. I once said to a Catholic priest in an argument, to which he said: "What do you want, Rome is eternal". I said to him: "Lord, forgive me, it is exactly 1934 years old." For it was in 1934. "But we have a plow that was found in Lower Saxony, it is 3000 years before the turn of time, it is 5000 years old. And when you look at the plants, what the state science is digging out of the German soil, then your teaching that this was a lazy, drunken, and cultureless people is over. For it is precisely the installations here on the Rhine, where the Germanic forest stood opposite the Limes, which enables us to ascertain that only a people organized at least in their great tribal associations to the last and already well-founded in the matter of the state was in a position to be able to recalculate here these gigantic constructions, their hours of work and the people needed and were organized for these working hours, to bring about these gigantic constructions.
Heinrich Himmler
During the struggle and now, we always took the view that what we sometimes see as terribly important, terribly difficult, terribly arduous in one year is only a very small part of the great history of our people.
Heinrich Himmler
National Socialism in its racial knowledge is, after all, the theaching that not all the people are equal is the knowledge and the call to this precious Germanic blood.
Heinrich Himmler
But this blood, which alone is the creative, from which alone our thinkers, inventors, soldiers, statesmen, teachers of law, from which alone the engineers, the technicians, the eternally inventing, organising spirit of Aryan white humanity sprout, which would die out once this blood had seeped away or been mixed and gone to death. This blood is what we understand by the precious one of our people. And it is this Nordic blood that binds the Bavarian with the pomeranian, the east Prussia here with the man of the Westmark the Schleswig Holsteiner with the man of Styria that gives us the stampf of being a Germanic people.
Heinrich Himmler
Every nation, it can be the best, has its lees and its yeast. Our German people, which in the course of three centuries again has grown out of the remnant of 4 million that remained after the 30 Years’ War, also has a lees. It is certainly not greater than that of other peoples. It is sometimes particularly dangerous for us as a people of such high standing, because it is particularly out of the ordinary. It is understandable and explicable, because through this wonderful country, which is so incredibly beautiful in terms of its landscape, and in which you are now in one of the most beautiful parts, through this country, which is so beautiful, but which is so unfortunate geographically, geopolitically and in terms of defence policy, with its open borders to the east and to the west, peoples and races of all kinds from Asia, from the east and from the west have passed through it over the centuries. Again and again, out of the otherwise healthy womb of our people, in the course of heredity and in the enigma of the course of heredity and the game of love; again and again, once, a dark germ will rise and becom a human being. This realisation need not sadden us.
Heinrich Himmler
As long as the Aryan lives, as long as our blood, the Nordic-Germanic blood, is alive, there will be order on this globe of the Lord God.
Heinrich Himmler
We then learn further that in the winter of 1807 the Immediate Commission was set up and carried out its great work. We did not learn, however, that the cannonade of Valmy and the surrender of the fortresses in 1806 were a complete act of treason on the part of the Prussian army at the time Freemasons, the sans-culottes and the Illuminati in France, that it was a complete conspiracy.
Heinrich Himmler
Despite our large numbers, we as a people of 75 million are a minority in the world. We have very, very many people against us that you, as National Socialists, know very well: all of Capital, all of Judaism, all of Freemasonry, all of the Democrats and Philistines of the world, all of the Bolsheviks of the world, all of the Jesuits of the world, and so on not least all the peoples who regret that they didn't completely kill us in 1918 and who only know one vow: once we get our hands on Germany again, then there will be no more 1918, but then that will be it End.
Heinrich Himmler
On this very day, 21 June, in peacetime all over Germany the fires of the sun festival were burning. Everywhere the sun festival was celebrated by the youth, the entire Movement, the SS and the SA. If one flew across Germany in 1933 and 1934, at the time we started that custom, one could see actual traces of fire extending from North to South, and East to West. In wartime we cannot celebrate the sun festival. We can only remember that day. Our ancestors always considered this an important festival. And I am very pleased, gentlemen, that you will be able to celebrate this very festival today and tomorrow, the 21st and 22nd, on top of a mountain, the Obersalzberg, where you are guests of your supreme warlord.
Heinrich Himmler
There should be no doubt in your mind that we are fighting with the oldest enemies that our people have had for thousands of years: Jews, Freemasons and Jesuits.
Heinrich Himmler
Many people say, "Oh, the Finns are an honest people". Yes sir. Do you know why they're so honest? Not because they've got simply fantastic moral inclinations, but because they had laws for 300 years, that anybody who stole one Finnish mark should have his hand hacked off. And that was so painful and so distressing that the whole people, as a result of such measures and such education, gradually became honest. We're not going to start doing that here, but, gentlemen, we must always take care to begin with ourselves.
Heinrich Himmler
Created in 1936 to provide forced labor33 for factories, Sachsenhausen would, with its sister camps Dachau and Buchenwald (created in 1933 and 1937, respectively), serve as Heinrich Himmler’s model for concentration camps. Pitching the purpose of camps as “education” institutes,
Larry Loftis (Code Name: Lise)
he
Peter Longerich (Heinrich Himmler: A Life)
He distanced himself more and more from Roman Catholicism. Instead, he became increasingly preoccupied with works that, in his view, dealt with occult phenomena in a serious ‘scholarly’ way; for example, a book about ‘Astrology, Hypnosis, Spiritualism, Telepathy’,33 topics which, at the peak of the inflation and during the subsequent period of upheaval, were generally in vogue.34 In 1925 he was to read a book about the power of pendulums,35 and in the same year he approached an astrologer with a request for four horoscopes.36 He was impressed by an account of the Pyramid of Cheops—‘history built and written in stone and a representation of the universe, which a genius has written in the form of this pyramid’—since it showed ‘a range of knowledge that we conceited people of culture have long ago lost and even now have not recovered to the same extent’.37 During January and February 1923 he read a book on Spiritualism, and commented in his notes that it had convinced him that Spiritualism was true. Thus, Himmler assumed that it was possible to communicate with the souls of the dead.38 Already, in May 1921, he had read a book twice within a short time which claimed to prove there was life after death; despite being somewhat sceptical, he was inclined to believe the evidence put forward. ‘The transmigration of souls’, he noted at the end of his commentary on it.39 It was a topic that was also to preoccupy him after he became Reichsführer-SS (RFSS).
Peter Longerich (Heinrich Himmler: A Life)
He was not one of those Nazi supporters who were attracted by the ‘Führer’s’ charisma; instead, he became politically involved primarily in the context of the general preparations for a putsch that were being carried out by right-wing paramilitary organizations in the years 1922/3. If he had a political hero at this time it was Röhm, not Hitler.
Peter Longerich (Heinrich Himmler: A Life)
Germanic mythology, reinforced by all sorts of occult ideas, evidently became for him a kind of substitute religion.
Peter Longerich (Heinrich Himmler: A Life)
As a supporter of a ‘German Socialism’, Strasser advocated views different from those of Hitler, particularly on social and economic issues. He demanded the ‘nationalization’ of land and of the means of production, and within the NSDAP represented a decidedly anti-capitalist stance.
Peter Longerich (Heinrich Himmler: A Life)
It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive it. It would be the end of beauty and "Kultur", of the creative power of this earth.
Heinrich Himmler
That is why, whenever we meet and whatever we do, we must be mindful of our principle: blood, selection, and austerity. The law of nature is just this: What is hard is good; what is vigorous is good; whatever wins through in the battle of life, physically, purposefully and spiritually, that is what is good-always tak­ing the long view. Of course sometime -- and this has happened often in history -- someone can get to the top by deceit and cheating. That makes no difference to nature, to the fate of the earth, to the fate of the world. Reality, that is, Nature, Fate, removes the impostor after a time-time not reckoned in generations of man but in historical periods. It must be our endeavour never to deceive ourselves, but always to remain genuine, that is what we must continually preach and instill into ourselves, and into every boy and each one of our subordinates.
Heinrich Himmler
We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy. I will now say again something which I have already today said to the men elsewhere: we will never let that excellent weapon, the dread and terrible reputation which preceded us in the battles for Kharkow fade, but will constantly add new meaning to it. They can call us what they like in the world, the main thing is that we are the eternally loyal, obedient, steadfast and unconquerable fighting men of the Germanic people and of the Fuehrer, the SS of the Germanic Reich.
Heinrich Himmler
U koopt Prins Bernhard af, in het buitenland, alsnog via dwangsom? Ah, fijn.
Petra Hermans
Himmler is the man whom General Heinrich Hossbach described as “Hitler’s evil spirit, cold, calculating and ambitious … undoubtedly the most purposeful and most unscrupulous figure in the Third Reich.
Bill Yenne (Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler's Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS)
I view it as disastrous for a people when boys tell their mothers: "When we are marching in the Hitler Youth, see to it that you do not pass by. I would greet you, yes, but the others would laugh, I would then be considered a mama’s boy and a weakling.” I view it as disastrous for a people when a boy is ashamed of his sister and his mother or is directed to be ashamed of women
Heinrich Himmler (The Homosexual Threat to Civilization: A Speech by Heinrich Himmler)
In any case we must educate our young always to be chivalrous men, men (Menschen) who stand up for women
Heinrich Himmler (The Homosexual Threat to Civilization: A Speech by Heinrich Himmler)
We must put a stop to the whole tendency, which we have today in youth and which we may also have in the SS, to mock a man who walks with a girl, a man who is respectful toward his mother, and a boy who is gentlemanly toward his sister.
Heinrich Himmler (The Homosexual Threat to Civilization: A Speech by Heinrich Himmler)
We must be clear about that: the movement, the Weltanschauung has lasting stability if it is supported by the woman
Heinrich Himmler (The Homosexual Threat to Civilization: A Speech by Heinrich Himmler)
and that they should learn to judge for themselves and heed their individual conscience.10 Arendt depicts Eichmann as a pompous idiot, “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” Poking fun at his malapropisms, she observes with dead precision, “His inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”11 Eichmann, whose efforts to expel, deport, and exterminate millions exceeded even the orders he received, who continued to the very last moment when even Heinrich Himmler had changed course, who said he despised colleagues who just followed orders, was the least apt example of an average bureaucrat, of just another number in the huge equation of the Nazi state.12 Eichmann was totally devoted to Hitler and National Socialism, fanatically ambitious
Abram de Swaan (The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder)