“
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
“
The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
“
It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.
”
”
Wilhelm Reich (Listen, Little Man!)
“
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
“
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify...no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human...
”
”
Primo Levi (If This Is a Man • The Truce)
“
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)
“
HEADMASTER: I was a geographer. I went to Hull.
IRWIN: Oh. Larkin.
HEADMASTER: Everybody says that. 'Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry...as I say, I was a geographer...but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves.
Art. They get away with murder.
”
”
Alan Bennett (The History Boys)
“
It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther.* The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and, furthermore, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed… and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies… in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us”—advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler.
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in an infant`s mouth belongs to Himmler`s circle of hell.
”
”
Andrea Dworkin (Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant)
“
Himmler announced today that a Polish farm labourer had been hanged for sleeping with a German woman. No race pollution is to be permitted. Another
”
”
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
He was a strange mix of Heinrich Himmler and Barney the Dinosaur.
”
”
Jonas Eriksson (Everyday Psychopaths)
“
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
”
”
Project Itoh (Harmony)
“
Thousands of those men and boys died here, and I have recently learned that their inhuman treatment was the intended policy of Himmler. He called his plan Death by Exhaustion, and he implemented it. Work them hard, don't waste valuable foodstuffs on them, and let them die. They could, and would, always be replaced by new slave workers from Europe's Occupied countries.
”
”
Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)
“
Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler--who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself--was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!
”
”
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
“
Subordinate of H. Himmler, may have played role in Himmler’s not yet fully explained death in 1948.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
“
I wish you had fucked her. Then you’d know. Then you’d know the sublime … Her asshole, for example. It’s like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler—
”
”
Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf, #1))
“
The name came from the fact that prisoners could be “concentrated” in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps “legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law.” Dachau
”
”
Annie Jacobsen (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America)
“
When Hitler brushed past me going down the aisle, he was followed by Himmler, Brückner, Keitel, and several others, all in dusty field-grey. Most of them were unshaven and I must say they looked like a pack of Chicago gangsters.
”
”
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state.
”
”
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
“
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)
“
I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.)
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
The trick used by Himmler—who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself —was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!
”
”
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
“
Out, Himmler! Out of my sight! Go and visit your club-footed daughter! Bring her sauerkraut! Sauerkraut and heroin, Thorndike! She will love it! She will—!
”
”
William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist)
“
history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
”
”
William Styron (Sophie's Choice)
“
Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of “strong objections in certain circles” to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was “the equivalent of treason.
”
”
Annie Jacobsen (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America)
“
What Himmler planned as a gift-wrapped massacre became a siege lasting nearly a month, until at last the Germans decided to torch everything—buildings, bunkers, sewers, and all the people in them.
”
”
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife)
“
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)
“
Most self-indulgent of all Nazis, and is in sharp contrast to late H. Himmler, who lived in personal want at low salary. Herr Goring representative of spoils mentality, using power as means of acquiring personal wealth. Primitive mentality, even vulgar, but quite intelligent man, possibly most intelligent of all Nazi chiefs. Object of his drives: self-glorification in ancient emperor fashion.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
“
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)
“
This pursuit of Theo was not borne out of hatred for him as a man or a Jew. All of that was just an excuse - an excuse for lawless men to take what belonged to others. It seemed strange that those who served the Hitlers and the Himmlers and the Gorings believed constant lies. "The Jew is a misfortune." It was those little men in the service of greed who were the most violent, the most dedicated to the brutality of the racial policies. They murdered and terrorized for one reason only: because they could. They were the law of the lawlessness; the power of evil was their creed and their joy and their god!
”
”
Bodie Thoene (Vienna Prelude (Zion Covenant, #1))
“
Fue Himmler, y sólo él, quien durante el curso de la guerra fijó el carácter definitivo de los campos de concentración. Sólo él daba las órdenes al servicio de Seguridad, sólo él tenía el derecho a hacerlo.
”
”
Rudolf Höss (Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz)
“
(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)
“
By early 1937, the Nazi state could be likened to an atomic structure. The nucleus was Hitler, surrounded by successive rings of henchmen. The innermost ring was Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, privy to his less secret ambitions and the means he was proposing to employ to realize them. In the outer rings were the ministers, commanders-in-chief and diplomats, each aware of only a small sector of the plans radiating from the nucleus. Beyond them was the German people. The whole structure was bound by the forces of the police state – by the fear of the wiretap, the letter censors, the Gestapo and ultimately the short, sharp corrective spells provided by Himmler's renowned establishments at Dachau and elsewhere.
”
”
David Irving (The War Path)
“
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
“
Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past.
”
”
Adolf Hitler
“
The secret police announced that two men were shot for “resisting arrest” yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.
”
”
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
Only then, after all these things had been accomplished within the first couple of hours of the coup, could the messages, which had been drawn up and filed, be sent out by radio, telephone and telegraph to the commanders of the Home Army in other cities and to the top generals commanding the troops at the front and in the occupied zones, announcing that Hitler was dead and that a new anti-Nazi government had been formed in Berlin. The revolt would have to be over—and achieved—within twenty-four hours and the new government firmly installed. Otherwise the vacillating generals might have second thoughts. Goering and Himmler might be able to rally them, and a civil war would ensue. In that case the fronts would cave in and the very chaos and collapse which the plotters wished to prevent would become inevitable.
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic. The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany, questioning the validity of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a career depended upon an “Aryan” physiognomy (Himmler used to select the applicants for the SS from photographs) and the amount of food upon the number of one’s Jewish grandparents, was like questioning the existence of the world.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“
9 October 1943
Regarding the Jewish question, he [Himmler] gives a very unadorned and frank picture. He is of the conviction that the Jewish question can be solved by the end of this year. He advocates the most radical and most severe solution, namely to exterminate Jewry, bag and baggage. Of course, if brutal, this is a consistent solution. Because we must take on the responsibility of entirely solving this question in our time. Subsequent generations will doubtlessly no longer dare address this problem with the courage and obsession as we are able to do today.
”
”
Joseph Goebbels (The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943)
“
They knew where they were going by then—Ravensbrück, the concentration camp set up by Himmler in 1938 for all the women who did not fit the Aryan Kinder-Küche-Kirche ideal: criminals, prostitutes, Roma, and, in recent years, increasing numbers of Resistance fighters from all over Europe.
”
”
Annejet van der Zijl (The Boy Between Worlds)
“
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)
“
As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes."
Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds.
To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it.
”
”
Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
“
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)
“
It was this method of achieving the “final solution” that Himmler had in mind when he addressed the S.S. generals at Posen on October 4, 1943. …I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly… I mean… the extermination of the Jewish race… Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written…55
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.7
”
”
David Rubín (The Islamic Tsunami: Israel And America In The Age Of Obama)
“
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)
“
The fact that the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatsoever for political behavior—that, on the contrary, one could follow the party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced the night before—naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the same concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what one was doing, that Himmler’s ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressed: "My honor is my loyalty.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“
Johann had told me once that he had heard Himmler say on the radio that, after the war, all the Gypsies would be relocated to a reservation where they could live according to their ancestral customs without interference. It all sounded like castles in the air, but that day I could at least start dreaming. I had now been given the sacred mission of saving the Gypsy children at Birkenau, which would start by reviving their will to live in the midst of all that death
”
”
Mario Escobar (Auschwitz Lullaby)
“
It has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you’re robbing somebody, oppressing them, dictating their lives, it’s a very rare person who can say: Look, I’m a monster. I’m doing this for my own good. Even Himmler didn’t say that. A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression, whether it’s throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: It’s their depravity. That’s why I’m doing it. Maybe I’m even doing them good. If it’s their depravity, there’s got to be something about them that makes them different from me. What’s different about them will be whatever you can find. And that’s the justification. Then it becomes racism. You can always find something—they have a different color hair or eyes, they’re too fat, or they’re gay. You find something that’s different enough. Of course you can lie about it, so it’s easier to find.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (How the World Works)
“
The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.
”
”
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
“
Thus the pace, justification and mode of implementation of the genocide changed repeatedly from its inception in the summer of 1941. Examining the origins of 'the final solution' in terms of a process rather than a single decision uncovers a variety of impulses given by the Nazi leadership in general, and Hitler and Himmler in particular, to the fight against the supposed global enemy of the Germans. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides. What drove the exterminatory impulses of the Nazis, at every level of the hierarchy, was not the kind of contempt that stamped millions of Slavs as dispensable subhumans, but an ideologically pervasive mixture of fear and hatred, which blamed the Jews for all of Germany's ills, and sought their destruction as a matter of life and death, in the interests of Germany's survival.
”
”
Richard J. Evans (The Third Reich at War (The History of the Third Reich, #3))
“
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
“
Himmler was himself ‘more normal,’ that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement. He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Göring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“
Contrary to what had long been assumed, Himmler did not give the order for the general extermination of all Jews in Soviet territory during his August 15 visit to Minsk, when, at his request, he attended a mass execution of Jews on the outskirts of the city.48 The move from selective to mass murder had started earlier, probably as a result of Hitler’s remarks during the July 16 conference regarding the “possibilities” offered by “antipartisan” operations. All Jews may not have been partisans in German eyes, but why not assume that they would offer assistance to partisans if they could?
”
”
Saul Friedländer (The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945)
“
He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there:
"I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando," he said to me, "when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down."
Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed--one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains. Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando.
"Why?" I asked him.
"If you would write a book about that," he said, "and give the answer to that question, that 'Why?'--you would have a very great book."
"Do you know the answer?" I said.
"No," he said, "That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it."
"Any guesses?" I said.
"No," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "even though I was one of the ones who volunteered."
He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me:
"There were loudspeakers all over the camp," he said, "and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music--sometimes the best."
"That's interesting," I said.
"There was no music by Jews," he said. "That was forbidden." "Naturally," I said. "And the music was always stopping in the middle," he said, "and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements."
"Very modern," I said. He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly.
"There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando."
"Oh?" I said.
"Leichentärger zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed. Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse."
In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry.
"After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Mother Night)
“
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)
“
The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was Himmler. He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S., taken from a Hitler speech before the S.S. in 1931, “My Honor is my Loyalty”—catch phrases which Eichmann called “winged words” and the judges “empty talk”—and issued them, as Eichmann recalled, “around the turn of the year,” presumably along with a Christmas bonus. Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it: “These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again,” alluding to the “battles” against women, children, old people, and other “useless mouths.” Other such phrases, taken from speeches Himmler made to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders, were: “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.” Or: “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening order an organization could ever receive.” Or: We realize that what we are expecting from you is “superhuman,” to be “superhumanly inhuman.” All one can say is that their expectations were not disappointed. It is noteworthy, however, that Himmler hardly ever attempted to justify in ideological terms, and if he did, it was apparently quickly forgotten. What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted
”
”
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
“
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
“
on the evening of Thursday, 31 August 1939, an unnamed inmate of a German concentration camp was taken by the Gestapo to a radio transmitting station outside the frontier town of Gleiwitz. He was then dressed up in a Polish Army uniform and shot. A propaganda story was quickly concocted alleging that the Poles had attacked Germany, thus enabling Hitler to invade Poland ‘in self-defence’, without needing to declare war first. Operation Himmler, as this farcically transparent pantomime was codenamed, thus encompassed the very first death of the Second World War. Considering the horrific ways in which fifty million people were to die over the next six years, the hapless prisoner was one of the lucky ones.
”
”
Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War)
“
In a certain sense the Holocaust can be seen as an expression of an almost religious fanaticism, and at the same time as a wilful blindness, a deep, collective moral lapse. This is not a popular explanation. It is, after all, much more disturbing than all the theories that grasp at anti-Semitism and the evil of the German Nazi elite. It implies that a similar mass persecution, using the current technology, bureaucracies and systems of repression and manipulation, could take place again tomorrow in a different place and against a different group. The technocrats will remain. In Haffner’s words: ‘This is their age. We shall be rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but the Speers, whatever happens to them as individuals, shall be with us for a long time.
”
”
Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
“
In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis were ‘working towards the Führer’, whose authority allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the occupied territories. Academics – historians at the forefront – excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east. Racial ‘experts’ in the party set to work to construct the ‘scientific’ basis for the inferiority of the Poles. Armies of planners, moved to the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring. Hitler had to do no more than provide the general licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice.
”
”
Ian Kershaw (Hitler)
“
Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology.
”
”
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
“
Himmler left the Catholic Church in 1936, and as the war later raged he sometimes reflected on Islam’s supposed advantages in motivating soldiers. “Mohammed knew that most people are terribly cowardly and stupid,” he told Kersten in 1942. “That is why he promised every warrior who fights courageously and falls in battle two [ sic ] beautiful women. . . . You may call this primitive and laugh about it . . . but it is based on deeper wisdom. A religion must speak a man’s language.” These reflections have a crackpot quality, as did much of the rest of Himmler’s thinking about the spiritual world, which included an interest in mysticism and the occult. It is, of course, no reflection on the Islamic faith that Himmler read its sacred text so shallowly or that he subscribed to the hoary cliché about Islam’s supposed martial character.
”
”
Anonymous
“
It was about a year ago when I first made contact with members of the British Foreign Office. I volunteered my services and privileged information to a foreign power. Which is effectively treason, or would be, except that I regard it as pure patriotism. You see, Clara, I no longer recognize the Germany I love. I see these brutes strong-arming a small nation like Austria, and now threatening Czechoslovakia, because they can and because no one will stop them. I see them running riot with the rule of law - Germany, whose legal system is the greatest in the world, which has always stood for justice and right. And when I see this gang of thugs flooding the streets of my beloved country with tides of blood, I feel hatred swelling inside me. Damn Himmler and Heydrich and all the other sadists. I hate this false Germany, as much as I love the real Germany. And I intend to do something about it.
”
”
Jane Thynne (The Scent of Secrets (Clara Vine, #3))
“
In my country, we all participated. It is not enough to say that Hitler dragged the rest of us, kicking and screaming, to do his bidding. We did it willingly. That will be the scar that will never heal. Nor should it. We betrayed our neighbours, we took the precious possessions of those people the system deemed to be not in keeping with the perfect Aryan ideal – we did it. Us. The German people. The country that created Wagner and Dürer and Nietzsche also created Himmler, Goebbels and Göring. They didn’t drop from the sky, something alien. No. They were of my people, the Brownshirts who smashed up Jewish property, who humiliated Jews in the streets, who shipped them off to die in conditions that do not even bear thinking about – we all did it. We drove the trains, we sold their clothes, we moved into their houses, we spent their money. And even if we didn’t do those things, we kept our heads down while it all went on around us. All but a small few of us have blood on our hands, and now and for the rest of time, we must pay.
”
”
Jean Grainger (Return to Robinswood (Robinswood #2))
“
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)
“
Il avait lu des masses de livres là-dessus, tout récement celui d'Hannah Arendt sur le procès d'Eichmann à Jérusalem, il savait que le jour où il écrirait sérieusement, ce serait à ce sujet. Le nazisme, tous les habitants de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle doivent se débrouiller avec, vivre avec l'idée que c'est arrivé, comme lui devait vivre avec la mort de sa soeur Jane. On peut ne pas y penser, n'empêche que c'est là, et il faudrait que ce soit aussi dans son livre.
Rien de plus éloigné du tao que le nazisme. Les Japonais, pourtant, qui vénèrent le tao, avaient été alliés aux nazis. S'ils l'avaient emporté... Un moment, il laissa miroiter cette idée. On avait déjà fait des livres de ce genre, il en avait lu un d'après lequel le Sud avait gagné la guerre de Sécession. Il se demanda ce que serait un monde issu de la victoire de l'Axe, quinze ans plus tòt. Qui dirigerait le Reich ? Hitler toujours l'un de ses lieutenants ? Est-ce que cela changerait quelque chose que ce soit Bormann, Himmler, Goering ou Baldur von Schirach? Est-ce que cela changerait quelque chose pour lui, habitant de Point Reyes, Marin County ? Et quoi?
”
”
Emmanuel Carrère
“
mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands
”
”
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife)
“
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)
“
To protect ourselves we use the most potent marker of distance we know, the line of demarcation that passes between ‘we’ and ‘they’. The Nazis have become our great ‘they’. In their demonic and monstrous evil ‘they’ exterminated the Jews and set the world aflame. Hitler, Goebels, Goering and Himmler, Mengele, Stangl and Eichmann. The German people who followed ‘them’ are in our minds also ‘they’, a faceless and frenzied mass, almost as monstrous as their leaders. The remoteness of ‘they’ is vast and dashes down these proximate historical events, which took place in the present of our grandparents, into a near-medieval abyss. At the same time we know, every one of us knows, even though we might not acknowledge it, that we ourselves, had we been a part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism. In Germany in 1938 Nazism was the consensus. It was what was right, and who would dare to speak against what is right? The great majority of us believe the same as everyone else, do the same as everyone else, and this is to become the ‘we’ and the ‘all’ are what decide the norms, rules and morals of society. Now that Nazism has become ‘they’, it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case what Nazism was ‘we’. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 6 (Min kamp, #6))
“
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)
“
Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology. Since sexual abuse enhanced photographic memory while decreasing critical analysis and free thought, there would ultimately be no free will soul expression controlling behavior. In which case, social engineering was underway to create apathy while stifling spiritual evolution. Nevertheless, to short sighted flat thinking individuals such as Bush, spiritual evolution was not a consideration anyway. Instead, controlling behavior in a population diminished by global genocide of ‘undesirables’ would result in Hitler’s ‘superior race’ surviving to claim the earth. Perceptual justifications such as these that were discussed at the Bohemian Grove certainly did not provide me with the complete big picture. It did, however, provide a view beyond the stereotyped child molester in a trench coat that helped in understanding the vast crimes and cover-ups being discussed at this seminar in Houston.
”
”
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
“
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)
“
Il giorno della mia nascita, i tre personaggi destinati a devastare l’umanità erano già venuti al mondo: Hitler aveva diciotto anni, Stalin ventotto e Mao tredici. Ero cascata nel secolo sbagliato. Il loro.
”
”
Franz-Olivier Giesbert (La cuoca di Himmler)
“
The Ordo Templi Orientis and The Golden Dawn were associated with secret Russian, British and German societies, and especially with Elena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, established in New York City in 1875, Rudolph Steiner, the Brüder Des Lichts, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff, founder of Thule Gesellschaft which attracted Adolf Hitler, Himmler, Karl Haushofer, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Rosenberg, Halford John Mackinder, Hans Frank. These secret associations and alliances linked together German and English occultists in a formidable bond. The blend of esoterism, occult and so-called British-German mysticism deeply influenced Hitler; an alarming movement which was in sharp contrast with Maria Orsic’s metaphysical and occultic movement. Many argued that this strong link between British and German occultists, led Adolf Hitler to believe that England will not take a stand against him. Hitler thought that those occultists had a considerable influence in England.
”
”
Maximillien de Lafayette (Volume I. UFOs: MARIA ORSIC, THE WOMAN WHO ORIGINATED AND CREATED EARTH’S FIRST UFOS (Extraterrestrial and Man-Made UFOs & Flying Saucers Book 1))
“
4 If you’re going to San Francisco / Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair / You’re going to meet some gentle people there.
”
”
Franz-Olivier Giesbert (La cuoca di Himmler)
“
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)
“
Z.B: Hannah Arendt observó que el verdadero genio entre los seductores nazis era Himmler, que organizó a las masas en un sistema de dominación total, gracias a su (correcta!) suposición de que en su gran mayoría los hombres no son vampiros o sádicos, sino empleados y miembros de una familia.
”
”
Zygmunt Bauman (Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity)
“
Especially striking was an upsurge of interest in astrology, fortune telling and all manner of numerical and alphabetical methods of divining the future.34
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
Lies had always been an integral part of Nazi propaganda. Whether he was convinced that lies were justified by the greater ends they served or whether he had become incapable through his years of power and his closeness to Hitler of separating wish from sober calculation, falsehood is surely indivisible.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
It is a race now whether the Bolsheviks double-cross the Americans, or the Americans the English – because they are certainly not very united – or whether the English double-cross both the others
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
Thus the legend of the ‘stab in the back’ and the undefeated German Army had become historical truth
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
the homeland differed from its counterpart in 1918 as it had been cleansed of Jews and all criminal riff-raff.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
on 24 July Marshal Rokossovskii’s Army Group had overrun the extermination camp at Majdanek; for the first time the unbelievable had become visible. Photographs of gas chambers and crematoria and living skeletons in the camp had shocked the world.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
siblings Scholl died as courageous and upright martyrs. Report of an eyewitness.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
The Munich students provided a spectacular example of resistance put down by the Gestapo;
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
This Christendom, this greatest pestilence which could have befallen us in history, which has weakened us for every conflict, we must finish with.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
Rascher’s ‘normal’ colleagues and co-workers recognised him as a fraud who inflicted unnecessary suffering and fatalities and used his privileged position with the Reichsführer to gain medical reputation and advancement.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
Himmler was, as he had always been, merely the most extreme, emotionally committed exponent of the orthodoxy of the master race.
”
”
Peter Padfield (Himmler)
“
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)
“
Between May 26 to June 4, a hastily assembled fleet of more than 800 boats, including fishing boats, pleasure craft, and lifeboats, made numerous crossings of the English Channel, rescuing nearly 200,000 British troops and more than 100,000 French soldiers from capture by the Germans.
”
”
Bill Yenne (Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler's Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS)
“
Himmler and these men are all members of a Nazi paramilitary organization known in German as the Schutzstaffel.
”
”
Bill O'Reilly (Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History)