Nazi Ss Quotes

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

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.

Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.

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.

Johann Clement watched the blows fall. First there had been wild talk and then printed accusations and insinuations. Then came a boycott of Jewish business and professional people, then the public humiliations: beatings and beard pullings. Then came the night terror of the Brown Shirts. Then came the concentration camps. Gestapo, SS, SD, KRIPO, RSHA. Soon every family in Germany was under Nazi scrutiny, and the grip of tyranny tightened until the last croak of defiance strangled and died.

Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe was not the early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman - Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death's-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. [...] Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they have been doing all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.

...the consequences of this shift of emphasis from the police to the military in the power game were of great consequence. It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially a police force, for the rule and even the conquest of foreign territories, with the ultimate aim of an amalgamation of the army and the police under the leadership of the SS.

The stock holders in the quarry were the SS and the leaders of the Nazi party. The blood of the slaves were their dividends, and the fat grew rich on human misery.

Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

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

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.

What is it with you and Nazis?” “They fun to watch,” Ordell said. “Look at the flag they got, with the boogied-up lightning flash on it. You can’t tell if it’s suppose to be SS or Captain Marvel.

Le parti national-socialiste avait fait un fameux cadeau à ces SS-là : ils pouvaient marcher au combat sans aucun risque physique, décrocher les honneurs sans avoir à entendre siffler les balles. L'impunité psychologique était plus difficile à atteindre. Tous les officiers SS avaient des camarades qui s'étaient suicidés. Le haut commandment avait pondu des circulaires pour dénoncer ces pertes futiles : il fallait être simple d'esprit pour croire que les juifs, parce qu'ils n'avaient pas de fusils, ne possédaient pas d'armes d'un autre calibre : des armes sociales, économiques et politiques. En fait, le juif était armé jusqu'aux dents. Trempez votre caractère dans l'acier, soulignaient les circulaires, car l'enfant juif est une bombe à retardement culturelle, la femme juive, un tissu biologique de toutes les trahisons, le mâle juif, un ennemi plus implacable encore qu'aucun Russe ne saurait l'être. (ch. 20)

In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it onto motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities. He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Röhm, the chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was one of Hitler’s inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time. Not Stalin, but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution. On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.

This, to be sure, is not the entire truth. For there were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard. They could be found everywhere, in all strata of society, among the simple people as well as among the educated, in all parties, perhaps even in the ranks of the N.S.D.A.P. Very few of them were known publicly, as were the aforementioned Reck-Malleczewen or the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Some of them were truly and deeply pious, like an artisan of whom I know, who preferred having his independent existence destroyed and becoming a simple worker in a factory to taking upon himself the “little formality” of entering the Nazi Party. A few still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name. A more numerous group were the workers, especially in Berlin, and Socialist intellectuals who tried to aid the Jews they knew. There were finally, the two peasant boys whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand (1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and refused to sign; they were sentenced to death, and on the day of their execution they wrote in their last letter to their families: “We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out.” The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing, was altogether different from that of the conspirators. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There may also have been such persons among the members of the resistance, but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspirators than among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints, and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in a single desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute element manifest itself publicly: this was when the Scholls, two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a “mass murderer.

atheistic regimes, such as communist China, communist Russia, and Nazi Germany is more than one hundred million people.32 There is no close second place. David Berlinski, a secular Jew who received his PhD from Princeton University, believes that one of the main reasons for such atrocities is the absence of ultimate accountability: “What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe . . . was that God was watching what they were

Von Braun and his team had just launched America’s first successful satellite, Explorer I, and as far as the public was concerned, von Braun’s star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had information on von Braun that the rest of the world most definitely did not, namely, that he had been an officer with the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS during the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of thousands of slave laborers forced to build the V-2 rocket, in an underground labor-concentration camp called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.

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

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.

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

A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to gouge out the eye of a pet cat after feeding the cat and cuddling it for a month. This exercise was designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison and mold a full Übermensch. There is a very sound magical postulate involved: the practitioner achieves superhuman status by performing some atrocious, revolting, subhuman act. In Morocco, magic men gain power by eating their own excrement. But dig out Ruski’s eyes? Stack bribes to the radioactive sky. What does it profit a man? I could not occupy a body that could dig out Ruski’s eyes. So WHO gained the whole world? I didn’t. Any bargain involving exchange of qualitative values like animal love for quantitative advantage is not only dishonorable, as wrong as a man can get, it is also foolish. Because YOU get nothing. You have sold your YOU.

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

The SS shifted and Grese's eyes narrowed but the singing seemed to hold them bound and not one raised their weapon. The music rose up around the emaciated women in a halo of warm, swirling breath, pouring out their humanity, their togetherness, their refusal just to lie down and die in the dirt of the Nazi regime

Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the opening of the Second World War. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS were practicing Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on, and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant.) Human beings and institutions are imperfect, to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid proof that holy institutions are man-made.

the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937–38 and the Holocaust of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany in 1941–45. Yet we make a great mistake if we imagine that the Soviet NKVD or the Nazi SS acted without support. Without the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale.

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

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

SS-mannen spurte meg hvor jeg kom fra. Jeg fortalte at jeg kom fra Norge. Han ville vite hvorfor jeg var blitt arrestert og hadde havnet i Auschwitz. Jeg svarte at det var fordi jeg var jøde. Kun derfor. Men han ville ikke tro meg.

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

The documents reveal that the ‘real’ Odessa was much more than a tight organization with only nostalgic Nazis for members. It consisted instead of layered rings of non-Nazi factions: Vatican institutions, Allied intelligence agencies and secret Argentine organizations. It also overlapped at strategic points with French-speaking war criminals, with Croatian Fascists and even with the SS men of the fictional Odessa, all in order to smuggle Hitler’s evil minions to safety.

Psychology, above all, is applying human understanding in a scientific manner. . . . The only profession I have ever encountered which separates the role of a human being from his professional activity,” he declared, “was the role of the SS man.

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

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

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

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.

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

The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; death carried out not as any kind of exception, not as an act of purposeful vengeance or hatred, but as casual, smiling, even homey routine, often against a background of colorful flower beds and to the accompaniment of lilting operetta music. It was to be death as a confirmation of all that had preceded it, death as a last demonstration of absolute power and absolute unreason, death as the final triumph of Nazism over man and over the human spirit.

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

In their own way, the Hungarian troops were as brutal as the SS. Most of the officers were well groomed, with pomaded hair, and had instilled in their mostly illiterate men an anti-Semitic fascist ideology that was on par with anything the SS could provide. They were callous and apt to shoot inmates for entertainment. Their main duty was to protect the kitchens, and they would stand in the square between the barracks taking shots at the prisoners foraging for scraps, killing dozens of them.9 Some retained a mystic devotion to the Nazi cause. One told a Jewish woman that he regretted the work of exterminating her people remained incomplete, telling her that Hitler would surely return, “and again we shall fight side by side.

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

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

The armed guard, following Göring by the mandated six steps, suddenly heard something whiz through the air, followed by a sickening thump. Embedded in the wooden planking behind Göring was an eight-inch SS combat knife. The sentry looked up, but was unable to determine who had thrown it or whether he or Göring was the intended target. “And if Göring himself had died who could prove that an American did not do it?

They stopped briefly at an inn near the town of Altaussee, a tidy village tucked in the woods near a pristine alpine lake. Outside, trimly uniformed SS officers were offering their services to the liberators, who they were sure would soon be at war with the Soviets. No? Then the SS officers were happy to surrender, as long as they could keep their sidearms. They feared their own troops would shoot them in the back.

Hitler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Economics says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had the money, and he was telling them more or less what they wanted to hear. The party needed large sums to finance election campaigns, pay the bill for its widespread and intensified propaganda, meet the payroll of hundreds of full-time officials and maintain the private armies of the S.A. and the S.S., which by the end of 1930 numbered more than 100,000 men—a larger force than the Reichswehr. The businessmen and the bankers were not the only financial sources—the, party raised sizable sums from dues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers, books and periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money they gave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative parties which they had been supporting hitherto.

This fluctuating hierarchy, with its constant addition of new layers and shifts in authority, is well known from secret control bodies, the secret police or espionage services, where new controls are always needed to control the controllers. In the prepower stage of the movements, total espionage is not yet possible; but the fluctuating hierarchy, similar to that of secret services, makes it possible, even without actual power, to degrade any rank or group that wavers or shows signs of decreasing radicalism by the mere insertion of a new more radical layer, hence driving the older group automatically in the direction of the front organizations and away from the center of the movement. Thus, the Nazi elite formations were primarily inner-party organizations: the SA rose to the position of a superparty when the party appeared to lose in radicality and was then in turn and for similar reasons superseded by the SS.

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

On Good Friday last year the SS found some pretext to punish 60 priests with an hour on "the tree." That is the mildest camp punishment. They tie a man's hands together behind his back, palms facing out and fingers pointing backward. Then they turn his hands inwards, tie a chain around his wrists and hoist him up by it. His own wight twists his joints and pulls them apart...Several of the priest who were hung up last year never recovered and died. If you don't have a strong heart, you don't survive it. Many have a permanently crippled hand.

It soon became apparent to me that deniers were a new type of neo-Nazi. Unlike previous generations of neo-Nazis—people who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, sported SS-like uniforms, and hung swastikas at meetings where they would give the Sieg Heil salute—this group eschewed all that.5 They were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They didn’t bother with the physical trappings of Nazism—salutes, songs, and banners—but proclaimed themselves “revisionists”—serious scholars who simply wished to revise “mistakes” in the historical record, to which end they established an impressive-sounding organization—the Institute for Historical Review—and created a benign-sounding publication—the Journal for Historical Review.6 Nothing in these names suggested the revisionists’ real agenda. They held conferences that, at first blush, seemed to be the most mundane academic confabs. But a close inspection of their publications and conference programs revealed the same extremism, adulation of the Third Reich, antisemitism, and racism as the swastika-waving neo-Nazis. This was extremism posing as rational discourse.

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.

The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons. We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run. At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead. When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free.

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

But Hans Beimler survived Dachau, escaping certain death just hours before the SS ultimatum expired. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night.7 After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler’s cell early the next morning, on May 9, 1933, and found it empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: “Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you’ll tell me [where Beimler is].” One of them was executed soon after.8 Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the camp, “Wanted” posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler’s arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the “famous Communist leader,” who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears.9 Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in Munich, he was spirited away in June 1933 by the Communist underground to Berlin and then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the SS men to “kiss my ass.

Sir Barry Domvile sensed the chill as soon as he arrived in Nuremberg for the 1937 Reichsparteitag. 'Thought the SS more truculent than usual,' he observed ... And he was further disappointed when the Führer passed by him at the reception without a word. Indeed as Hitler walked along the line of British guests, he remained stiff and expressionless until introduced to Francis Yeats-Brown when he burst into smiles. Yeats-Brown's autobiography, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930), had been made into a Hollywood movie (starring Gary Cooper) that had become a great favourite of Hitler's. He thought the film such a valuable demonstration of how Aryans should deal with an inferior race that he had made it compulsory viewing for the SS.

We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't image the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculating it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.

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

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.

Jack Anderson gave a few details in his column, “Operation Condor, an Unholy Alliance” on August 3, 1979:            Assassination teams are centered in Chile. This international consortium is located in Colonia Dignidad, Chile. Founded by Nazis from Hitler’s SS, headed by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf Hitler’s 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or roasted to death over barbecue pits.

He was a proud young man who had been called up into the SS, and he was in a concentration camp. The young man simply didn’t go along, and he was shot as an SS man. And that was also known to us in our town.

The second secret is Juan and Eva Perón’s deep ties to the Nazi Party.

I had 3,000 Einsatzgruppen members who every day went out and shot as many Jews as they could and Gypsies as well. I tried twenty-two, I convicted twenty-two, thirteen were sentenced to death, four of them were actually executed, the rest of them got out after a few years. “The other 3,000—nothing ever happened to them. Every day they had committed mass murder.”5 But it is difficult to hide forever. And soon, with Benny Ferencz wrapping up his work, a new generation of Nazi hunters will emerge.

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

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

Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons.

However, all works of history lean on a smaller bank of key resources as a gateway into the research: The Nazi Hunters and Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb; The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski; Hunting Evil by Guy Walters; Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev; Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File by Alan Levy; Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice by Gerald Steinacher; The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau; the seminal Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt; and the equally spectacular Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth. The best research we came across concerning the validity of claims about the existence of an ODESSA group can be found in The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina by Uki Goni.

The United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) is not aggressively pursuing war crimes prosecutions. Instead, it is recruiting members of the Nazi Party to spy against the Soviet Union.

SS leaders and Husseini both claimed that Nazism and Islam had common values as well as common enemies—above all, the Jews.14

Bankers and industrialists supported the Nazi party and programs. Doctors performed medical experiments. Jurists perverted the law for political purposes. Ministers conspired to commit Nazi aggressions, and the military carried them out. The Schutzstaffel (“SS”) were mass murderers.

The German designer Hugo Boss owned a small textile company in Metzingen, Germany. One of his early contracts was to manufacture brown shirts for the emerging Nazi Party. By 1938 the firm had become a key supplier of Nazi uniforms, including for the Army, Hitler Youth and the paramilitary SS. As the war progressed, Hugo Boss’s factories were staffed by forced labourers from France and Poland, most of whom were women.

a police official in SS uniform, probably a member of the Gestapo, turned up in a senior high school class in the Stuttgart area. He was there to explain the background of ‘shootings “because of resistance” one could read about from time to time in the press’. He said simply, that while courts worked well when hard evidence could be found, the police had to act when there was insufficient evidence. They knew how to recognize guilt and were not bound by rules of evidence as were judges, so that the police could become the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner. Lest students worry unduly, they were assured that the police did not execute anyone without ‘previously thoroughly examining’ the case.

First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units.

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

we had a very nice SS man there. His name was Müller. As a young man he used to work for Jewish people in a shoe store. He was with us during the winter of 1944. He said that his people were not going to work until they sent them some warmer clothing. It was very nice of him. He didn’t have to do it.

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

Norman Cohn, in his book Warrant for Genocide, quotes the postwar testimony of SS captain Dieter Wisliceny, who was tried and executed in 1947 for his part in killing Hungarian, Greek, and Slovak Jews. A straight line, said Wisliceny, ran from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the precepts of the Nazis, and from there to the attempted murder of a race. The straightness of this line is evident from the activities of the Nazi academic Professor von Leers, last seen propagating the “Rabbi’s Speech” at the University of Jena, but by 1942 publishing The Criminal Nature of the Jews. As the Holocaust moved from improvisation to industrial organization, von Leers wrote, “Not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals—but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offense against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs.

The admiral tossed the report at Molina and said to me, “Tell us about it.” “Jade Helm is an exercise about how the government will put down a right-wing uprising, or rebellion, and arrest everyone they think might be sympathetic with the rebels. They’ll use these paramilitary police they have tucked into every government alphabet agency as storm troopers and SS troops—” That was as far as I got. Molina exploded. “Comparing the federal government to Nazis is unacceptable. I am not going to sit here listening to that kind of shit, Carmellini.” I didn’t say anything. Sal Molina couldn’t fire me, and if Grafton did, I was ready to be on my way. Truth was, I had been in the belly of the beast for far too long. “Go on, Tommy,” Grafton prompted, ignoring Molina. “They’ll arrest every prominent Republican they can find and hold them in guarded camps, mainly at military bases. They have computer-generated lists. Gun owners, people who run their mouths on Facebook and Twitter, radio talk-show hosts, editors and publishers of Republican newspapers. . .you know, dangerous enemies of society.

Vous vous rendez compte, quelle vie cette vie. Vous vous rendez compte, quel monde ce monde," Mais oui, je me rends compte. Je ne fais que ça, me rendre compte et en rendre compte. C'est bien ce que je souhaite. J'ai souvent recontré, au cours de ces années, ce même regard d'étonnement absolu qu'a eu ce viellard qui allait mourir, juste avant de mourir. J'avoue, d'ailleurs, n'avoir jamais bien compris pourquoi tant de types s'étonnaient tellement, Peut-être parce que j'ai une plus longue habitude de la mort sur les routes, des foules en marche sur les routes, avec la mort aux trousses. Peut-être que je n'arrive pas à m'étoner parce que je ne vois que ça, depuis juillet 1936. Ils m'énervent, souvent, tous ces étonnés. Ils reviennent de l'interrogatoire, éberlués. "Vous vous rendez compte, ils m'ont tabassé. -- Mais que voulez-vous qu'ils fassent, nom de dieu? Vous ne saviez donc pas que ce sont des nazis?" Ils hochaient la tête, ils ne savaient pas très bien ce qu'il leur arrivait. "Mais bon dieu, vous ne saviez pas à qui nous avons affaire?" Ils m'énervent souvent, ces éberlués. Peut-être parce que j'ai vu les avions de chasse italiens et allemands survoler les routes à basse altitude et mitrailler la foule, bien tranquillement, sur les routes de mon pays. À moi cetter charrette avex la femme en noir et le bébé qui pleure. À moi ce bourricot et la gran-mère sur le bourricot. À toi cette fiancée de neige et de feu qui marche comme une princesse sur la route brûlante. Peut-être qui'ils m'énervent, tous ces étonnés, à cause des villages en marche sur les routes de mon pays, fuyant ces mêmes S.S., our leurs semblables, leurs frères. Ainsi, à cette question: "Vous vous rendez compte?" j'ai une réponse toute faite, comme dirairt le gars de Semur. Mais oui, je me rends compte, je ne fais que ça. Je me rends compte et j'essaie d'en rendre compte, tel est mon propos.

This same complex but well-oiled machinery went into high gear during 1948 when Perón’s Nazi rescue group began working in Europe, principally out of Berne and Genoa. In a period of under two months that year, Immigration files similar to Stojadinovic’s were opened for four notorious SS officers: Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Josef Schwammberger and Erich Priebke. They arrived on separate ocean liners many months apart, but the paperwork for their journeys began together – in the case of Mengele and Priebke, simultaneously, as we have seen.

Whether Kasztner truly believed that his negotiations with the SS might eventually save the Jews of Hungary, or whether he did the Nazis’ bidding solely to preserve the friends, relatives and ‘prominents’ he had handpicked for rescue – abandoning the many to save the few – the result was the same.

The dominant caste often forced its captives to exact punishment on one another or to dispose of the victims as their tormenters watched. In Nazi Germany, the SS guards were not the ones who put the prisoners into the ovens. The captives were forced into that grim detail. It was not the SS who collected the bodies of the people who had died the night before. That was left to the captives. In the American South, black men were made to whip their fellow slaves or to hold down the legs and arms of the man, woman, or child being flogged. Later, when lynchings were the primary means of terror, it was the people who had done the lynching who told the family of the victim or the black undertaker when they would be permitted to take down what was left of the body from the lynching tree.

What makes the Holocaust such an indigestible subject is precisely the fact of its not being a confrontation between narrowly defined protagonists. It is not a story that can be told by focusing exclusively on the Nazis (members of the SS and the Gestapo and ideological enthusiasts of the Third Reich) and the Jews. Ordinary Germans also participated in the Holocaust – state employees, the Wehrmacht, and the civilian population – by enjoying the fruits of the crime. The Holocaust is also a confrontation between institutions and civilian populations of occupied Europe and the Jews who had lived in these countries for generations.

Pius opposed the Nuremberg Trials, opposed the creation of a Jewish state, and opposed postwar attempts to reconcile Christianity with the faith from which it had sprung. He excommunicated every Communist on earth in 1949 but never took a similar step against members of the Nazi Party or the murderous SS. Nor did he ever explicitly express remorse over the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

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

Judge Louis B. Brodsky went out of his way to explain that many regarded this new emblem of Germany as a 'black flag of piracy' and believed that the SS Bremen had engaged in a 'gratuitously brazen flaunting of an emblem which symbolizes all that is antithetical to American ideals of the God given and inalienable rights of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' The judge's long speech from the bench took aim at the Nazis' 'war on religious freedom... the suppression of the blessed trinity of free speech, freedom of the press and lawful assembly, the degradation of culture, an international menace threatening freedom; a revolt against civilization - in brief, if I may borrow a biological concept, an atavistic throw-back to premedieval, if not barbaric, social and political conditions.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

The government employed these men and women for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare, for work in American laboratories, and even as special guerrilla troops for deployment inside the USSR in the midst of a nuclear war. CIA recruiting in Europe in particular often focused on Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and other Eastern European nationalists who had collaborated with the Nazis during Germany’s wartime occupation of their homelands. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such recruits were SS veterans; some had been officers of the bloody Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi party’s security service.

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In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding).

Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.

The SS San Pasqual The SS San Pasqual was launched on June 28, 1920, but less than a year later was severely damaged in a heavy storm. In 1924, the “Old Time Molasses Company of Havana,” a leading Cuban-American molasses company, bought her to be used in Santiago de Cuba, as a floating storage container for raw molasses. Eventually her superstructure was somewhat dismantled and she was towed to Havana, where she remained until 1933. Later, she was once again towed. This time the SS San Pasqual was taken along Cuba’s northern coast and purposely run aground off Cayo Santa María. During World War II, the SS San Pasqual was outfitted with machine guns and light cannons. Since the ship was hard aground, she was unable to chase Nazi submarines, but she was far enough off the coast to serve as a submarine lookout post. A footbridge was constructed out to her, providing access from the mainland, but time, tides and hurricanes have washed away all signs of the old bridge.

What's your name?" Oedipa said. "Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entrepreneur, "Winner, for short. Listen, now we're getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We're working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike you?""I'll let you know," Oedipa said. "I'll keep you in mind." She left, wondering if she should've called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn't she?

I felt the tears well in my eyes. “But your father was murdered. Mine died in an accident.” She lowered her eyes, and for a moment, I thought that maybe I could see the little girl under all those years. “When the war ended—when the world believed that I was dead—I searched for the Butcher of Lodz. I wanted to bring him to justice for what he did. I contacted groups that search for ex-Nazis.” I didn’t know where she was going with this, but I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Did you find him?” She looked off again, not responding to my question. “You see, sometimes I still see his face. I see him on the streets, or out my window. He haunts my sleep, even now, even all these years later. I still hear his laugh before he killed my father. Still. But mostly . . .” She stopped. “Mostly what?” I said. She turned and met my eye. “Mostly I remember the way he looked at me when my father asked him to spare me. Like he knew.” “Knew what?” “That my life, the life of a girl named Lizzy Sobek, was over now. That I would survive but never be the same. So I kept searching for him. Through the years and even decades. I finally found his real name and an old photograph of him. All the Nazi hunters told me to relax, not to worry, that the Butcher was dead, that he had been killed in action in the winter of 1945.” And then it happened. She turned the page and pointed at the photograph of the Butcher in his Waffen-SS uniform. I saw right away that he hadn’t died, that the Nazi hunters had been wrong. You see, I had seen this man before. He had sandy hair and green eyes, and last time I saw him, he was taking my father away in an ambulance.

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

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.

Several dozen Britons, most of them former British army or police officers (by mid-March 1948 some 23o British soldiers and thirty policemen had deserted),32 also served in Palestinian Arab ranks,-3-3 as did some volunteers from Yugoslavia and Germany. The Yugoslavs, possibly in their dozens, were both Christians, formerly members of pro-Axis Fascist groups, and Bosnian Muslims;-3' the handful of Germans were former Nazi intelligence, Wehrmacht, and SS officers.35

Meanwhile, the suffering of Ernst Heilmann in Börgermoor continued. Once, he had to spend an entire day smeared from head to toe in human excrement. Another time, he crawled on all fours into the prisoner barracks, led on a chain by an SS man, barked loudly, and exclaimed “I am the Jewish Parliamentary Deputy Heilmann from the SPD!” before he was maimed by guard dogs.

After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground.

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

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

....the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van.People here call it "the whispering coach". The relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once. - We now have pure communism. But communism murders more honestly.

The injuries inflicted upon Mosley’s right-hand man, Jeffrey Hamm, bear this out. He had his jaw broken at the “battle of Brighton”; he was knocked unconscious by a flying brick as he addressed a meeting in London; and 43 Group commandos, formerly of the Royal Marines and paratroops, assaulted him at his home even though he had a former Nazi SS paratrooper for a bodyguard.144