Auschwitz Quotes
"No one on that first day, and that certainly included Rudolf Hoess, could have predicted the camp would, within five years, become the site of the largest mass murder the world has yet seen."
"Without Hoess’s leadership through the hitherto uncharted territory of mass murder on this scale, Auschwitz would never have functioned as it did."
"In appearance, Hoess was thus as far away as it is possible to get from the conventional image of the red-faced, saliva-spitting SS monster, which, of course, makes him all the more terrifying a figure."
"As a fanatical National Socialist I was completely convinced that our ideal would gradually be accepted and would prevail all over the world … Jewish supremacy would therefore be destroyed."
"The uncertainty of the duration of their imprisonment was something with which they could never come to terms."
"The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for in this struggle the stronger, the more able, win, while the less able, the weak, lose."
"Anyone who shows even the slightest vestige of sympathy towards them [prisoners] must immediately vanish from our ranks."
"We fight their [the Jews’] actions as they cause a RACIAL TUBERCULOSIS OF NATIONS."
"I want to hear no more about difficulties! For an SS officer there are no difficulties!"
"The purpose of the Russian campaign [is] to decimate the Slavic population by 30 millions."
"The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that the feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum."
"During evening roll-call it was said that all the sick could leave to be healed... Everyone had hope. But I wasn’t so convinced of the good intentions of the SS."
"It is good if the fear that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us."
"They theJewsthe JewstheJews were extremely shocked, utterly frightened and petrified, and you could do what you wanted with them. They had resigned themselves to their fate."
"If I’m honest I have no empathy fortheJewsfor the JewsfortheJews. For the Jews harmed me and my parents so much that I cannot forget."
"I only thought, 'Aim carefully so that you hit.' That was my thought."
"I went along to the site of the execution...and afterwards the commander of the auxiliary police approached me because I was in the air force. 'Lieutenant,' he said, 'I can’t take it any more. Can’t you get me out of here?'"
"The only people who were entitled to be fed by the invading force were those 'performing important tasks for Germany'."
"It was either an ugly word or they looked away. It didn’t make me feel cross. It made me feel afraid."
"The search for a relationship with a powerful figure as a means of survival was not confined to Auschwitz; it was also a common factor of life in the ghetto."
"The only way to improve their situation was for her to try to find a job, since that meant ‘an additional soup at lunchtime’."
"Lucille is certain in her own mind that it was her Polish roots that saved her and her family."
"The strain of ghetto life had a profound effect on Lucille’s mother, who ‘really lost all interest.'"
"We didn’t feel anything. We didn’t say a prayer, we didn’t cry – we were numb, there was no feeling left."
"People were crying out, ‘How can you ask this? How can we do this?’ But he said, ‘If we don’t, it’ll be worse.’"
"You really couldn’t trust anybody, because if I would tell a co-worker something, she would use it for her advantage."
"He talked and I would listen, and he molested me."
"It shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did."
"Human material is very bendable. You can do anything with it."
"I thought about it several times. Human material is very bendable. You can do anything with it."
"They could not comprehend how somebody could ask parents for their children."
"I don’t remember them crying. I saw these little ones, some of them very cute, and they were exterminated. It was atrocious."
"But these children didn’t have their mothers. They didn’t have the chocolate croissant…"
"You cannot imagine it really. I could only accept it fully when I was guarding the valuables and the suitcases at the selection. If you ask me about it – it was a shock that you cannot take in at the first moment."
"We were convinced by our world-view that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us, and that thought was expressed in Auschwitz – that it must be avoided, what happened in the First World War must be avoided, namely that the Jews put us into misery."
"He gives the lie to the notion, prevalent amongst some historians, that the SS were so brutalized by their training that they would have killed anyone they were asked to."
"The SS administration of the camp was divided into five main departments: the headquarters department (personnel, legal and other related functions), the medical unit (doctors and dentists), the political department (the Gestapo and criminal police, the Kripo), the economic administration (including the registration and disposal of property stolen from the murdered prisoners) and the camp administration (responsible for security within the camp)."
"Once Auschwitz developed selection on arrival, the whole extermination process was streamlined."
"The only discriminatory order the authorities on Jersey baulked at was one stating that Jews should wear the yellow star."
"The idea that Therese was leaving Guernsey to be transported to her death was inconceivable to Barbara Newman: ‘It was all outside our experience, really, wasn’t it? Things like that don’t happen in England.’"
"In a little over a month, between the end of July and the end of August 1942, an estimated 312,500 people were murdered at Treblinka."
"No previous model determined their construction, and in many ways their history and operation more exactly encapsulates the uniqueness of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ than does Auschwitz."
"How can the brain conceive of 600,000 people, the estimated death toll here, being murdered in an area less than 300 metres by 300 metres?"
"And not just at the most obvious level – that the SS were massively implicated in corruption and theft at Auschwitz; it was a fundamental lie through and through because no distinction was ever possible during the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ between the ‘honourable’ murder of helpless civilians and pure bestiality."
"Crucial in any attempt to understand how the Nazi doctors felt able to answer that question is the realization that for them Auschwitz was not a sudden introduction to the idea that trained medical staff should be involved in murder."
"Their involvement was symbolized by the fact that the Zyklon B was transported to the gas chambers in a pseudo-ambulance marked with a red cross."
"As a result of their total complicity, the Auschwitz doctors faced a dilemma more stark than any of the other Nazi perpetrators, best expressed in the question: how can you take part in mass murder and yet still retain a sense that what you are doing is morally compatible with the Hippocratic oath that compels doctors to try to heal the sick?"
"It was, however, in the area of medical experiments that the doctors of Auschwitz were to become especially infamous."
"Auschwitz prisoners were even ‘sold’ to the Bayer company, part of I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs."
"He experimented not just on twins, but also on dwarves and inmates with the form of gangrene of the face known as noma, which was common in the gypsy camp in Birkenau because of the appalling conditions that existed there."
"That prisoners were used for this purpose fitted into the Nazi ideal that enemies of the state ought to provide a ‘service’ to the Reich, if not by working as forced labour then by dying in the pursuit of ‘medical knowledge’."
"The Nazis’ adult euthanasia programme, which originated in the autumn of 1939, and the staff of the Operation Reinhard death camps have already been described."
"The close links between the Nazis’ adult euthanasia programme and the staff of the Operation Reinhard death camps."
"The only truly effective means of succouring the tortured Jewish, and I may add the other suffering peoples of Europe, lies in Allied victory." - Anthony Eden
"You don’t ask questions here! Be quiet from now on!"
"I can’t sell you all the Jews of Europe. But I could let one million go."
"If your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?"
"If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time."
"This was my first realization since we arrived in Auschwitz, that there was a world out there with children who looked like children, and who went to school."
"We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness."
"We had a feeling that we had done something good, a very good deed, that we had somehow fulfilled our duty."
"For them it was a horror, true enough, but also just one more terrible sight in a war already overflowing with atrocity."
"These next few weeks would be remembered by many of the prisoners as the worst experience they suffered while in captivity; worse than the constant selections, worse than the starvation diet in the camps, worse than the disease-ridden, freezing huts they lived in."
"They struggled on as the snow turned to slush, invading their thin shoes and raising blisters and sores."
"The things they have committed – well, nobody would think they were human at all."
"This word and this connection are never, ever, to be mentioned again in my presence."
"Each person has the freedom to make the best of the situation he’s in."
"There was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there."
"Soon the last survivor and the last perpetrator from Auschwitz will have joined those who were murdered at the camp."
"Auschwitz and the Nazis’ 'Final Solution' represent the lowest act in all history."