Hitler and the Holocaust Read Free

Jewry,” German radio broadcast, 11 and 13 January 1939
     
     
     

2
    FROM WEIMAR TO HITLER
    As for the final goal and mission of the Germanic völkische movement, as far as the Jews are concerned,… it is to wipe out the East European and vermin Jew with an iron broom. A perfect job needs to be done.
    Völkische Beobachter editorial, 10 March 1922
    We want to point the finger at the Jew as the inspirer, the originator, and the beneficiary of this terrible catastrophe [the Spanish civil war].… This is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the peoples, the Son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the plastic demon of the decay of humanity.
    JOSEPH GOEBBELS, Nuremberg Party Congress, September 1937
    And when I heard that the Jews were being driven from their professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my mind.… It was only “the Jew” who was being persecuted and “made homeless.”
    MELITA MASCHMANN, head of the League
of German Girls in the Hitler Youth
     
     
     

3
    PERSECUTION AND RESISTANCE
    All the Gestapo roads lead to Ponary and Ponary means death. Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murders is self-defence. Brothers, it is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers.
    ABBA KOVNER, Manifesto of Zionist Youth , Vilna, 31 December 1941
    Why didn’t we resist when they began to resettle 300,000 Jews from Warsaw? Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?
    EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM, Diary , 15 October 1942
    In exile the Jews had always been in a minority; they had always been in danger; but they had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies.… A two-thousand- year-old lesson could not be unlearned; the Jews could not make the switch [when their leadership realized] … that the modern machine-like destruction process would engulf European Jewry.
    RAUL HILBERG, The Destruction of the European Jews (1973)
     
     
     

4
    THE “FINAL SOLUTION”
    If just once, at the beginning or during the course of the [First World] war, we had exposed twelve or fifteen thousand of those Hebrew corrupters of the people to poison gas … the sacrifice of millions of men would not have been in vain. On the contrary, if we had rid ourselves of those twelve or fifteen thousand fiends, we might perhaps have saved the lives of a million good brave Germans.
    ADOLF HITLER, Mein Kampf (1925)
    And then they all come, those worthy eighty million Germans, and each one has his own decent Jew. Of all who talk that way, none of them has watched, none of them has gone through it. Most of you know what it means to see one hundred bodies lying there, five hundred lying there or one thousand lying there. To have gone through this and, aside from exceptions due to human weakness, to have remained decent, that has made us tough.
    HEINRICH HIMMLER, speech to higher SS and police leaders, Poznan , October 1943
     
     
     

5
    BETWEEN THE CROSS AND THE SWASTIKA
    It is a Christian action to expel the Jews, because it is for the good of the people, which is thus getting rid of its pests.
    FATHER JOZEF TISO, President of Slovakia , August 1942
    I must make heard the indignant protest of the Christian conscience and I proclaim that all men, Aryan or non-Aryan, are brothers, because they are created by the same God.… The current anti-Semitic measures are in contempt of human dignity, a violation of the most sacred rights of the individual and the family.
    BISHOP PIERRE-MARIE THEAS (MONTAUBAN),
protesting the deportation of French Jews, September 1942
    Christianity in Germany bears a greater responsibility before God than the National Socialists, the SS and the Gestapo. We ought to have recognised the Lord Jesus in the brother who suffered and was persecuted despite his