The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water.

Tattooed skins appear to have been the most sought after.

Can you make available two or three professional criminals for these experiments… The experiments, by which the subjects can of course die, would take place with my co-operation.

Dr. Rascher’s “freezing experiments” were of two kinds: first, to see how much cold a human being could endure before he died; and second, to find the best means of rewarming a person who still lived after being exposed to extreme cold.

Summing up, this murderous hack concluded that warming up a “chilled” man with women “proceeds very slowly” and that hot baths were more efficacious.

Neither survived, and it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the last acts of his life, ordered their execution.

Actually Lidice itself had been wiped off the face of the earth. As soon as the men had been massacred and the women and children carted off, the Security Police had burned down the village, dynamited the ruins and leveled it off.

Any attempt to save the population there,” the directive stated, “from death by starvation by importing [food] surpluses from the black-soil zone [of Russia]” was prohibited.

According to Alexander Dallin in his exhaustive study of

German rule in Russia, Germany could have obtained more from

Russia in norma...

The Allied governments had ordered the breakup of the vast Krupp empire but Alfried Krupp, who took over the active management of the firm after his release from prison, evaded the order and at the time of writing (1959) announced, with the approval of the Bonn government, that not only would the company not be broken up but that it was acquiring new industries.

There was testimony at the Nuremberg trials that the ashes were sometimes sold as fertilizer.

Sometimes they were pulled out before the victims were slain. A secret report of the German warden of the prison at Minsk disclosed that after he had commandeered the services of a Jewish dentist all the Jews “had their gold bridgework, crowns and fillings pulled or broken out. This happens always one to two hours before the special action.” The warden noted that of 516 German and Russian Jews executed at his prison during a six-week period in the spring of 1943, some 336 had the gold yanked from their teeth.

Not a gun was fired—not even by the Fascist militia—to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure—being hauled away from the King’s presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall.

One would have thought that if they considered Nazism to be such a monstrous evil as they constantly contended—no doubt sincerely—they would have concentrated on trying to overthrow it regardless of how the West might treat their new regime. One gets the impression that a good many of these “good Germans” fell too easily into the trap of blaming the outside world for their own failures, as some of them had done for Germany’s misfortunes after the first lost war and even for the advent of Hitler himself.

We were deeply shaken. It was serious enough that the attempt had not succeeded. But even worse would be the discovery of the bomb, which would unfailingly lead to our detection and the death of a wide circle of close collaborators.

The bomb was never discovered. That night Tresckow rang up Colonel Brandt, inquired casually whether he had had time to deliver his parcel to General Stieff and was told by Brandt that he had not yet got around to it. Tresckow told him to hold it—there had been a mistake in the bottles—and that Schlabrendorff would be arriving the next day on some official business and would bring the really good brandy that he had intended to send.

With incredible courage Schlabrendorff flew to Hitler’s headquarters and exchanged a couple of bo...

The mechanism had worked; the small bottle had broken; the corrosive fluid had consumed the wire; the striker had hit forward; but—the detonator had not fired.

it was believed that it would not be too difficult to kill all three men with one bomb. This foolish resolve led Stauffenberg to miss two golden opportunities.

for another day when he could get all three.

The General frantically canceled the Valkyrie alarm and the troops were marched back to their barracks as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible.

tried to shove it aside with his foot and finally reached down with one hand and lifted it to the far side of the heavy table support, which now stood between the bomb and Hitler.* This seemingly insignificant gesture probably saved the Fuehrer’s life; it cost Brandt his.

To his utter consternation he found that nothing had been accomplished. Word about the explosion had come through by telephone from Fellgiebel shortly after 1 o’clock but the connection was bad and it was not quite clear to the conspirators whether Hitler had been killed or not.

There is something weird and grotesque about this last meeting of the two fascist dictators on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, as they surveyed the ruins of the conference hall and tried to fool themselves into thinking that the Axis which they had forged, and which was to have dominated the continent of Europe, was not also in shambles.

It is to be doubted if there was any accidental change of place. The Lagebaracke, as its name implies, was, so far as I can make out, the place where the daily conferences were usually held.

several were done to death and the civil population was incited to lynch Allied air crews who parachuted to the ground.