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

by William L. Shirer

toward the end, after more than an hour of typical distortions of history and a boastful account of the feat of German arms in Poland

As far as the outside world is concerned, this eternal aim will have to undergo various propaganda adjustments… This does not alter the war aim.

One was developed through the Vatican by Dr. Josef Mueller,

“The men capable of leadership in Poland must be liquidated. Those following them… must be eliminated in their turn.

Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying and hysterical women.

Work was commenced immediately and on June 14 Auschwitz was officially opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners whom the Germans wished to treat with special harshness.

Rudolf Franz Hoess, a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison—he spent most of his adult life as first a convict and then a jailer—and who in 1946, at the age of forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting another half million who had been allowed to “succumb to starvation.”

distinguished, internationally known firm as I. G. Farben, whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitable operations.

“Resistance will continue as long as possible.”

Allies. Nazi Germany seemed invincible. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and now Denmark and Norway had succumbed easily to Hitler’s force, or threat of force,

repair. That could be prevented only if the Luftwaffe

One of the most odious of them obligated the French to turn over to the Reich all anti-Nazi German refugees in France and in her territories.

The captured German Foreign Office documents are full of messages from Thomsen reporting on the embassy’s efforts to sway American public opinion in Hitler’s favor.

tendency of the German diplomats to tell the Nazi dictator pretty much what he wanted to hear—a practice common among representatives of totalitarian lands. Two

Punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians [in Russia] do not, until further notice, come any longer under the jurisdiction of the courts-martial… Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before an officer. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot. With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members of the Wehrmacht, prosecution is not obligatory even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or offense.†

Reichstag pass a law which gave him absolute power of life and death over every German and simply suspended any laws which might stand in the way of this.

the key generals were too cowardly or too confused about their oaths of allegiance to help the opposition to carry on from there.

The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities [Halder noted sadly in his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous. Serious work has become impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called “leadership” a most peculiar character.

The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuehrer and Fatherland unto the end.

What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment of death, with which he can free himself from this misery, if his duty doesn’t chain him to this Vale of Tears.

a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose “undesirable elements”—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated.

Europe itself, as the Nazi leaders put it, must be made “Jew-free.”

What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us.

It is necessary to keep the standard of life low in Poland and it must not be permitted to rise…

If any priest acts differently, we shall make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted.

There should be one master only for the Poles, the German. Two masters, side by side, cannot and must not exist. Therefore, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.

This obsession of the Germans with the idea that they were the master race and that the Slavic peoples must be their slaves was especially virulent in regard to Russia.

We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.

Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100…. Every educated person is a future enemy.

Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion.

“Liberation from Bolshevism” was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods…

treat the peoples of the occupied Eastern territories as “Second-Class Whites” to whom Providence has merely assigned the task of serving as slaves for Germany…

The Russian fights today with exceptional bravery and self-sacrifice for nothing more or less than recognition of his human dignity.

first, to dominate it; second, to administer it; third, to exploit it.

Naturally [Goering added] this giant area would have to be pacified as quickly as possible. The best solution would be to shoot anybody who looked sideways.*

“It used to be called plundering,” he said. “But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder and to do it thoroughly.”

Whenever Hitler occupied a country, his financial agents seized the gold and foreign holdings of its national bank.

it was estimated that the Germans carted off (as “levies in kind”) 9 million tons of cereals, 75 per cent of the total production of oats, 80 per cent of oil, 74 per cent of steel, and so on, for a grand total of 184.5 billion francs.

“if the new food scheme is carried out in 1943 a half-million people in Warsaw and its suburbs alone will be deprived of food.”10

reduction of the entire Polish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare existence of the population, closing of all educational institutions, especially technical schools and colleges in order to prevent the growth of the new Polish intelligentsia. Poland shall be treated as a colony. The Poles shall be the slaves of the Greater German Reich.

In the massive deportations of slave labor to the Reich, wives were torn away from their husbands, and children from their parents, and assigned to widely separated parts of Germany.

Army Group Center intends to apprehend forty to fifty thousand youths from the age of 10 to 14…. and transport them to the Reich.

The wild and ruthless man hunt [he wrote to Governor Frank], as exercised everywhere in towns and country, in streets, squares, stations, even in churches, at night in homes, has badly shaken the feeling of security of the inhabitants. Everybody is exposed to the danger of being seized anywhere and at any time by the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and of being sent to an assembly camp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him.

There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the East may leave the household only to take care of domestic tasks… It is prohibited for them to enter restaurants, movies, theaters and similar establishments. Attending church is also prohibited…

All Jews and Communist functionaries [Ohlendorf testified] were to be removed from the prisoner-of-war camps and were to be executed. To my knowledge this action was carried out throughout the entire Russian campaign.

At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of generations; is not to be regretted but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger.

Such a case was the slaughter in cold blood of seventy-one American prisoners of war in a field near Malmédy, Belgium, on December 17, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

From now on all enemies on so-called commando missions in Europe or Africa challenged by German troops, even if they are in uniform, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man.38

This means that their chance of escaping with their lives is nil… Under no circumstances can [they] expect to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention…

The proportion, publicly proclaimed by the Germans, was invariably 100 to 1—a hundred hostages shot for every German killed.