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

by William L. Shirer

Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “endangering German security” who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany.

Efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate.

I have only one request [Dr. Buehler concluded], that the Jewish problem in my territory be solved as quickly as possible.

displeased at a report received in his office that of the 136,700 commitments to concentration camps between June and November 1942, some 70,610 had died and that in addition 9,267 had been executed and 27,846 “transferred.”

Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor and Chelmno, all in Poland.

not all the incoming prisoners were done away with—at least not at once, because some of them were needed to labor in the I. G. Farben chemical works and Krupp’s factory until they became exhausted and were ready for the “final solution.”

Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.

“Our doctors,” he added, “had orders to write ordinary death certificates and could put down any reason at all for the cause of death.*58

The firm of I. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz.

One of the oldest German companies in the field offered its drawings for crematoria to be built at a large S.S. camp in Belgrade.

C. H. Kori,

Letters were found from Tesch and Stabenow offering not only to supply the gas crystals but also the ventilating and heating equipment for extermination chambers.

The Reichsbank, in fact, was overwhelmed by the “Max Heiliger” deposits. With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank’s profit-minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through the municipal pawnshops.

It was in the tenth delivery in November, 1943, that dental gold appeared. The quantity of dental gold became unusually great.

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler’s forces.

“this year between twenty and thirty million persons will die of hunger in Russia” and that “perhaps it is well that it should be so.” Already, he said, Russian prisoners of war had begun “to eat each other.”.

One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian prosecution, constructed an electrically heated tank for making soap out of human fat.

The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism.

I’ll go right into the Vatican. Do you think the Vatican embarrasses me? We’ll take that over right away… The entire diplomatic corps are in there… That rabble… We’ll get that bunch of swine out of there… Later we can make apologies…

They hated Hitler and all the degradation he had brought on Germany and Europe. But they were not interested in overthrowing him. They thought Germany’s coming defeat would accomplish that.

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.

reminder to the conspirators in Berlin of the danger that confronted them at a time when the indiscreetness of some of the leaders was becoming a source of constant worry to the others.

only way that now seemed possible but would breathe new life and light and hope and zeal into the conspiracy and become its real, though never nominal, leader.

drawing up a memorandum to the Ministry of the Interior—now headed by Himmler—in which they jointly demanded a cessation of the persecution of the Jews and the Christian churches, the restoration of civil rights and the re-establishment of a system of justice divorced from the party and the S.S.-Gestapo.

The Nazi despotism had endured for eleven years and only the certainty of utter defeat in a war which Germany had launched, and which they had done little to oppose—or, in many cases, not opposed at all—had roused them to action.

“I was standing here by this table [Hitler recounted]; the bomb went off just in front of my feet… It is obvious that nothing is going to happen to me; undoubtedly it is my fate to continue on my way and bring my task to completion… What happened here today is the climax! Having now escaped death… I am more than ever convinced that the great cause which I serve will be brought through its present perils and that everything can be brought to a good end.”

This time we shall settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed.

Hitler, seized by a titanic fury and an unquenchable thirst for revenge, whipped Himmler and Kaltenbrunner to ever greater efforts to lay their hands on every last person who had dared to plot against him. He himself laid down the procedure for dispatching them.

“Because I am not and never could be a Nazi,”

“is the totalitarian claim of the State on the individual which forces him to renounce his moral and religious obligations to God.”

Hitler is not only the archenemy of Germany: he is the archenemy of the world.

On July 24 the Nazi salute was made compulsory in place of the old military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him: it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.47

It was inevitable that they would follow him blindly, like dumb cattle but also with a touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them above the animal herd, over the precipice to the destruction of the nation.

“We are to be hanged,” Moltke wrote to his wife just before his execution, “for thinking together.”

Nazi ideology had taught that the place of the German woman was in the home and not in the factory—and in the home she stayed.

the seed has been sown that will grow one day… to the glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement of a truly united nation.

Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.

They seemed to be a drab assortment of mediocrities. It seemed difficult to grasp that such men, when last you had seen them, had wielded such monstrous power, that such as they could conquer a great nation and most of Europe.

But with the Third Reich, nothing was ordinary, not even its end. In that total annihilation all the secrets of [Hitler’s] rule were broken open, all the archives captured….