Alex > Recent Status Updates

"In his speech at the Reich Peasants’ Rally of 1935 Himmler had asserted that ‘our common and eternal enemy, the Jew’ was responsible for the violent Christianization of the Saxons, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (Schutzstaffel, 5)."

"161. ‘Das sind Staatsfeinde’, Das Schwarze Korps, 4 March 1937. See also: ‘Homosexualität und Kunst’ (11 March 1937), ‘Ächtung der Entarteten’ (1 April 1937), and ‘Was sage ich meinem Kinde?’ (15 April 1937), in which Himmler’s demand for a positive attitude towards the question of sexual relations between young people was addressed."

"According to official figures, the number of murders and cases of manslaughter declined by 46.2 per cent between 1932 and 1938, the number of cases of grievous bodily harm by 58.3 per cent, of serious cases of theft by 58.7 per cent, of blackmail by 39.6 per cent, of arson by 45.2 per cent, and of counterfeiting currency by 88.2 per cent (Deutsche Justiz, 101 [1939], 1476)."

"On 2 March 1922 he writes: ‘Had to drink a whole glass of beer in one go. Hugo, the new Senior, did not know that I had been given permission not to drink beer.’ On the following day he noted: ‘terrible stomach ache.’"

"A British Secret Service officer who questioned both of them [Himmlers wife and daughter] thought that no interrogation was necessary, as his impression was that Margarete’s life had remained relatively unaffected by her husband’s professional activities. He also attested that Himmler’s wife had retained a ‘small-town mentality’."

Goebbels:
"In the atmosphere surrounding Himmler there is something very nice, modest, and absolutely National Socialist, and this has an extraordinarily beneficial effect. One can only be thankful that, at least as far as Himmler is concerned, the old National Socialist spirit still prevails."

"In April 1945 an official in military intelligence, Hans von Dohnanyi, former head of military intelligence Wilhelm Canaris, his deputy Hans Oster, the military judge Karl Sack, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Georg Elser, who had attempted to assassinate Hitler, were murdered in concentration camps."

"However, it was only after the reshuffle in the Vichy government had been concluded in March 1944284 that the Germans could at last ignore French concerns about the deportations. The new government was, in any case, so disliked by the population that the country could now be controlled only by a terror regime."

"Himmler endeavoured to set aside concerns of the district governor responsible, Friedrich Uebelhoer, that the Gypsies might engage in arson by advising Uebelhoer to shoot ten Gypsies for every fire in the ghetto. ‘In this way,’ Himmler advised, ‘you will get the best possible fire brigade for the ghetto; it will be the keenest there has ever been.’"

"Yet, in Posen he reiterated to his leadership corps: ‘I don’t care in the least what happens to the Russians or the Czechs [ . . . ] Whether other nations are prosperous or die of hunger only interests me in so far as we have slaves for our culture; otherwise it doesn’t interest me.’"

"In the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia in August 1943 the ‘dead zones’—contiguous territories—already made up 16 per cent of the arable land; in July 1944 in the area under military administration in eastern Byelorussia as much as 75 per cent!"

"Moreover, many people’s normal inhibitions were removed by the immediate threat under which they were living and by the destruction of their usual way of life. Youth gangs emerged in the rubble of the bombed cities and the black market flourished. Cases of homicide and robberies also increased."

"The pamphlet The Subhuman issued by Himmler’s SS Main Office clearly illustrates—with photographs to demonstrate the inferiority of the Soviet peoples—their view of ‘eastern people’: ‘a frightful creature [ . . . ] just an approximation to a proper human being [ . . . ] but intellectually and spiritually inferior to any animal.’"

"He rejected concessions or favours to the indigenous population. Thus, he not only objected in April 1942 to Rosenberg’s proposal for a ‘new agrarian order’ offering the rural population the prospect of having private property (a scheme which failed anyway); he also vehemently opposed any attempt to promise the Russians a ‘nation state’."

In France:
"As a large number of children were held in the camps, the attempt to continue the deportations aroused public opposition from the Catholic Church and the population was vehemently hostile. Thus, at the beginning of September the Vichy government informed the Germans that further arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the unoccupied zone."

"The military engagement of the Finnish legion was considerably delayed. In January 1942 Aaltonen, the chief of the Finnish state police, told a colleague of Berger’s in no uncertain terms that the volunteers were so discontented, above all with the arrogance of the German officers and their rough treatment, that ‘Finnish volunteers [ . . . ] going into action for the first time would shoot their German SS officers’.

"A sober appraisal would put Himmler himself in the racially average band, or to some extent even below it: his face was round rather than oval, his nose more broad than slim, his normal bearing more ‘sagging’ than ‘erect’, and his chin—and for the racial assessors this was a particularly negative feature—fell clearly into the ‘receding’ category."

"For racial theory was based on the proposition that the origins of human beings in the twentieth century could be traced back to prehistoric, pure ‘primal races’ (Urrassen)—an assumption that was essentially a historical myth with no anthropological foundation."

"German women who had become pregnant by civilian workers or prisoners of war were also subjected to a racial test, on the outcome of which depended whether the Race and Settlement Main Office would require the pregnancy to be terminated."

"Apart from this the regiment reported: ‘Herding woman and children into the marshes was not as successful as it should have been, for the marshes were not so deep that people sank into them.’ Was that an attempt deliberately to misinterpret Himmler’s command?"