Himmler Quotes

“on 24 July Marshal Rokossovskii’s Army Group had overrun the extermination camp at Majdanek; for the first time the unbelievable had become visible. Photographs of gas chambers and crematoria and living skeletons in the camp had shocked the world.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“the homeland differed from its counterpart in 1918 as it had been cleansed of Jews and all criminal riff-raff.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Thus the legend of the ‘stab in the back’ and the undefeated German Army had become historical truth”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“It is a race now whether the Bolsheviks double-cross the Americans, or the Americans the English – because they are certainly not very united – or whether the English double-cross both the others”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Lies had always been an integral part of Nazi propaganda. Whether he was convinced that lies were justified by the greater ends they served or whether he had become incapable through his years of power and his closeness to Hitler of separating wish from sober calculation, falsehood is surely indivisible.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Especially striking was an upsurge of interest in astrology, fortune telling and all manner of numerical and alphabetical methods of divining the future.34”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“The Munich students provided a spectacular example of resistance put down by the Gestapo;”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“siblings Scholl died as courageous and upright martyrs. Report of an eyewitness.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Himmler was, as he had always been, merely the most extreme, emotionally committed exponent of the orthodoxy of the master race.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“This Christendom, this greatest pestilence which could have befallen us in history, which has weakened us for every conflict, we must finish with.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Rascher’s ‘normal’ colleagues and co-workers recognised him as a fraud who inflicted unnecessary suffering and fatalities and used his privileged position with the Reichsführer to gain medical reputation and advancement.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“a precept that it is a Divine Commandment to obey Germans”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“the deepest impulses behind the war had to do with the sequence of sterilisation, direct medical killing and genocide.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Rather than medical killing being subsumed to war, the war itself was subsumed to the vast biomedical vision of which “euthanasia” was a part.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Munich was the final turning point for Hitler. He had met the leaders of the western democracies and made monkeys of them. He had proved that tactics of deception, threat and histrionics worked at the highest levels of European diplomacy. His will had broken the bonds of reality; everything was possible.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“In truth, through our work, we have laid the foundations of a new system of laws, the right to life of the German Volk.’39”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“The attack of the Jews and all secret enemies occurs, as it has for centuries, via seeds of discord, via lies, calumny, via shameless intrigue.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“after watching Hitler return from Munich in the evening of 30 June: ‘Depend on it, it is precisely this Hitler going on his way over heaps of bodies, whom they [the generals] have yearned for in their deepest heart of hearts.’83”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Höss found himself going hot and cold and trembling as he was forced to watch from the front rank; it affected him far more than the first execution he witnessed.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“The other political parties hurriedly dissolved themselves,”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Whether the idea was taken from the Spanish Inquisition whose methods it so resembled or from the example of the Russian secret police, whether it sprang from Himmler’s own zealotry, it was a deliberate policy designed to suppress by fear all actual or potential opposition or even criticism of the regime.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“The others were led to it by admonition and example, by the need to prove hardness, after a while by indifference.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Sadists had licence and delighted in their ability to cause suffering, especially if their victims pleaded for mercy.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“What Höss rationalised as hate for the enemies of the state might be better described as a sense of power and contempt for the inmates fostered in the guards by the camp system.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“On their way to the first session of the new Parliament, a group of Nazi deputies uniformed in brown celebrated by smashing department-store windows down the Leipzigerstrasse; ‘by some odd chance,’ a Jewish journalist noted in her diary, ‘the casually aimed projectiles hit only non-Aryan targets.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“a groundswell of financial support built largely of frustration was about to lift the Hitler movement on a dizzy ride to power.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Hesse’s ultimate message about the unity of the cosmos and the importance of loving the world, not despising it, was censored out by his convictions in the other direction. Hermann Hesse’s books were banned after Hitler took power.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Himmler with ‘devising the saturation method of propaganda in selected areas over short periods of time,”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“Through Haushofer, Hess was able to help Hitler put an academic gloss on the political arguments of Mein Kampf.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler

“The trial has at any rate proved’, The Times correspondent continued, ‘that to plot against the constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria.”
― Peter Padfield, Himmler