Ostland Quotes

“For this marked the point at which my soul was irrevocably lost; when that imaginary evil psychiatrist would have looked on in delight, knowing that he had proved beyond doubt that even the most law-abiding of men could be transformed into depraved, inhuman beasts, given the right environment and stimuli. In”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“What fools we are. How little we appreciate the gifts that are bestowed upon us. Only later, in retrospect, do we look back with the hindsight of all the decades that are lost forever and rue the opportunities we once had and the other, better life we might have led.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“The men surrounding me had managed to succeed within a system that was unashamedly run on Darwinian lines. Individuals and institutions alike were expected to compete with one another in an unending struggle so that only the fittest would survive. I wanted to see how it was done. Who would try to impose themselves upon the meeting? Who would hold back and let others talk themselves into trouble? And which approach would work best in the long run for me? No”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“I was, of course, unable to see the hopeless tangle of contradictions and misperceptions I had become. But then, among the many lessons I learned in Minsk was that one can become all but totally deranged while still functioning very efficiently at work and remaining confident that one’s personal behavior is perfectly normal, one’s thoughts completely rational. Or to put it another way, one of the symptoms of madness is the conviction that one is sane.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“It was as though the whole grotesque business were a gigantic experiment, conducted by an insane, all-powerful psychiatrist who sought to establish just what terrible sins once-decent men might be capable of if correctly manipulated.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“One should never underestimate the competitive instincts of young men as a factor in the conduct of war. I”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“By the afternoon, the shooting had just become a blur of noise and sound, and the smell of cordite, blood, and shit filled the air. At one point Schlegel shouted out in shocked surprise, “No! That’s our damn waitress!” as he realized that one of the Jews in the line being marched toward our pistols worked at the KdS mess. We were killing our own staff, like Saturn devouring his sons; and that, more than anything else, seemed to sum up the lunacy of it all. We would rather have Frau Levy lying dead in a hole in the ground than bringing us our evening bowls of soup. The”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“If von Toll was right that the extermination of the Jews was an act of pure insanity, then part of that madness was the very pretense that this was all a perfectly rational, orderly activity, conducted according to rules.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“But I cannot believe that you, or anyone else, would be asked to slaughter your fellow human beings, whatever race or religion they are, for no strategic purpose at all. For God’s sake, man, we’re Germans. We’re the most cultured, scientifically advanced people on earth. We believe in laws, in order, in correct procedures. So whatever you’re ordered to do, there will be a reason for it. You must simply trust that the reason is good. And if any of your men come to you and say, ‘I can’t do this, I don’t believe it’s right,’ just tell them what I have told you. It is not our business to think. It is our business to obey.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“War is always filled with cruelty and suffering. That’s the nature of it.” “But not toward defenseless civilians, surely?” “On the contrary, it has always been cruelest of all toward them . . . You surely remember your classical history: ‘Carthago delenda est.’” “Carthage must be destroyed . . .” “That’s it. Carthage was a massive city. When the Romans finally seized it they killed more than four hundred thousand people and sold the survivors into slavery. Then they razed the city to the ground, obliterating it forever. Scipio Africanus gave the orders for that ‘action.’ I daresay there were officers under his command who balked at them. But they obeyed all the same.” “But”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Stark’s problem, however, was that, like Paul Ogorzow, he was handicapped by his stupidity. He had just enough intelligence to realize the strength of his position, but not quite enough to appreciate its limitations.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Little by little I was making all the necessary adjustments that we all employed simply to hold on to our sanity. The crucial thing was to distract oneself from the truth of what was really going on: to try, as far as possible, to live in denial.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“But surely the way we are treating the Jews is different. This is absolutely a matter of right and wrong.” There are times when it helps to have been trained as a lawyer. It enables one to pretend that there is something a little primitive, unsophisticated even, about thinking in terms of good and evil. “Perhaps, but we aren’t the ones making those moral decisions. We are simply servants of the Reich—the agents, as it were, acting for those people, so the moral responsibility is theirs, not ours.” Von”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“But if you have nothing against them, how can you just stand there and do nothing when you see them treated the way they are here?” That simple question was the one that tormented all of us who were posted to Minsk and still possessed any shred of conscience or decency.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Like it or not, Schlegel was senior to me and I was a newcomer. I had no right to contradict him. And so I began the process of moral compromise: I made the first excuse for doing nothing, turning a blind eye, justifying the unjustifiable. Deeper”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“For it was only in those last months of 1941 and early ’42 that what people now call the Holocaust gradually emerged from countless more or less random acts of violence to become something very different: a coherent program of extermination, planned with extraordinary precision and detail. In”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“We may have conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, but that didn’t prevent us from seeing them as cultured, civilized nations, whose people were really little different from ourselves. The East was different, a vast, barren landscape in which there were no boundaries to behavior and all conventional standards of legality and morality had been cast aside as a matter of basic principle: a land whose inhabitants were officially considered to be less than human. Even”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Paula was suddenly aware that Heuser profoundly scared her. It was not that she feared him in any physical sense. There had never been any suggestion that he’d hurt anyone before or after his time in Minsk, nor had he been remotely threatening in any of his interviews with her. No, what chilled her to the bone was that she, Kraus—absolutely anyone—might have within them the same capacity for evil and the same ability to numb themselves to its consequences. She”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Yet his transformation from the fine, principled detective who had helped track down the infamous S-Bahn murderer to the blood-drenched fiend that the case against him described was impossible to comprehend. How could a human soul be corrupted so totally, so fast? And how, knowing all that he’d done, could Heuser then return to civilian life, reestablish himself in the police, and present himself once again as an admirable, honorable pillar of law and order?”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“How could a human soul be corrupted so totally, so fast? And how, knowing all that he’d done, could Heuser then return to civilian life, reestablish himself in the police, and present himself once again as an admirable, honorable pillar of law and order?”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“But they had known exactly what they were doing, which was why they were always drunk out of their minds on the vodka stacked in crates right next to the bullets as they did it. Ah yes, the vodka . . . The prosecutor had already stated that a conservative estimate of 31,970 people had been killed. Paula was curious to know when he would reveal something she’d learned while interviewing a quartermaster who had supplied the killers with their food and drink. He reckoned that he’d delivered around thirty thousand bottles of vodka to the various killing sites: a bottle, in other words, for every single person that had died. How hard those killers had tried to obliterate their consciousness along with their consciences.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Ogorzow possessed a certain animal cunning, there was no doubt about that. But he was fundamentally very stupid. And one of the signs of his stupidity was his misguided belief that he was actually a very clever, shrewd individual who could run rings around thickheaded policemen.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Interrogation is like a game of poker. Sometimes the person on the other side of the table keeps their intentions as well hidden as their cards. But then there are times when, for all their efforts, they cannot help but reveal themselves. This was one of those. Ogorzow said nothing, but his face betrayed the calculations he was making as he tried to come up with a story good enough to satisfy our curiosity without causing him serious trouble. “I”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“On June 22, 1941, we discovered what all the fuss was about. For that was the day that Operation Barbarossa began: the invasion of Russia, the single biggest undertaking in the entire history of warfare. The Wehrmacht launched the greatest of all its blitzkriegs and smashed through Stalin’s Red Army with even more devastating success than it had through the British and French a year earlier. In the wake of our armies came a second wave of invaders, four SS task forces known as Einsatzgruppen, and lettered A to D. Their officers were almost all drawn from the Criminal Police, Gestapo, and SD, while their lower ranks tended to comprise uniformed police officers, many of them middle-aged and therefore too old to fight in the army itself, organized into so-called police battalions. We”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“There was thus no good reason for us to detain them, and even if we had done so, we had no material to work with during an interrogation. A police officer, like a prosecutor, is always in a much stronger position if he already knows the answer to the question he is asking. It is one thing to make a man admit to a truth that you have already discovered for yourself. It is quite another to take potshots in the dark, hoping that you are lucky enough to strike a target. We”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“Yet in February 1941 there were just seven hundred Gestapo men covering the entire capital. This relatively small force was able to maintain control over millions of people thanks to the efforts of the people themselves, for in those days betrayal was a way of life. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, and even family members had long been accustomed to reporting one another’s slightest infractions.”
― David Thomas, Ostland

“To put it at its simplest, the police had been placed under the control of the SS, run by SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. He in turn created a new organization, the Reich Security Main Office, under the command of SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, into which were placed the three elements of the Security Police, to wit: the Criminal Police (Kripo), the Secret Police (Gestapo), and the Party’s own intelligence service, the SD. So to be a detective was effectively to be a member of the SS also, and every Criminal Police rank had its equivalent in the SS.”
― David Thomas, Ostland