International Military Tribunal

“ All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us. ”

“ Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, 'but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany. But for us the question of blood was a reminder of our own worth, a reminder of what is actually the basis holding this German people together. ”

“ Of course they will mostly be those who have no reason to do so. To put it vulgarly, many will do something in their trousers. Many people will get shaky at the knees. The only thing that matters is that we stand firm. This is what is important for us as SS-men, for our province of duty and our mission (it is a task additional to those of the whole German Armed Forces and the whole German people) : That is what I would like to impress upon you, this is what I beg you, as Commanding Officers, as Chiefs, and as leaders to teach the young men again and again in their ideological instruction. ”

“ They are not the people of the country, those are the others. They are subjects of a state of foreign nationality, which, in any moment of doubt, is their enemy, or at the very best, as, shall we say, Roumania, a tolerably neutral and impartial observer. But on the whole these Germans have lived, throughout the centuries of German weakness, from the Thirty Years' War up till now, in surroundings calculated not to strengthen their consciousness of German race [Deut-schtum] but to destroy it. ”

“ They are the necessary condition, for our race, and our blood to create for itself and put under cultivation, in the years of peace, (during which we must live and work austerely, frugally and like Spartans) , that settlement area in which new blood can breed, as in a botanical garden so to speak. ”

“ We're overcoming the social barriers, so I've been told by important party members, and now you're setting up racial ones. My reply to these people has always been: If you want to look at things in a negative way, there is nothing in the world which you cannot see in a negative way. ”

“ I am not making spiteful assertions now but merely stating the facts-that, for instance, among Hungarian generals there is such a considerable percentage of men of German origin, who of course had, in most cases, to alter their names if they wanted to get anywhere. ”

“ If we had not been to a German school we should 'not be able to read and write German either. If we had been forced, shall we say, to go to a Polish school, we should write Polish too, although we profess to be Germans. And that is often the case with these men. 1 must therefore expect of you understanding and human sympathy in this matter, and must expect that the leaders, in addi-tion to their many other duties, will undertake to see that addi-tional German instruction in reading, speaking and writing, be given to these men at every opportunity that is offered. ”

“ One thing is certain: wherever the enemy lands, if once we can get to grips with him on the Continent, where we are not dependent on supplies from overseas, that ought to be, and will be, all right with us. ”

“ That by no means indicates that England will collapse today, tomorrow or the next day, but it does mean that we will just be approaching the time when one or other of our opponents, once Russia is conquered and eliminated as a factor, will come to the conclusion that it is not worth carrying on the war. ”

“ And we must never for-get this: these Germans do not usually live together in hundreds of thousands, but a thousand here in a few villages, and two thousand there, and 20 thousand at the most somewhere else. But they do not live together in large numbers. ”

“ That is what I demand and exact of you,-that you really concern yourselves with the man, the young fellow of 17 to 18 who comes to us, and with many who are in our ranks not as volunteers but as conscripts. ”

“ We know that this conflict with the advancing pressure from Asia, with the 200 million Russians, is necessary. And we shall win as sure as I am speaking here in the University of Kharkow. We shall have to pass through many a valley, many a narrow defile. Many will grow tired on the way. ”