To tell the truth, one did become used to it ... They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [extermination area] in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of black-blue corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity – it could not have. It was a mass – a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’ I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo ... I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the ‘tube’ – they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. Franz Stangl, cited Yitzhak Arad 1987
They called it relocation, but they put them in concentration camps. Harry S Truman, 1961
Auschwitz and the concluding episode with George W Bush visiting the slave labour camp where his grandfather helped the Bush family fortune on free Jewish slave labour. Secret Rulers of the World, Channel 4 2001
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Viktor Frankl
How is it that, once victory took form and the horrible spectacle of the extermination camps was revealed, we could have shamelessly broken the promises given to the peoples in those years of ordeal? Rene Cassin
I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people. George Takei
I was six months old at the time that I was taken, with my mother and father, from Sacramento California, and placed in internment camps in the United States. Robert Matsui
I have never seen anything so horrible. It looked like a concentration camp. The children were near death, they were skin and bones. Their limbs were gnarled, distorted and atrophied. Eric Rosenthal
My name is Sam Ozaki. I am a native-born American citizen, Los Angeles, California. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed executive order #9066 we were all rounded up like cattle and placed into America’s concentration camps. Sam Ozaki, American concentration camp survivor
There were 30,000 undefended Boar farm houses. Every single one of them was burnt to the ground. This destruction left thousands of Boar civilians, mostly women and children, homeless. But Lord Kitchener had a plan for them as well. The British army rounded up around 160,000 women and children, crammed them into wagons or railway trucks and transported them to hastily improvised refugee camps, which, guarded by the army, quickly became outdoor prisons ... They became places of horror. Kitchener’s policy gave the world a new phrase – concentration camps. Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
Emily Hobhouse decided it was her duty to tell the people of Britain exactly what was being done out here in their name. And she spoke plainly. She talked of wholesale cruelty, murder to the children, and a war of extermination. And Emily Hobhouse was proved horribly right. 26,000 Boar women and children died in British concentration camps. 80% of them under the age of sixteen. ibid.
In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die. Elie Wiesel
To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver’s seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue. J G Ballard, Empire of the Sun
All of us in the CIA know all about the concentration camps in America and their purpose. We know that their purpose is to terminate ‘resisters of the New World Order’ under martial law. Michael Maholey, CIA Naval Intelligence
In July of 1942, when the Frank family went into hiding, over 20,000 concentration camps were under construction. Anne Frank: The Nazi Capture, National Geographic 2015
It is important to note Nazi Germany’s war effort was largely supported by two organisations, one of which was called I G Farben. I G Farben produced 84% of Germany’s explosives, and even the Zyklon B used in the concentration camps to kill millions. One of the unspoken partners of I G Farben was J D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in America. In fact the German Air Force could not operate without a special additive patented by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil ... American business funded both sides of World War II. Zeitgeist, 2007; also cited John Nada, Wake Up Call
Himmler’s ‘project’ was of course the Final Solution. The extermination of millions of undesirables. The disabled, gypsies, Jews and homosexuals. Anyone who did not conform to the genetic purity of the Ayran ideal was slaughtered in the death camps. Then there is Hitler himself. Here the failed artist who banned decadent art expounds on one of his favourite subjects ... ‘Yes, they will all come to belong to the German people. I am merely a curator.’ The Nazis: A Warning From History: The Wrong War, BBC 1997
The concentration camps were a tool of oppression – not yet of systematic murder. In 1933 for many Germans they were an acceptable part of the Nazi revolution. The Nazis: A Warning From History: Chaos and Consent
Of all their evil actions nothing defines the Nazis like the Final Solution - the murder of some six million Jews. The Rise of the Nazi Party: The Final Solution
The film – The Eternal Jew – produced by Goebbel’s Propaganda Unit, has a stark message: wherever Jews settle they behave like rats and parasites. ibid.
With this complicity of silence no German needs to speak openly about the Final Solution. No-one needs to take responsibility. ibid.
He is directly culpable for the murder of six million Jews ... Eichmann was called the Architect of the Final Solution and he was very good at doing his job ... He was a very rabid intensely fiercely efficient and virulent Nazi. Towards the end of the war Eichmann tells a fellow Nazi he will happily go to his grave knowing he had killed six million Jews. He was a specialist on Jews and he knew quite a lot about them. Guy Walters, author Hunting Evil
It was late summer when Heydrich summoned me. He said, ‘The Fuhrer has ordered the extermination of the Jews.’ So I knew then. I said nothing because there was nothing to say. Adolf Eichmann
cf.
I regret and condemn the orders of the then German government to carry out acts of extermination on the Jews. Adolf Eichmann, Israeli trial
Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business. Adolf Eichmann, cited Wolterstorf’s ‘Religion and Public Education’
I was never an anti-Semite ... My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood ... I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it. Adolf Eichmann, cited Marchione’s ‘Consensus and Controversy’
I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork. It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times. Adolf Eichmann, memoirs
When I arrived at the place of the execution, the gunmen fired into a pit the size of several rooms. They fired from small submachine guns. As I arrived, I saw a Jewish woman and a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull out the child, but then a bullet smashed the skull of the child. My driver wiped brain particles from my leather coat. Adolf Eichmann, memoirs
Because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver, I now feel called upon and have the desire, to tell what happened. Adolf Eichmann, memoirs
Before the Israeli court stood the man who had sent millions of Jews to their deaths. Hitler’s Henchmen II: Eichmann
Eichmann was driven by a desire for recognition and a career in the SS. ibid.
He studied the enemy keenly. A thorough smattering of Knowledge. The Tsar of the Jews, he later called himself. ibid.
Eichmann used his victims as assistants. ibid.
Eichmann was ordered to Berlin and made officer in charge of Jewish affairs for the whole nation. ibid.
On June 1st 1962 Adolf Eichmann was executed. His ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean. ibid.
Adolf Eichmann, the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program, has estimated that the anti-Jewish activities resulted in the killing of six million Jews. Of these, four million were killed in extermination institutions, and two million were killed by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units of the Security Police and SD which pursued Jews in the ghettos and in their homes and slaughtered them by gas wagons, by mass shooting in antitank ditches, and by every device which Nazi ingenuity could conceive. So thorough and uncompromising was this program that the Jews of Europe as a race no longer exist, thus fulfilling the diabolic ‘prophecy’ of Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the war. Robert H Jackson