Marriages between Jews and Germans of Germany or related blood are forbidden. Hermann Goering
I herewith commission you to carry out all preparations with regard to … a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence. Hermann Goering
I decide who is a Jew. Hermann Goering
I would sooner eat soil than have my grandchildren brought up and poisoned by the Jewish spirit and filth. Grand Admiral Karl Donitz
They should take care. One day we’ll run out of patience. Then we’ll shut those lying cheeky Jewish mouths. Joseph Goebbels
If the Jewish newspapers think they can intimidate us with their hidden threats, they’d better watch out. Our patience has its limits. One day, we’ll shut their dirty, lying Jewish mouths! Joseph Goebbels
It would have been unwise to tell the Jews what we had planned for them before we assumed power. Joseph Goebbels
Judaism is a manifestation of a disease which is catching. Germany at least does not intend to bow to his Jewish threat. She is carrying out a radical extreme – exclusion – of the Jews. Joseph Goebbels
We have German theatre, German films, a German press, a German literature, German art, and German broadcasting. The objection that was often raised against us in the past – it is not feasible to remove Jews from the arts and from cultural life because there were too many of them and that we’d be unable to fill all the vacant positions – all this has been brilliantly proved wrong. Joseph Goebbels
The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness. Joseph Goebbels, February 1942
A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. Joseph Goebbels, March 1942
Wer Judenwohnungen ohne meine Genehmi-gung vermierer, macht sich strafbar. [It is a punishable offence to let a Jew’s flat without my permission.] Albert Speer, letter to landlords
Hatred of the Jews was Hitler’s motor and central point perhaps even the very element which motivated him. The German people, the German greatness, the Empire, they all meant nothing to him in the last analysis. For this reason, he wished in the final sentence of his testament, to fixate us Germans, even after the apocalyptic downfall in a miserable hatred of the Jews ... When speaking of the victims of the bomb raids, particularly after the massive attacks on Hamburg in Summer 1943, he again and again reiterated that he would avenge these victims on the Jews; just as if the air-terror against the civilian population actually suited him in that it furnished him with a belated substitute motivation for a crime decided upon long ago and emanating from quite different layers of his personality. Just as if he wanted to justify his own mass murders with these remarks. Albert Speer, Munich June 1977
The tough decision had to be made to exterminate these people from the face of the Earth. Heinrich Himmler
We won’t waste much time on the Jews. It’s great to get to grips with the Jewish race at last. The more that die the better; hitting them represents a victory for our Reich. The Jews should feel that we’ve arrived. We want to put half to three-quarters of all Jews east of the Vistula. We will crush these Jews wherever we can. Everything is at stake. Get the Jews out of the Reich, Vienna, everywhere. We have no use for Jews in the Reich. Probably the line of the Vistula, behind this line no more. We are the most important people here. Heinrich Himmler, 1939, cited Merchant & Rubenstein & Roth
I have decided to find a really clear solution here too. I didn’t find that I was entitled to exterminate men ... and allow avengers in the form of children ... to grow into adults. Heinrich Himmler, 1943
I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934, to perform our duty as ordered and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary.
I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish People. This is something that is easily said: ‘The Jewish People will be exterminated’, says every party member, ‘this is very obvious, it is in our program – elimination of the Jews, extermination, a small matter.’ And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swines, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person – with exceptions due to human weaknesses – has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and ’17. Heinrich Himmler, speech October 1943
In a villa north of Berlin, Heinrich Himmler committed high treason behind his leader’s back. To save his own skin, he met an envoy from the Jewish World Congress. The SS: Himmler’s Madness, ZDF 2003
An estimated six million Jews were the victims of a racist mania orchestrated and implemented by Heinrich Himmler. Nazi Secrets: Himmler’s SS Cult
In the summer of 1941, I was called to Berlin to see Himmler. I was given the order to erect extermination camps. I can almost give you Himmler’s actual words, which were to the effect: ‘The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution to the Jewish problem. Those of us in the SS must execute these plans. This is a hard job, but if the act is not carried out at once, instead of us exterminating the Jews, the Jews will exterminate the Germans at a later date.’ Rudolf Höss, interview Leon Goldensohn
National Socialist legislation has acted to correct foreignism. I say ‘corrected’ because in National Socialist Germany Judaism has by no means been ruthlessly exterminated. Rudolf Hess
He was an arch-Nazi with one difference: the Nazis used to say that the Jews were degenerate and physically inferior and so on, whereas Mengele thought there were two gifted peoples in the world – the Germans and the Jews – and one of these peoples had to rule the world. Dr Ella Lingens, Auschwitz prisoner
A voyage by ancient Hebrews even before the time of Christ is the foundation for an entire religion ... Israel 600 B.C. two thousand and ninety two years before Columbus ... So strong is the Central Band’s [Cherokee] belief that they have Jewish ancestry and origins in ancient Israel they set out to prove it by blood ... New Mexico state archaeologist David Eck has led more than his share of people into the Los Lunas desert etched with the ten commandments in what appears to be Paleo-Hebrew ... The stone has been subject to vandalism. Who Really Discovered America? History 2010
The English ruthlessly used and then abused the Jews. In 1290 they expelled them altogether. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, How God Made the English II: A Tolerant People? BBC 2012
Early in his reign Edward, perhaps acting from religious conviction, outlawed money-lending, and so put most of England’s Jews out of business. He then forced them to wear yellow felt badges of identification ... A year after his invasion Edward arrested all the heads of the Jewish households, and hanged nearly three hundred in the Tower. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Nations, BBC 2000
So what if anything do we have in common? Not the colour of our skin. Not the languages we speak … We are a fiercely argumentative lot … What ties us together is a story. Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews I: In the Beginning, BBC 2013
Freud never gave up on his Jewishness. ibid.
You don’t have to accept the Bible as literal truth to believe that three and a half thousand years ago something extraordinary and fateful in world history did happen over there on the other side of the Jordan valley. ibid.
For many archaeologists today the Bible is a distraction. ibid.
The Bible started to be written down around two thousand seven hundred years ago. ibid.
The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. ibid.
‘We have become the teachers of men in the greatest of things.’ ibid. Josephus
In 1492 all Jews were expelled from Christian Spain. Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews II: Among Believers
The Jews in Medina … turned publicly and bitterly critical and were accused of treason. Two Jewish tribes were exiled from Medina, and hundreds of Jewish men massacred, their women and children enslaved. ibid.
The future for the Jews of Europe now lay under the shadow of the Cross. ibid.