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A “Page of Glory”
The “Extermination of the Jewish race.”
Did the Nazi government have a deliberate plan to exterminate Jews? The folks using Dan Gannon’s hate machine tell us “No!”, but perhaps SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, speaking to assembled SS Major-Generals at Posen on October 4th., 1943, can answer that question for us with more authority:
“Our basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man; we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. … Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. …
I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly …
I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about – `The Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says one party member, `that’s quite clear, it’s in our program – elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written. ”
International Military Tribunal. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression,
PS-1919, IV: 559, 563Excerpted from: “Accounting for Genocide: Victims – and Survivors – of the Holocaust” (New York: Free Press, 1979) Helen Fein
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