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Here are 60 direct quotes from 40 different Nazi officials about what they were doing to Jewish people, sourced to the original documents and recordings. All of it is from 1938-1944, so none of it is from post-war confessions.
Page 1 opens with Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, but it also includes people like Oberleutnant Walther, a field officer who wrote in a report that shooting Jews was faster than shooting Gypsies, "100 men in 40 minutes," and noted they were calm when they died.
The Goebbels entry is from his private diary.
Later pages have Himmler ordering troops to "drive Jewish women into the swamps," Romania's head of state saying "I say there is no law, I take full legal responsibility," and a Wehrmacht field marshal whose kill order Hitler praised and sent to every Eastern Front commander as a model.
patrick p retweeted
The (commonplace)🤏tinybrain🤏 Joel Webbon groupie poasters really annoyed me here so I went and pulled the actual document from the German and US National archives regarding Hitler ordering the destruction of Paris if the allies were winning.
On August 23, 1944, as Allied forces approached Paris and the French Resistance rose against German occupation, Hitler ordered German commanders to defend the city at all costs, including destroying entire neighborhoods, publicly executing resistance leaders, and preparing infrastructure for demolition. This surviving German military document transmits Hitler’s instruction that Paris must not fall into Allied hands unless it was reduced to a “field of ruins,” an order that was ultimately not carried out.
"In accordance with reference 2), the Führer has ordered:
'The defense of the Paris bridgehead is of decisive military and political importance. Its loss would tear open the entire coastal front north of the Seine and deprive us of the bases for long-range warfare against England.
In the course of history, the loss of Paris has always also meant the loss of all France.
The Führer therefore reiterates his order that Paris must be defended in the forward defensive perimeter of the city and refers to the reinforcements already announced for Commander-in-Chief West.
Within the city, the harshest measures must be taken at the first signs of an uprising, for example, demolition of entire city blocks, public execution of ringleaders, and evacuation of the population from affected districts, since this will best prevent further spread.
The Seine bridges are to be prepared for demolition. Paris must not fall into enemy hands, or only as a field of ruins.'
August 23, 1944 11:00 a.m.
Army Group Headquarters B Operations Section (Ia) No. 6355/44 — Secret Command Matter, Chief Matter"
BArch RH 19-IX/7, Bl. 40 (Oberkommando der Heeresgruppe B, "Führerbefehle", 17 June to 25 September 1944, 61 folios, also on microfilm MFB 6/499
NARA, RG 242, T311, roll 3, frame 7002331, folder 75145/6 (Heeresgruppe B, Führerbefehle)
Leonas Stonkus, whose Nazi-led Lithuanian battalion shot the Jews of Kopyl in Belarus:
Interviewer: “Were they shot lying on the ground, or in the pits?”
Stonkus: “The women knelt, I think. The children were jumping about. They had no idea this was a death zone. [...] The children stood in front. Behind them, all were already shot. They did not realize their parents were dead. The older boys or girls understood. The little ones just carried on fooling around.”
Interviewer: “So how were the children driven to the pit?”
Stonkus: “The women led the children. The order was that a mother must not leave her child behind. You must take your child with you. If you don't have the child, give it to a neighbor to lead.”
Interviewer: “Mothers and children?”
Stonkus: “Together. They crammed them into that pit, one on top of another. No one paid any attention. They fired, and that was it.”
This comes from USHMM’s interviews with Lithuanian witnesses (Leonas Stonkus interview, 1998, RG-50.473.0023). English captions translated from USHMM's transcript of Stonkus’s Lithuanian. Cut and captioned by me.
Juozas Aleksynas, whose Nazi-led Lithuanian police battalion shot Jews across Belarus in 1941:
Interviewer: “If a parent was holding a child, did they lie down together in the pit?”
Aleksynas: “They lay down beside the child, with an arm over the child.”
Interviewer: “Did you choose whom to shoot, the father or the child?”
Aleksynas: “You shot the father first. That’s how it was. The father. A child doesn’t feel anything. You put yourself in his place. How would the father feel if his child was shot beside him? That’s how it was.”
Interviewer: “Did they scream as you shot?”
Aleksynas: “Women sometimes cried as they walked. Mostly not. They didn’t scream or anything.”
This comes from USHMM’s interviews with Lithuanian witnesses (Juozas Aleksynas interview, RG-50.473.0010). English captions translated from Aleksynas’s Lithuanian. Cut and captioned by me.
Regina Jablonska, who worked in a kitchen at Ponary preparing meals for the German and Lithuanian killers:
“I didn’t see the shootings, I just heard the screams. If they were firing during lunch, when the wind came from the west, it carried these cries, very faintly from far away, and gunfire over and over.”
Sourced from Michael Prazan's doc, Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades (2009), Part I and Part II. I kept the doc’s English subtitles and joined all her speaking segments from both parts.
“The Jews unfit for deployment, around 4,000, were given special treatment on 5.4.1943 in Panarai near Wilna.”
- German Security Police and SD in Lithuania, on April 30, 1943.
This is a record of ~4,000 Jews classified unfit for work (women and children, the elderly) murdered at Ponary in one day. “special treatment” obviously meant killing.
(sourced from LCVA R-1399/1/26, folio 55)
patrick p retweeted
Im Ghetto Minsk waren auch über 20.000 Juden aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum, diese fielen so auch dem gigantischen weißrussischen Holocaust, meist durch Kugeln, zum Opfer
Vorallem bei Wiener Juden kann man die Erschießungsstätte Maly Trostinez bei Minsk oft als Todesort sehen
War diary of the Libau Schutzpolizei service detachment:
"Dec 18, 1941
No special events. Leave suspension from 17. 12. 41.
Remarks: Diminishing frost. State of health is good. Ammunition expenditure has occurred only through the shootings of Jews. 6000 rounds."
The day before reads:
"Dec 17, 1941
Conclusion of the operation against the Jews. A total of 2746 Jews were shot dead. Courland is consequently free of Jews, apart from approximately 350 Jewish craftsmen who are needed for urgent work.
Remarks: Light frost."
This is in reference to the shooting of women and children at Skede beach, which was photographed (see quote tweet).
(sourced from BArch R 70-SOWJETUNION/12, frame 0031)
At Skede beach, the Einsatzgruppen massacred 2,700 Jews, nearly all women and children. SS officer Karl Strott took these photos as a memento.
The boy on the far right, and likely most of the others in the first photo, including the baby in a dark shawl, are standing before the shooters in the second, seconds before they are shot.
There’s a third photo showing them after they were shot, but I’m choosing not to include it.
Some full scans in case they're useful. The first one is of the scan in the parent post, and there's a second one that also covers the executions: "From 14.-16.12.41, 2,772 persons were executed in Libau, namely 23 Communists and 2,749 Jews."
There's a third reference not included here that's pretty interesting, because it says that the same 2,749 Jews were "evacuated": "From 14 to 17 December 1941, 2,749 Jews were evacuated."
This is classic doublespeak for murder, and it's from a report from the SS and Police site commander in Libau, from Dec 29, 1941, sourced from LVVA R-83/1/25.
That one isn't online, so I've reached out to the Latvian State Historical Archives for a photo of it. Will post it here once it comes through.
(sourced from BArch R 70-SOWJETUNION/20, frame 0263)
patrick p retweeted
The Almanac produced also its own population estimates. The problem is:
1.) after 1942 they didn't update their figures in case of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania;
2.) they cribbed the figures from a publication published in... 1937!!!
Not only for Jews.
holocaustcontroversies.blogs…
Inna Evgenieva, a Christian girl from Kiev who witnessed the mass shooting of Jews at Babi Yar:
"I remember a group of four or five girls who absolutely refused to undress. The Germans pulled on their clothing. 'Undress!' they shrieked. And they refused. They attacked the Germans. We could hear. The Germans cursed them, and shot them then and there, fully dressed. They died with their clothes on. They were dragged to the ravine and thrown in."
Evgenieva watched from the attic of her family's house. I put together a map showing how close she was to the ravine, and am going to attach it to a reply to this post.
She recalls at the end of the day's shooting:
"We could see the outlines of the bodies. At the end of a day, they built a circular sand dike. In its centre we could see a black pool of blood and fat. A lake of black liquid. So many people had been killed... The wounded bled. You could see the blood through the sand."
Sourced from Michael Prazan's doc, Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades (2009), Part I. I kept the documentary's English subtitles.
EM 128, a secret SS report filed on Nov 3, 1941, five weeks after the shooting, talking up Einsatzgruppe C's action:
"As regards the actual executive work, about 80,000 persons have so far been liquidated by the commandos of the Einsatzgruppe. [...] The largest of these actions took place immediately after the capture of Kiew; only Jews with their entire families were used for it.
The difficulties arising in carrying out such a large-scale action, particularly concerning registration, were overcome in Kiew by calling upon the Jewish population, through a wall notice, to resettle. Although participation by only about 5,000 to 6,000 Jews had initially been expected, over 30,000 Jews appeared. As a result of exceedingly skillful organization, they still believed in their resettlement until immediately before the execution."
patrick p retweeted
Rouen, France June 1940
Amiens, France May 1940
Paris, June 3 1940
The only reason Paris wasn't destroyed by order of Hitler in '44, when he ordered the city reduced to a "field of ruins," was because German commander Dietrich von Choltitz refused to follow the order.
A farmer who worked a field across from the Treblinka extermination camp, describing what he saw when deportation trains pulled into the nearby station:
“The corpses lay there. They sat on them. No room.
Imagine August or July heat, with all the doors shut. About 150 inside, travelling for who knows how many days. No water, nothing. Of course they died.”
He also described what happened when the Jewish deportees tried to get water:
“When the convoys arrived, it was often very hot. The Jews were very thirsty. They tried to get out. As they got out, Ukrainians opened fire. Here there was blood and brain matter.”
Sourced from Shoah outtakes, USHMM (RG-60.5077, reel FV3811). English captions translated from the farmer’s Polish and the interpreter’s French, timed to the audio and clipped by me.
Wehrmacht officer Axel von dem Bussche recounting the massacre of ~5,000 Jews in Dubno, Ukraine:
“That line of naked people, men, women, children, old people, moved forward a few meters and stopped. [...] [The SS man] had twelve naked people at a time climb down into the pit and then he fired. Twelve, fourteen, fifteen shots. Then the line moved up.”
Interviewer: “What was your reaction?”
Bussche: “… Murder, yes. Mass murder, yes. But beyond that, the notion of extermination was quite clear.”
“The truly Christian reaction would have been to strip on the spot and join that line.”
There were ~11,000 Jews in the Dubno ghetto in 1942, and by the end of the war only 300 had survived.
Sourced from the documentary “Der Judenmord - Deutsche und Osterreicher berichten” (Michel Alexandre, WDR, 1998). English captions translated from Bussche’s German, with lots of importanthelp from @gaemsae. Cut and captioned by me.
Here's the full interview segment from the doc. I cut the first ~3 minutes of intro and the last ~5 minutes weighing what could have been done, to focus on the shooting, but the rest is super interesting and important. He's about as reliable a narrator as they come. The only thing modified are my added English captions.
Franz Suchomel, an SS sergeant at Treblinka, on hidden camera, describing the Lazarett, a fake infirmary where the old, the sick and children were shot at the edge of a burning pit:
“There was a white flag with a red cross. They didn’t know yet that they would be shot there.”
Lanzmann: “And children too?”
Suchomel: “Children too.”
Lanzmann: “Which children were sent to the Lazarett?”
Suchomel: “Sick children. Or if the mother was sick or the grandmother was old … then the children were sent along with the grandmother.”
Lanzmann: “How many people were shot in the Lazarett?”
Suchomel: “Let’s take it per day, not per transport. … Could have been twenty, but also two hundred.”
This is qt'ing a model I posted the other day of the Lazarett, to give some context to what it looked like.
Sourced from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah outtakes at USHMM (RG-60.5046, reels FV3755 and FV3757). English captions translated from Suchomel’s German, with important help from @gaemsae. I joined four sections of the interview into one clip. Cut and captioned by me.
I'm working on modeling the camps, and one of the more obscure things about Treblinka was The Lazarett, which was effectively a shed and a burn pit, disguised as a medical area. When Jews would get off the train, anyone who would slow down or disrupt the gassing process (the infirm, the sick, children), would be sent to the "medical center", where they would be shot in the back of the neck and dumped into the cremation pit.
The first image is the approach, the second what you would experience once inside, and the third the view from above.
patrick p retweeted
well as 3 tonnes of human hair, gold teeth etc. Did they just let them wander off in a nomadic fashion? xitter.cf/ppow84/status/20952266…
The evidence of mass murder found at the site of Treblinka would suggest otherwise: bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-1665…
Globocnik to Himmler, Feb 27, 1943, describing what they stole from the Jews at the Reinhard "transit" camps: RM 53 million, 1,800 kg of gold, 67,000 watches, and ~1,000 freight-car loads of clothing, underwear, rags, and bedding.
But wait. If Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were transit camps, why confiscate everything at a supposed waypoint after telling deportees to pack limited belongings for the journey?
And why a thousand railcars of textiles? Why shoes, underwear, glasses and three tons of women's hair? People were clearly being undressed. Were they reclothed for their "journey East"? If so, where are the invoices or orders for clothing for 1.5 million people?
According to the deniers, the SS stripped entire transports naked, shaved the women, took their glasses, and then sent all of them, the men, women, children, and elderly on to live and work in the East, where somehow only a hundred-odd people survived, most after escaping during bloody revolts ... at a transit camp.
(sourced from BArch, NS 19/2234)
