Quotes from Gitta Sereny

THE OBSESSION of Speer's life after Nuremberg, as I have pointed out, was Hitler's murder of the Jews. The ambivalence, however, was that while he sincerely grasped every opportunity to reiterate his sorrow and his pain at having been–the automatic formula he used–"a part of a government that committed such crimes", he was totally incapable of saying that he had known about them at the time.

What do you think it did to Galen's reputation," replied Father Schneider, "when the Allies dropped copies of his sermon together with their bombs?

What is the difference to you between hate, and a contempt which results in considering people as 'cargo'?

I am responsible only to myself and my God. Only I know what I did of my own free will. And for that I can answer to my God. What I did without, or against my free will, for that I need not answer.…

As it was, I often looked at him and thought to myself, 'Who are you? Oh my God, what are you that you can bear even to see this? What – oh God, what are you seeing with these eyes which look at me?

It is true, you know, although I cried, oh so many times when I thought of those people they were killing, I never never knew there were children too, or even women. I, too, rationalized it I suppose; I told myself, I suppose, that we were at war and that they were killing the men;

When indeed will we be mature enough to accept, for ourselves and our children, that there is no obligation to love, there is no guilt in not loving, and that the only valid basis for relationships...--between any human beings--is love freely given from both sides.

It is never permitted to deprive members of foreign races of human rights – the right to freedom, the right to property, the right to an insoluble marriage; never is it permitted to subject anyone to [such] cruelties.…

Amongst the deported are many Catholics. Would it not be possible that Your Holiness make another attempt to intercede for these unhappy innocents? Your intervention represents the last hope of so many and the fervent entreaty of all decent men.

I remember, he brushed his face with his hand and then he said, 'We are living through terrible times, my child. Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Paul's place, I would have done the same. I absolve him from all guilt.

he was a priest Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I had carried this awful thing around with me for a year, I had thought and thought and cried and worried myself sick over what would happen to my Paul, if not on earth, then after his death Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and then he, a priest, had taken it so Ã¢â'¬Â¦ not calmly, but, well, matter-of-factly.

this was part of the plan they failed to bring off – the three worst murderers amongst the SS, Kurt Franz, Miete and Mentz (significantly enough not Stangl), would be "executed" by the insurgents.

There were idiots amongst them – morons. I often opened my mouth too wide and let them have it. 'My God,' I'd say to them, 'euthanasia passed you by, didn't it,' and I'd tell my wife when I got home, 'these morons got overlooked by the euthanasia.

That everything human has its origin in human weakness.

There were, of course, no sanitary napkins, or even newspapers, and the girls used large leaves – burdock leaves if they could find them – to protect themselves. But any blood showing on a dress meant death; it was unaesthetic, and the SS were very keen on aesthetics.)

God is everything higher which I cannot understand but only believe.

I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself," he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. "But I was there," he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. "So yes

Speer's moral corruption had its seed in his emotional attachment to Hitler–he likened it to Faust's fatal bargain with Mephistopheles. Achievement and success rooting it ever deeper over the years, he lived–almost addictively–in an increasingly vicious cycle of need and dependence.

what we are above all other things, is individual and different.

despite my reluctance to add to the polemics about the record of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during the Nazi period, the sombre facts, previously unpublished, which emerged during my research could not be ignored.

If morality is extinguished, there is no human being left.

But what is important is that it is hard to see in this instance what they have to gain by denying that they had been "schooled" for murder at the euthanasia institutes, if that in fact was what happened. They would surely appear in a slightly less terrible light if they could claim that they had been scientifically conditioned – brainwashed – to death-camp work, rather than assigned to it because their natures seemed particularly suited to such activity.

now at long last one of them is going to have the courage to explain to my generation how any human being with mind and heart and brain could Ã¢â'¬Â¦ not even 'do' what was done – it isn't our function to say whether a man is 'guilty as charged' or not – but even see it being done, and consent to remain alive.

the great Dutch Protestant theologian W. A. Visser 't Hooft suggested, which I suspect applies to many people including–to a large degree–Speer: that "people cannot find a place in their consciousness . . . their imagination . . . or finally have the courage to face (or allow themselves to remember) unimaginable horror. It is possible," he said, "to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing.