Quotes from Christopher Simpson

German business fed on forced labor throughout the war, exploiting the SS extermination-through-work programs to fulfill military production contracts. Contrary to postwar claims, the initiative for these programs came from industry, not from the Nazi state.

The murder program accelerated in the spring of 1943. German troops entered the Warsaw ghetto and killed thousands of Jews in street fighting. In the south, the Nazis began deporting Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. In the north, they deported Dutch Jews to Sobibor, gassing about 34,000 people there as they arrived. The SS also arranged a special transport for 3,000 Jewish mothers and children from the Netherlands; they murdered all of them.11

German industry's unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust.

Corporate managers from Krupp, IG Farben, Daimler Benz, and similar companies enforced regulations under which laborers who "sabotaged production" or left their posts without permission were punished by beatings, hangings, or deportation to death camps.

Wartime collaboration with the Nazis frequently

One week after the British announced the creation of the UNWCC in early October 1942, the Soviet Union convened its own war crimes panel, the ponderously titled Extraordinary State Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Crimes of the German Fascist Occupiers and Their Collaborators and the Damage Caused by Them to the Citizens, Kholkhozes, Social Organizations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR—more simply, the Extraordinary State Commission (ESC).

Nevertheless, except in Poland and the occupied territories of the USSR,* the Nazis consistently succeeded in enlisting the assistance of much of the established power structure, civil service personnel, and police.

This meant that when Germany defaulted on a series of loans in the early 1930s, Dillon, Read and its major partners had already taken their share of the spoils, while the smaller investors who had bought these bonds lost tens of millions of dollars.

Private German banks and businesses used the SS registration data to take over about 5,000 of the most prosperous Jewish companies in less than eighteen months, according to contemporary SS reports, and liquidated about 21,000 smaller Jewish businesses to make room for competing German enterprises.

A nation whose civilization is rooted in Christianity will therefore always be at pains to preserve Christianity as the basis of its civilization and to discourage foreign elements in its cultural life. So long as the Jews fail to appreciate this fact they will come up against difficulties.…

Morgenthau knew that a handful of Long's aides at State had for years systematically denied available U.S. visas to refugee Jews, suppressed intelligence about Hitler's Holocaust, and undermined efforts to establish a commission to document Nazi atrocities. Recently he had learned that Long's group at State had sabotaged a deal that could have purchased survival for 70,000 Romanian Jews for a mere $170,000 in Romanian currency.37

In reality, though, U.S. and Soviet psychological warfare programs each fed its rival's appetite for escalated conflicts, particularly in contested countries in the Third World. Scientific research programs on either side that claimed to be a defensive reaction to foreign intrigues were easily interpreted in the rival's camp as aggressive preparations for war.

Mikoyan contended that the U.S. decision to halt denazification in Germany was of great political importance at the time, and in fact remains difficult for many Russians to understand or accept to this day.1

Stalin's own crimes and blunders are not justified, of course, nor can the past fifty years of Soviet publicity concerning Nazi crimes always be taken at face value. But whether the U.S. government intended it or not, its actions cast the die for the cold war not in 1946 or 1947 (as most Western observers would have it), but by the end of 1945 and arguably earlier.

the Cold War has been dangerous and costly in its own right. It has bankrupted the USSR and very nearly the United States as well; led to a string of civil wars and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns in Eastern Europe; repeatedly threatened to spark a general nuclear war; and institutionalized a pattern of advanced weapons proliferation that has left most countries and peoples in a far more precarious position than they were when the conflict began.

the new framework of law did not confront or contain one of the signal crimes of the day: the Turkish Ittihad government's destruction of some one million Armenians. Nor did existing international law achieve justice for the Armenians when the killing was over, in part because Britain, France, and the United States saw greater advantage in cooperating with Turkey in a new division of Middle Eastern oil than they did in bringing Ittihad criminals to justice.

The bulk of the Nazi killings prior to 1941 were what the Poles termed "cold pogroms": deportation of tens of thousands of people to barren wastelands or to desperately overcrowded Jewish ghettos where death came slowly through hunger, disease, or exposure to the elements. Nazi concentration camps during this period were prison camps, not extermination centers.

It is essential to identify and condemn the deeds that contribute to genocide, particularly when such deeds have assumed a mantle of respectability, and to ensure just and evenhanded punishment for those responsible. But the temptation will be to accept the inducements and rationalizations society offers in exchange for keeping one's mouth shut. The choice is in our hands.

The Nazis organized the extirpation of between 700,000 and one million Jews and Poles between September 1939 and the summer of 19424—a casualty rate approaching that which the Turks had achieved in a comparable time using nearly identical methods.

As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the "extermination of the Armenians" had led him to "the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine" over which Aryans would eventually triumph.

Cardinal Schuster and Monsignor Bicchierai had long been among the most prominent clerical supporters of fascism in Italy, according to SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann, who handled negotiations with the Vatican for the SS during the last days of the war.

Wolff was successful in that effort and wrote of his "special joy (besondere Freude) now that five thousand members of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka every day.

Thus international law typically provided protection for the powerful and ruthless rather than for their victims.

The fact is that no clear international ban against crimes against humanity existed prior to 1945, due in large part to U.S. opposition.