Quotes About SS

A central credo of Hitler's new SS was the Blood Myth, which evoked the twin visions of racial fastidiousness and combat on a cosmic stage. It

Nobody can now watch Leni Riefenstahl's chilling film of this festival, Triumph of the Will, without shuddering at the sight of the SS troops breaking into the parade-step as they stomped into sight of the Führer.

SS uniform was black and elegant

Himmler was an ambitious, sinister, idealistic creature of devious ways. His ideas on human behaviour had been gleaned from animal breeding lectures at agricultural college years before. The SS had certain affinities to the Jesuit monastic orders, an enforced mysticism which even Hitler found slightly ludicrous: in 1940, witnessing the pagan Yule celebration of the SS Leibstandarte at Christmas, he quietly commented to an adjutant that this would never take the place of 'Silent Night.

SS leaders and Husseini both claimed that Nazism and Islam had common values as well as common enemies—above all, the Jews.14

was Himmler whom the Führer had entrusted with the Final Solution, their breathtaking plan to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It was Himmler who had the nerve to justify this plan, standing before his SS generals in October 1943 and assuring them that they had "the moral right to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us," to pile up their "corpses side by side" in monuments to the Reich's power.

The shock of finding a familiar word in an unfamiliar setting.] A SS man would examine us. Whenever he found a weak one, a musulman as we called them, he would write his number down: good for the crematory.

In Germany now there are three choices,' Kammler told them. 'You are shot by the SS, you are imprisoned by the SS, or you work for the SS.

How drab the British and the French looked in their office suits, crumpled after their long journeys, compared to the uniforms of the SS and the Italian fascists. How unvirile; how dowdy and outnumbered.

Diels told the reporters, "The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.

The deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 of 4,000 Jewish children aged twelve and younger, after being forcibly separated from their parents at the Vélodrome and starved for a week, was done not by the Gestapo or the SS but by ordinary Parisian gendarmes acting under orders from French officials.

The führer ordered the Second SS Panzer Corps moved up out of Le Mans. A moment later he countermanded the order. No one said anything.

I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps – they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, I'm free! I'm free! And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people. - Roy Gates

The SS, as such, behaved no more criminally than any other social groups would behave when taking part in political events.

began to scream and yell. The SS was betraying him now as well as the army. This rage was far worse than any of his rows with Guderian. Eventually he collapsed into an armchair, drained and weeping.

Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.

One night, he confessed to me that he was horrified by his first experience of the radical methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to combat the partisans; but his profound conviction that only a barbarous, completely inhuman enemy could necessitate such extreme measures had in the end been reinforced. "In the SD, you must have seen some atrocious things," he added; I assured him I had, but preferred not to elaborate. Instead

He was a proud young man who had been called up into the SS, and he was in a concentration camp. The young man simply didn't go along, and he was shot as an SS man. And that was also known to us in our town.

The Latvians wanted to storm the ghetto. They wanted to kill the Jews. So the Germans had to protect us—the German army or SS or whatever it was. It is paradoxical.

I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

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.

Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography. They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as "ardent Nazi" were re-categorized as "not an ardent Nazi.

Immediately after the war, a group of Jewish partisans known as the Nokmim traveled throughout Germany and Austria hunting down former members of the SS. Also known as the Avengers, this band of mercenaries paid by the government of Great Britain made northern Italy their home base.3

By 1933, when Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party assumed power in Germany, the military was divided between the Wehrmacht—the traditional army, navy, and air force of the German state—and the SS, a paramilitary organization loyal to Hitler and the Nazi Party.