Hannah Arendt Quotes

I am certain, however, that those responsible for the murder of millions of Germans will never be brought to justice.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

During the Nuremberg trials, Oswald Pohl, an SS Lieutenant General,...is shown here explaining how Farben operated such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.

We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

The greatest and the most horrible crime that has ever been committed in the history of the whole world.

Even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

The Nazis quite clearly killed millions of Jews.

It's perfectly understandable and proper for one to be anti-Semite, but to exterminate women and children is so extraordinary, it's hard to believe. No defendant here wanted that.

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.

Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.

I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh.

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.

What is the difference between burning and gassing people in ovens and doing it to a whole nation out in the open?

I became interested in genocide, because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand. I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!

I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.