Elie Wiesel Quotes

At the end of the day, with all due respect, the Jews are the ultimate victims of the twentieth century.

Marched into Russia. Killed the Jews. Strangled the women. Murdered the children. Everyone knows what we bring.

In the 20th century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology, born of neopaganism, gave rise to the attempt, planned and systematically carried out by the regime, to exterminate European Jews. The result has passed into history as the Shoah.

Germany is the place where when Hitler was the prime minister and supreme commander, he burned over six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all German people knew that Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the world and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

I want to remind people that the Nazis weren't able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn't have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

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.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated.

Nothing can be achieved without sacrificing blood. The Jews will meet their end at our hands

The killing of the Jews made the war monstrous.

The Nazi’s radical anti-Semitism was an attempt to guarantee the complicity of the broadest possible swath of the populace in Nazi crimes. With their hands dripping with blood, most Germans would likely see no real choice but to fight to the death against the allies.

I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

They are shooting Jews in masses. These crimes must not be allowed to continue..

Germany's crimes were recent and of such a scale and depravity that, unless constantly faced, they will come to seem fictitious.

Never to forget the Holocaust was not only against Jews. It was mostly against Jews but it was also against homosexuals, gypsies and, let's not forget, people with disability.

The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

It was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious.

The Nazis quite clearly killed millions of Jews.

The Fuehrer declared that the Jews have played their final act in Europe, and therefore they have played their final act.