Ben Stein Quotes

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

Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.

I remember learning about the Holocaust when I was in kindergarten and being terrified. I think we even watched a graphic video about it in Jewish day school. Although I was quite young, I remember making these vows to myself such as, I'm never going to love my country so much that I can't leave in a moment's notice.

It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us.

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

The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.

Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.

What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.

Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.

Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed.

Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn't allow us to forget.

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.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way... So the Holocaust doesn't interest me, see? They've had a lot of publicity, but they didn't suffer as much.

Murder has been done in Buchenwald.

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

We are watching the Germans closely; we are not forgetting what they did to us during the war.

As Minister of Economics, Funk accelerated the pace of rearmament and as Reichsbank president banked for the SS the gold teeth fillings of concentration camp victims, probably the most ghoulish collateral in banking history.

I didn't realise the depth of horror that happened in the Second World War every day.

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

The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.

How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.