Nazi Persecution Quotes

Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

Please report to RF SS and to the Fuehrer that all arrangements against Jews, political and concentration camp internees in the Protectorate have been taken care of by me personally today.

I was a student in Germany when Hitler came to power.

My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. I only found out as an adult because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms - partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people.

Those that perished in Hitler's gas chambers were the last Jews to die without standing up to defend themselves.

Generally speaking, Israeli intelligence did not hunt Nazi war criminals.

I had a Jewish grandfather. We managed to hide this fact from the authorities by falsifying documents, my father and I. His father was Jewish, but because my father was an illegitimate child, it was rather easy to pretend that his father was unknown.

It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.

I denounce the madness that has taken possession of the Nazis of Germany in these days of persecution of helpless, innocent Jews whose only offense is that they are members of the race of which Jesus … was a member.

We can proudly say that Hitler has never conquered us. At the very time when Europe was overshadowed by the blackest Nazi darkness Yugoslavia was ablaze with the fire of freedom and resistance. We caused havoc to enemy military installations, destroyed railways, roads and bridges and held down on our territory many enemy divisions which otherwise would have served on other fronts where our great allies were waging decisive battles.

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.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

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.

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

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.

Under Hitler it was the entrepreneurial and professional classes who were the first victims of Nazi boycotts and exclusion. Today it is Israel, the most powerful symbol of Jewish national resurgence in two millennia.

I will never forget the moment when Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father. The men were marched away. Two hours later, a lorry came by, loaded with their clothing.

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

In 1933, the Nazis came to power and the more systematic persecution of the Jews followed quickly. Laws were enacted which excluded Jewish children from higher education in public schools.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.

I dealt with legal questions in the interest of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP and its members during the difficult years of struggle for the victory of the Movement.

If you want to do something for the Jews, why not give them a good part of Germany?

Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one 'last night' to another?