Partial Translation of
Document 1919-PS

Speech of the Reichsführer-SS at the Meeting of
SS Major-Generals at Posen, October 4, 1943

In 1941 the Führer attacked Russia. . . I can give a picture of this first year in a few words. The attacking forces cut their way through. The Russian Army was herded together in great pockets, ground down, taken prisoner. At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labour. What after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labour, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger. . . .

One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death [verrecken—to die-used of cattle] interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude toward animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes to me and says, "I cannot dig the antitank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them," then I have to say, "You are a murderer of your own blood because if the antitank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die, and they are sons of German mothers. They are our own blood." That is what I want to instill into the SS and what I believe have instilled into them as one of the most sacred laws of the future. Our concern, our duty is our people and our blood. It is for them that we must provide and plan, work and fight, nothing else. We can be indifferent to everything else. I wish the SS to adopt this attitude to the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians. All else is vain, fraud against our own nation and an obstacle to the early winning of the war.

Foreigners in the Reich

We must also realize that we have six to seven million foreigners in Germany. Perhaps it is even eight million now. We have prisoners in Germany. They are none of them dangerous so long as we take severe measures at the merest trifle. It is a mere nothing

today to shoot ten Poles, compared with the fact that we might later have to shoot tens of thousands in their place, and compared to the fact that the shooting of these tens of thousands would then be carried out even at the cost of German blood. Every little fire will immediately be stamped out and quenched, and extinguished, otherwise as in the case of a real fire-a political and psychological surface-fire may spring up among the people.

The Communists in the Reich

I don't believe the Communists could attempt any action, for their leading elements, like most criminals, are in our concentration camps. And here I must say this that we shall be able to see after the war what a blessing it was for Germany that, in spite all the silly talk about humanitarianism, we imprisoned all this criminal substratum of the German people in concentration camps: I'll answer for that. If they were going about free, we should be worse off. For then the subhumans would have their NCOs and commanding officers, then they would have their councils of workers and military. As it is, however, they are locked up, and are making shells or projectile cases or other important things, and are very useful members of human society. . .

The Clearing Out of the Jews

I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed, up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never to speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.

I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about "The Jewish race is being exterminated," says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program-elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them." And then they come, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time-apart from exceptions caused by human weakness-to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if— with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war-we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. . . .

We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order . . . that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves. . . .

of

A number of SS men—there are not very many them have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else. Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want, in the end, to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. . . .

The Principle of Selection

We are a product of the law of selection. We have made our choice from a cross section of our people. This people came into being aeons ago, through generations and centuries, by the throw of the dice of fate and of history. Alien peoples have swept over this people and left their heritage behind them. Alien bloodstreams have flowed into this people, but it has, nevertheless, in spite of terrible hardships and terrible blows of fate, still had strength in the very essence of its blood to win through. Thus this whole people is saturated with, and held together by Nordic-PhalianGermanic blood, so that after all one could, and can, still speak of a German people. From this people, of such varied hereditary tendencies, as it emerged from the collapse after the years of the battle of liberation, we have now consciously tried to select the NordicGermanic blood, for we could best expect this section of our blood to contain the creative, heroic and lifepreserving qualities of our people. We have gone partly by outward appearances, and for the rest have kept these outward appearances in review by making constantly new demands, and by repeated tests both physical and mental, both of the character and the soul. Again and again we have sifted out and cast aside what was worthless, what did not suit us. Just as long as we have strength to do this will this organization remain healthy. . . .

The SS after the war

Then this organization will march forward into the future young and strong, revolutionary and efficient to fulfill the task of giving the German people, the Germanic people the super-stratum of society which will combine and hold together this Germanic people and this Europe, and from which the brains which the people needs for industry, farming, politics, and as soldiers, statesmen, and technicians, will emerge.

The Future

When the war is won,-then, as I have already told you, our work will start. We do not know when the war will end. It may be sudden, or it may be long delayed. We shall see.

If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future. We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our boys with the laws of the SS

organization. I consider it to be absolutely necessary to the life of our peoples that we should not only impart the meaning of ancestry, grandchildren, and future but feel these to be a part of our being. Without there being any talk about it, without our needing to make use of rewards and similar material things, it must be a matter of course that we have children. It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial superstratum of the Germanic people. In twenty to thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its leading class. If the SS, together with the farmers, . . . then run the colony in the East on a grand scale, without any restraint, without any question about any kind of tradition but with nerve and revolutionary impetus, we shall in twenty years push the national boundary [Volkstumsgrenze] five hundred kilometers Eastwards.

I requested of the Führer today, that the SS-if we have fulfilled our task and our duty by the end of the war-should have the privilege of holding Germany's most easterly frontier as a defence frontier. I believe this is the only privilege for which we have no competitors. I believe not one person will dispute our claim to this privilege. We shall be in a position there to exercise every young age-group in the use of arms. We shall impose our laws on the East. We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals. I hope that our generation will successfully bring it about that every age-group has fought in the East, and that every one of our divisions spends a winter in the East every second or third year. Then we shall never grow soft. . . .

Thus we will create the necessary conditions for the whole Germanic people and the whole of Europe, controlled, ordered, and led by us, the Germanic people, to be able, in generations, to stand the test in her battles of destiny against Asia, who will certainly break out again. We do not know when that will be. Then, when the mass of humanity of 1 to 11⁄2 billion lines up against us, the Germanic people, numbering, I hope, 250 to 300 million, and the other European peoples, making a total of 600 to 700 million— (and with an outpost area stretching as far as the Urals, or, a hundred years, beyond the Urals)—must stand the test in its vital struggle against Asia. It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive it. It would be the end of beauty and Kultur, of the creative power of this earth. That is the distant future. It is for that that we are fighting, pledged to hand down the heritage of our ancestors.

We see into the distant future because we know what it will be. That is why we are doing our duty more fanatically than ever, more devoutly than ever, more bravely, more obediently, and more thoroughly than ever. We want to be worthy of being permitted to be the first SS men of the Führer, Adolf Hitler, in the long history of the Germanic people, which stretches before us.

NOTES

1Office of the U.S. Chief Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (1946), 4:558-572. Document 1919-PS includes a partial English translation of the October 4, 1943, speech at Poznan, as well as a translation of Himmler's April 1943 speech at Kharkov, Ukraine. The National Archives has the German transcript, Himmler's notes, and an audio recording of the October speech in National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, Record Group 242. A part of the transcript is reproduced herein (from p. 65). The National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, RG 238, over 1,600 cubic feet of records, supplements RG 242, which contains about three times more records. See also Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (1949, reprinted 1971) for day-to-day proceedings and documents in English; Mary Anne Fugelso, Index to the International Military Tribunal Proceedings (1966); and Robert Wolfe, ed., Captured German and Related Records: A National Archives Conference (1974).

2Robert F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France (1950) vol. 1, The Prologue to the Dreyfus Affair; Guy Chapman, The Dreyfus Case: A Reassessment (1955); Léon Daudet, L'Avant-Guerre: Études et documents sur l'espionnage juifallemand en France depuis l'Affaire Dreyfus (1915); Édouard Drumont, La France juive: Essai d'histoire contemporaine, 200th ed. (n.d.); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1967); C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1969).

Encyclopedia Britannica (Macropedia), 15th ed., s.v. "International Relations. World War II: Cost of the War"; The Historical Encyclopedia of World War II (1989), s.v. "Prisoners of War." Among experts there is a notable variation in the estimates of civilian deaths. These figures are offered as an example of the estimated order of magnitude rather than as precise numbers. Cf. Jim Miller, "A War to Remember," Newsweek, Sept. 4, 1989, p. 64, and U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 28/Sept. 4, 1989, p. 36, where the estimate of civilian deaths for France varies from 173,000 to 450,000.

*Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, rev. ed. (1985), p. 1220.

George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (1988); George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968).

"Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (1943), pp. 214, 248-249, 285-296, 300, 327-328, 389–390, 654-655; Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (1989), pp. 490 491, 531.

Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 114, 197; Joseph Tenenbaum, Race and Reich: The Story of an Epoch (1956), pp. xiii-xv; Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 88–107; Bohdan Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell (1980), pp. 25-29.

Examples of Nazi legislation that included anti-Jewish measures are the Law for the Restitution of the Professional Civil Service (April 1933), the Law for the Revocation of German Citizenship (July 1933), and the Reich Citizenship Law (September 1935), augmented by the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor (1935). Examples of laws used against the Gypsies are the Denaturalization Law (July 1933), applied to foreign and stateless Gypsies inside Germany; the Law for Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects (1933) and the Laws Against Crime (1937), both of which included

Gypsies under the racial category of "asocials”; and a law entitled "Fight against the Gypsy Menace" (1938). From 1933 a national police commission decided to require mandatory registration and fingerprinting of all Gypsies older than six. The Law for Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects was specifically directed against the physically handicapped and mentally ill, and its effect was strengthened by the Law for Marriage Health (October 1935). Memorandum from Dr. Sybil Milton, United States Holocaust Council, February 1992; Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 30-31.

"Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 95-117, 207-208; Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, p. 533.

10Milton memorandum; Robert Jay Lifton, "Sterilization and Euthanasia," in A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, ed. Michael Berenbaum (1990), pp. 222-228; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 177-222; Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, pp. 186-187.

"Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Density of Europe's Gypsies (1972), pp. 174-175; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 181-182; Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 28, 44-45, 81, 91-92.

12Office of U.S. Chief Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 7:752-754 (translation of Document L-3). 13Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 131-156.

14Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 641-667. Ukraine is approximately 200,000 square miles with some of the richest land in Europe.

15

5 Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (1961), pp. 578-579; Konnilyn Feig, "Non-Jewish Victims in the Concentration Camps," in A Mosaic of Victims, p. 173; Göring statement as recorded in Count Ciano's diary, cited in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960), p. 854; Ihor Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe: A Study of Lebensraum Policies (1961), pp. 141-150; Christian Streit, "The Fate of the Soviet Prisoners of War," in A Mosaic of Victims, pp. 142–149. Kamenetsky has made extensive use of the documents from the Nuremberg hearings.

16Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, pp. 41, 52-81, 175– 176, 234 n. 145 on Document NG-2325; R. L. Koehl, RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy (1957); Shirer, Third Reich, p. 944; Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 40, 44. Whether or not "resettling" was a Nazi euphemism like "transporting Jews to the East," the percentage objectives indicate general Nazi aims.

17Office of U.S. Chief Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 4:570-572; quotation from April 1943 speech at Kharkov, Ukraine, 4:573–574. See also pp. 577-578, where Russia is equated with Asia: “We know that this conflict with the advancing pressure from Asia, with 200 million Russians, is necessary."

18Office of U.S. Chief Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 1:1030-1031.

19Feig, "Non-Jewish Victims," in A Mosaic of Victims, pp. 166–167; Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, pp. 21, 55, 62-65, 88-101; Richard C. Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust: Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (1986), pp. 24– 27; Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Council Law No. 10 (1949), 4:989–1053. Kamenentsky points out that because there had been a fifth-century Gothic settlement in Ukraine, Hitler was willing to accept certain Ukrainian women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five as candidates for regermanization. Out of a potential 10.7 million prospects for regermanization in the provinces annexed in western Poland, of the 6 million Poles remaining after previous ex

pulsions, only 3 percent were found qualified in June 1942 (pp 100-101). Cf. Heinrich Himmler, Untermensch (1942).

20 Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 294-295.

21 Peter Black, "Forced Labor in the Concentration Camps, 1942-1944," and Edward Homze, "Nazi Germany's Forced Labor Program," in A Mosaic of Victims, pp. 37-63; Office of U.S. Chief Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 6:1111-1115 (Documents D-272, D-274, and D-277); Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 49, 76

81.

22 Black, "Forced Labor," in A Mosaic of Victims, pp. 46-51, 56-57.

23Hitler, Mein Kampf; Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 126-145, 294-311; Milton memorandum; Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 19, 33. Cf. Woodward, Tom Watson, pp. 431-450.

24Bullock, Hitler, pp. 621-633; Office of U.S. Chief Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 4:558; Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 71-76.

25See Reinhard Heydrich's order of July 17, 1941: Regulations for the Commandos of the Security Police and Service to be detailed to Stalags, RG 242, National Archives, Washington, DC; Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, pp. 163-165 (I.M.T. Document No-3155).

26Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 12191220; Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust, pp. 19, 28, 45, 81, 91-92. The release of the former Soviet Union's archives may change these estimates considerably. Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, who is responsible for opening these documents, stated on June 15, 1992, that he has records showing 27 million Soviet people died during World War II (Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives 24 (Winter 1992): 357).

B

y the end of World War II, the world was a much smaller place. Powerful prewar empires lay in ruin, nations emerged where once there were none, and the death count, for both military personnel and civilians, exceeded sixty million. The world had been ushered into the atomic age, and the next fifty years, and beyond, would be dominated by memories and policies born of the war.

In 1989 Don W. Wilson, Archivist of the United States, charged the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum with the task of mounting a traveling exhibition to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the United States' involvement in World War II. The exhibition began with an idea: let the men and women whose lives were caught up in the war tell the story, not in retrospect, but as it happened. The result was "World War II: Personal Accounts-Pearl Harbor to V-J Day." It includes some of the most famous, and infamous, documents, photographs, and objects produced by the war-the draft of Roosevelt's Day of Infamy speech, Hitler's last will and testament, the photograph that inspired the Iwo Jima monument in Arlington National Cemetery, and the German and Japanese surrender documents.

But at the heart of the exhibition are the letters home and the diaries written by those who were there. Many are by youngsters aged eighteen to twenty-five, others by seasoned veterans of the regular military in their thirties. They are not memories-they are eyewitness accounts written in the language and tone of the 1940s. The phrasing and spelling are not letter-perfect, but the message is immediate and poignant, reflecting the writer's fear and loneliness. This direct

and revealing writing style can also be found in Japanese, German, English, and Canadian let

ters.

There are one hundred personal messages in the exhibition and an equal number of archival candid photographs of their authors. There are also carefully selected artifacts that relate to a phrase in a letter or a personal experience. The whole is set against a backdrop of mural-size photographs of specific episodes in the war. Taken together, the letters and diaries tell a lot about an enormous subject with an immediacy that spans the fifty-year barrier.

The last six months of peace before Pearl Harbor were a strange time for Americans. In the western North Atlantic, American naval units. were convoying ships bound for Britain. There was, in fact, an undeclared war going on there, but it was in neither side's interest to acknowledge it.

American army troops were working up to war strength, but peacetime attitudes died hard. In the Pacific, the fleet was busily training; in the summer of 1941 it remained at Pearl Harbor instead of returning, as usual, to West Coast ports.

There was a peculiar ambience to life in the islands. Just as Indian territory had been America's frontier a century ago, so now was the Pacific. Honolulu and Pearl Harbor were the crossroads of that frontier, the place where America met the East. Servicemen there trained hard, played hard, and grew up fast. Almost the