The Eichmann Sassen Transcripts

the cautious bureaucrat. Yes, indeed. Alongside this cautious bureaucrat there stood a fanatical fighter for the freedom of my blood, from which I descend.

And so I had repeated encounters with the dead, and I always had that queer feeling, I still remember seeing the ones that were burnt, I told you already, my knees shook. Do you know what I said? You will laugh. "I believe in God, the Father almighty, the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, died under Pontius Pilate," and so on and so on. "Resurrected from the dead," and so on. so that my knees would stop shaking. I would have been embarrassed, as an SS lieutenant colonel in uniform, wearing a thick leather coat, with the shoulder boards on top, if I had said, "Now I feel sick."

because they recognized my office as a welcome source, where they could round out their knowledge of Jewish life in Austria, When I tell you that for several weeks we made a thousand Jews a day fully ready to emigrate, At that time I demanded that Loewenherz provide me with 1,200 to 1,400 Jews every day. so there was a lively coming and going.

There is an order from the Reichsführer which reads, Jews fit for labor are to be put to work, Jews unfit for labor are to be handed over to the Final Solution.

He had told me that they had fitted showerheads up above that look like showers, and that it was supposed to be a shower room, And they would put in the idiots and throw in cyanide.

Belzec 600,000, Sobibor 250,000, Treblinka 700,000, Chelmno 300,000, together 1,850,000. As regards the appalling camp Auschwitz, its commandant Rudolf Hoess put the number of Jews gassed at 2 1/2 million

Yes. And now I want to tell you, as this recording comes to an end. I must first say this: I regret nothing. I will not crawl to the cross in any way whatsoever. These four months in which we have been recording this material, the four months in which you worked to refresh my memory, much of it was indeed refreshed. It would be too easy, and I could make it cheap by today's standards of opinion, to say that I deeply regret it, to play at a kind of conversion, as if a Saul had become a Paul. I tell you, Comrade Sassen: that I cannot do. I cannot do it because I am not willing. Because everything inside me resists saying that we did something wrong. No. I have to tell you quite honestly, had we killed, of the 10.3 million Jews whom Korherr recorded, as we now know, 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and would say, good, we have destroyed an enemy. Now, since through the malice of fate the greater part of those 10.3 million Jews have remained alive, I tell myself: fate wanted it so. I must submit to fate and providence. I am only a small man. I cannot do otherwise, nor do I want to. We would have fulfilled our task for our blood and our people and for the freedom of peoples, had we destroyed the most cunning mind among the human spirits living today. For that is what I told Streicher, what I have always preached: we are fighting against an adversary who, through many thousands of years of schooling, is intellectually superior to us. It was yesterday, or the day before, or a year ago, I don't know. I heard or read: even before the Romans built their state, even before Rome was founded at all, the Jews could already write. You see, a people that today can look back on a written history of, I would say, six thousand years; a people that five or six thousand years ago, and I am not wrong if I count even into the seventh millennium, was active as a lawgiver. That today's Christian churches make use of that legislation is very depressing to me. But it tells me that this must be a people of the first magnitude, for lawgivers have always been great. And it was from this understanding that I fought against this adversary. And from these motivations you must understand why I say: if 10.3 million of these adversaries had been killed, we would have fulfilled our task. Since that is not the case, I will tell you: the suffering and hardship our yet-unborn will have to endure. Perhaps they will curse us. But we, as a small number of people, could not prevail against the spirit of the age. We did what we could. Of course, I must tell you, there is also human emotion. I was not free of it either. I too succumbed to the same weakness. I know that. I too share the blame that the plan for a true, comprehensive elimination, perhaps envisaged by some authority, could not be carried out. I told you that in small examples. I was an inadequate spirit, placed in a position where in truth I could have, and should have, done more. As an excuse, what I told you may serve: first, that I lacked a comprehensive mind. Second, that I lacked the necessary physical hardness. And third, that even against my own will, a legion of people appeared who themselves worked against that will in turn, so that I, who already felt handicapped, was able to carry out even the remainder I might have pushed through only with deductions, because I was forced to squander myself for years in a struggle against the so-called interventionists. That is what I want to say in closing. Whether you put this in the book, I don't know. Perhaps it is not even opportune. Perhaps one should not. I only want to tell you the conclusion I have drawn from all these months of memory-refreshing, and which I feel compelled to share with you.