This page contains a collection of Holocaust quotations, selected and compiled by Alpha History authors. If you would like to suggest a quotation for this page, please contact Alpha History.
“Whoever would like to cherish such adders and puny devils — who are the worst enemies of Christ and us all — to befriend them and to do them honour simply in order to be cheated, plundered, robbed, disgraced, and forced to howl and curse and suffer every kind of evil, to him I would commend the Jews. And if this is not enough, let him tell the Jews to use his mouth as a privy, or else crawl into the Jew’s hind parts, and there worship the holy thing, so as afterwards to be able to boast of having been merciful, and of having helped the Devil and his progeny to blaspheme our dear Lord.”
Martin Luther, 16th century German religious reformer
“In order for a house to burn down, three things are required. The timber must be dry and combustive, there needs to be a spark that ignites it, and external conditions have to be favourable – not too damp, perhaps some wind. Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany provided the spark that set off the destruction we now call the Holocaust, and World War II created a setting conducive to brutality. However without the dry timber, mass murder on such a scale would not have been possible. People had to be prepared to accept the identification of other members of their society as enemies.”
Doris L. Bergen, historian
“In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of … Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.”
Winston Churchill
“In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether. ‘Living-space’ figured more prominently, posed against the alternative international competition for markets … The key theme now was the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate and profession.”
Ian Kershaw (historian)
“Was there any form of filth or crime without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut into such a sore, you find, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light, a Jew.”
Adolf Hitler
“A Jew is for me an object of disgust. I feel like vomiting when I see one. Christ could not possibly have been a Jew. It is not necessary to prove that scientifically – it is a fact. I do not need to prove this with science or scholarship. It is so!”
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propagandist
“At no time does the Lord God require of us charitable conciliation with the Jew, the mortal enemy of the Aryan character. Christ himself called the Jews ‘the sons of the Devil, a brood of snakes’, and drove the dealers and moneychangers from the house of God with a whip.”
Hildegard Passow, female NSDAP member
“For years I have written that any further mixture of German blood with Jewish blood must be avoided. In my articles I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law themselves – the law of Moses, which says, “If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women.”
Julius Streicher, Nazi propagandist
“Certainly I shall use the police, and most ruthlessly, whenever the German people are hurt. But I refuse the notion that the police are protective troops for Jewish stores. No, the police protect whoever comes into Germany legitimately, but it does not exist for the purpose of protecting Jewish money-lenders.”
Hermann Goering
“Who are the moneylenders? They are those who were driven out of the Temple by Christ Himself 2000 years ago. They are those who never work but live on fraud.”
Julius Streicher
“The Jew always lives from the blood of other peoples, he needs such murders and such sacrifices. The victory will be only entirely and finally achieved when the whole world is free of Jews.”
Julius Streicher
“As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods.”
Joseph Goebbels
“With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.”
Adolf Hitler
“We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.”
Heinrich Himmler
“Though anti-Semitism had been only one of several sources of Nazi voting strength, after 1933 Hitler placed anti-Semitic ideologues, the most important of whom were Joseph Goebbels, Otto Dietrich and Alfred Rosenberg, at the top of the key opinion-shaping institutions. In a dictatorship resting on the ‘leadership principle’, Hitler’s anti-Semitic convictions defined policy.”
Jeffrey Herf (historian)
“Consider why Germany, fighting a war on two fronts, desperate for fuel and materiel of every sort, would bother to load millions of Jews on railroad cars and transport them hundreds, even thousands, of miles to concentration camps. Camps built specifically to house them, where they would be fed, clothed, even tattooed so they could be inventoried… just to kill them.”
Edgar Steele, Holocaust denier
“Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world’s greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.”
Richard Weikart, ethicist
“Anti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries. A book I had, written by Dr. Martin Luther, was, for instance, confiscated. Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants’ dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the prosecution.”
Julius Streicher, Nazi propagandist
“The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people.”
Adolf Hitler
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”
Primo Levi
“I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.”
Hans Frank, Nazi Gauleiter of occupied Poland
“The time is near when a machine will go into motion which is going to prepare a grave for the world’s criminal – Judah – from which there will be no resurrection.”
Der Sturmer, January 1940
“Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews.”
Anne Frank, Holocaust victim and diarist
“You men of the einsatzgruppen are called upon to fulfil a repulsive duty. But you are soldiers who have to carry out every order unconditionally. You have a responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that is happening. I myself hate this bloody business and I have been moved to the depths of my soul. But I am obeying the highest law by doing my duty. Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats, against vermin.”
Heinrich Himmler, SS leader
“Don’t for a minute think that indoctrinating wide-eyed school children with the lies and slanders against Germans, Slavs, Catholics, Christians, Europeans, and whites in general isn’t a primary purpose of the Holocaust-mongers. The Holocaust is a religion. Its underpinnings in the realm of historical fact are non-existent – no Hitler order, no plan, no budget, no gas chambers, no autopsies of gassed victims, no bones, no ashes, no skulls, no nothing. Secondly, it’s a religion for losers … Suffice it to say that the rise of religions such as this generally coincides with the decline and fall of nations which tolerate them.”
Mark Weber, Holocaust denier
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and writer
“For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organisations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together – many of them only because they helped Jews.”
Simon Wiesenthal, Holocaust survivor and justice seeker
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
Anne Frank