Technical experience (with gassing and cremation) first gained with killing psychiatric patients was utilized later for the destruction of millions. The psychiatric murders came first.
Concentration Camps Quotes
In 1941 the psychiatric institution Hadamar celebrated the cremation of the ten thousandth mental patient in a special ceremony. Psychiatrists, nurses, attendants, and secretaries all participated. Everybody received a bottle of beer for the occasion.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed… Never shall I forget those flames, which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me for all eternity of the desire to […]
In August 1943 the Nazis issued an order for the Jews of Denmark to be deported and sent to the death camps. The Danes, learning that the Nazis would soon act, organized themselves into a nation of rescuers. Jews were hidden in their neighbors’ houses and then smuggled in small groups to the fishing villages […]
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.
The real question is: ‘Given what people are, why doesn’t it happen more often?’ Of course, it does, in subtler forms. (speaking of Auschwitz)
Such events do not occur only when the external conditions are favorable, however: people who have survived concentration camps or who have lived through near-fatal physical dangers often recall that in the midst of their ordeal they experienced extraordinarily rich epiphanies in response to such simple events as hearing the song of a bird in […]
I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me […]
I was the first or second tank in the column that liberated a major concentration camp, Magdeburg. When I came around the corner of that pine forest lane and saw the human skeletons hanging from the barbed wire enclosing the camp, I thought, how barbarous of men to string up corpses. Then some of the […]
