"First of all, I introduce myself .....Forgive me, my English is not so good. I am 70yrs old and I live in a small villa in a town in Oregon. One street, one bridge, a gas station, four churches and six bars . You know the place. My children have all gone now.. they call, but we don't see them so much. My wife is an American. I married her in 1948 when she was nineteen years. She is also a German, you understand this is necessary to me.
They tell me you want to talk about Extremes, you want to talk about the camps! Well, I ask YOU a question ...What about Order? When I was a young man at gymnasium we knew what it was like have discipline. It gave us strength we knew who we were and where we were going. But although my father came from the Junker class, and was a liberal ( he read the Frankfurter Zeitung every day, and subscribed to the critical magazines like Simplicissimus and Jugend). it was difficult for me to see that the world was very fair to my Fatherland. We had fought a long hard war, many of my family had died and the same was true of all our neighbors. Yet we were paying for everyone else! They call it Reparations. For what? All it meant was that my father was bankrupt because no one had money to buy the goods from his little factory. We lived off his pension and what my mother could earn dressmaking. She, a woman who had held a salon each week for the musicians and people with breeding in the town.
What made it worse was that the more we paid, the worse it got. If Hitler hadn't come we'd still be paying. And, down the street if you turned off the main road to my school, I could walk past the Jewish shops and businesses. So much money ... so much time to stare at us Gymnasium buys. I know, I know, they said they fought in the war; that they were German but they still had their secret signs and ways.. and money. They had a stranglehold on the economy ‑ the Jews and the Communists ‑ and many Jews were Communist too. That's a fact even now.
So when I heard the rumors of a new leader I naturally wanted to know everything about him. By this time I was in the local Institute of technology. I could not afford to go to University (they were full of Jews and agitating Communists who could find the money easily). Inflation was growing wilder every day, every minute. My mother used to take a shopping bag full of money out with her. She knew that if she stood in line for Wurst, by the time it was her turn the price had tripled. I went one bicycle tour in Schwarzwald in September 1923 and milk was less expensive than in my own home town -- only 250,000 marks a pint! Ach, those Jews.
Does any one think of Crystal Night nowadays? Well that was when the Jews found out that they weren't Germans, and that they couldn't buy respectability. We showed them.... But it was‑economics not race that was at issue. We, the Fatherland needed their wealth, their hoarded capital. We needed to break up that cartel of economic power. And they were happy to give it. They were always happy to line up, to obey anything so long as they could conform to What they thought we wanted. And we gave you bleeding hearts a chance .. we tried in the League of Nations to let you take the Jews. Give them a homeland, we begged you. If Chamberlain and Asquith were so concerned about the Jews why didn't the British take them?
The idea of concentration camps wasn't ours, although we perfected it. No. it was the British in the Boer War in South Africa who started them ‑ your precious Churchill was there. It is a natural answer to a natural problem. When a group of people get above their natural capabilities, step outside their place in the Order of life, then what better to do? Not only that but it provides a source of cheap and reliable labor, scientifically controlled. Why, when Speer needed secure reliable labor for the secret V‑2 project, then Himmler offered the obvious answer; the concentration camp prisoners.
But I am talking too much, and off the point. You want to know how I could work in the camps? Well ... it is not so easy, but it was our duty. Those people were not like most of you. We had been told that in the newspapers and in the picture houses. But we also knew it. They were like selfish children eager to please , at least the Jews were. They belonged with the other degenerates like the homosexuals and the gypsies, the insane and the congenital defectives; they even belonged with the subhuman Slavs. You could see it in the way they sniveled and told tales on one another. They'd do anything for that extra bit of food. They were not like us. And, remember, we SS knew that we were fighting a war. Not just a War on the frontline fighting with the Wehrmach, we were fighting the real War - for purity. We had no doubts about the outcome of the fighting and we were the group entrusted with the creation of the New Order. The work in the concentration camps was training, preparation, experimentation for our larger task. No society can live without order, it is the backbone of strong government. Like discipline it is vital for survival as a nation as a culture, as a species. One learns to obey orders because that is the natural way of things. You know about Plato and his ideas of Guardians, well our Guardians were people like Himmler, Goering, the Fuhrer. We trusted them .. they knew what was best. They wouldn't let us down, we wouldn't go back to the old days when milk cost 250,000 Deutschmarks a pint, and the Jew walked around in a fur coat. So even if we thought something was wrong it was better to obey orders and forget, to mind one's own business, even if some of them had fair hair and blue eyes and seemed just like me. I just did my job
Don't blame us. It was the Americans who let Mengele go. Those of us who had something to trade escaped trial, some of us (like me) just ran away and found a new home through helpful comrades in South America. Many of us just went home and burned our papers. Clearly you young people sympathize with our ideals because you accept the election of one of our comrades as President of Austria, you thought of him before the publicity as an international statesman. I, for one, am glad to see the old values come back,
Make no mistake you'd all obey orders too - if you thought it right, if it meant your survival or participation in something vital. Look at your prisons, look at Vietnam, look at the invasion of Libya and look at the Milgrim experiments ( In those people were prepared to shock with high voltage electricity as part of a University experiment)
Enough! Do you want to know what I think? Apartheid is too soft, that's why it will fail. It tries to philosophize by talking about 'separate development'. They've allowed the black man to get above his natural place in the order of things and above his potentialities. Even they know that!
sept.1989
And - you see - it happened! ... Yes? An old man's fears have been realized. But now, we have the new president - how you say - George 'Dubya' Bush? I think we have the better times here. Yes?
February 2001
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