Fritz Sauckel quotes

Fritz Sauckel was a German Nazi politician, best known as the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment during World War II. He oversaw the forced recruitment and exploitation of millions of foreign workers for the German war effort. He was convicted of war crimes and executed after the Nuremberg Trials. Here are 38 of his quotes:

Many years before I had left a beautiful country and a rich nation and I returned to that country six years later to find it fundamentally changed and in a state of upheaval, and in great spiritual and material need.

Fritz Sauckel

I'm a sailor, not a politician.

Fritz Sauckel

In order to provide the German housewife, above all mothers of many children...with tangible relief from her burdens, the Fuhrer has commissioned me to bring into the Reich from the eastern territories some four to five hundred thousand select, healthy, and strong girls.

Fritz Sauckel

What would you do if your country's welfare depended on labor? When a ship is in a storm it requires one captain.

Fritz Sauckel

Slaves who are underfed, diseased, resentful, despairing, and filled with hate will never yield that maximum of output which they might achieve under normal conditions.

Fritz Sauckel

I am dying innocent. The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany! God protect my family!

Fritz Sauckel

Himmler, Bormann, and Goebbels, they were probably bad fellows.

Fritz Sauckel

Only Communists and Social Democrats who acted against the state were incarcerated. Most of the Communists and Social Democrats I had known became Nazis later. Only those who were doing anything against the state were thrown in concentration camps.

Fritz Sauckel

America is so big that it cries for work. In Germany, if you tried to find work, you couldn't. In America, it was a strange economy which caused unemployment. German unemployment was due to the boycott of German goods. Not an official boycott. The world market refused to accept German goods. France, England, and America refused. Germany had no colonies and she had to export manufactured goods for grain. We had nothing to speak of. We managed to live during the war by rations. We all lived on a strict ration - even ministers in the government like myself - and we lived on things from the conquered countries, including Africa and Russia.

Fritz Sauckel

I had to examine myself very thoroughly to find the right path personally.

Fritz Sauckel

It so happened that I was on a German sailing vessel on the way to Australia when the ship was captured, and on the high seas I was made prisoner by the French.

Fritz Sauckel

As I, as a worker, came to know them, the aims of German trade unions were political, and there were a number of various trade unions with varied political views.

Fritz Sauckel

I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier.

Fritz Sauckel

I never burned down synagogues. It was a revolution, and Russians burned churches during their revolution. If there are many different nationalities in a country, the leadership should be divided among people by percentages. In finance, press, radio - the Jews had taken over positions. That feeling existed before Hitler.

Fritz Sauckel

Sauckel, the greatest and cruelest slaver since the pharaohs of Egypt, produced desperately needed manpower by driving foreign peoples into the land of bondage on a scale unknown even in the ancient days of tyranny in the kingdom of the Nile.

Fritz Sauckel

That man who is responsible for slave labor in Germany does not have my sympathy. I did not like the whole idea of what he did. After all, there are limits to what one can do with foreign populations in the forced labor business. In the first place, the whole idea is completely unproductive. One needs three or four men to watch one compulsory worker. Sauckel deserves the severest punishment.

Fritz Sauckel

I had nothing to do with concentration camps - Himmler's work. There was a labor minister, Ley, whose position is like your John Lewis in America. My duties were to assign POW and foreign labor to factories or whatever work had to be done. I had nothing to do with punishment, criminals, and so forth. That's Himmler's work. If someone had told me as a seaman I should have engaged in politics I would have taken it as an insult. After my return from France, when I found the workers in the Schweinfurt factory all divided up into groups, many parties - I want to give you an honest reason - that's why I became a National Socialist. In 1922-23 I knew, by fate, I must find a solution to the labor and social problem.

Fritz Sauckel

I was never informed in advance about the start of the war or about foreign political developments.

Fritz Sauckel

I had repeatedly made written requests to the Fuehrer that I might be allowed to join the Wehrmacht as an ordinary soldier. He refused to give me this permission.

Fritz Sauckel

The controversies between the proletariat and the middle class had to be smoothed out and bridged over by each getting to know and understand the other.

Fritz Sauckel

The Diet was dissolved by a Reich Government decree.

Fritz Sauckel

Through the Young Men's Christian Association and principally in Australia and North America, as well as in South America, I came into contact with families of these countries.

Fritz Sauckel