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!"

"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."

"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."

"Im a sailor, not a politician."

"Although as a sailor I despised politics - for I loved my sailors life and still love it today - conditions forced me to take up a definite attitude towards political problems."

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

"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."

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

"I had nothing to do with concentration camps - Himmlers 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. Thats Himmlers 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 - thats why I became a National Socialist. In 1922-23 I knew, by fate, I must find a solution to the labor and social problem."

"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."

"You must understand that the meaning of the word unemployed in Germany is different than in America. In America, unemployed means that a man may be unable to obtain work in his profession. In Germany it means he cant get work in any profession. In Thuringia there were 1.7 million people, of whom 500,000 men were unemployed in 1932 before Hitler came to power. In the whole of Germany, there were 8 million unemployed and 7 million half-time workers."

"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."