Kurt Daluege Quotes

• My chief qualification for the job is that I have been in almost every cell in the Moabit Prison in Berlin.
• The general impression he leaves is that he is insensitive, hard-boiled, capable of great ruthlessness, amoral, conscienceless.
• That it is fairly improbable to get much emotional response out of this man, I am convinced. There is a long-conditioned hardness, an outer shell which has been worn and used so long, probably nothing exists beneath it. Having dealt with force, violence, and easy dispositions of the lives of others, it is questionable as to how much value he puts on life in general, including his own in particular. This was not discussed with him, though it would be interesting to get some information on that point. Getting a sincere or emotionally meaningful answer from him is like trying to bail water from a long-dry well.
• Daluege was more stupid, more conceited, generally dumber than Heydrich. But Daluege was equally ambitious, although not in the same manner as Heydrich. Daluege was more personally conceited. Daluege was morally more decent than Heydrich, who drew no lines at using any methods to gain power. Daluege was more of an obedient officer.
• His cleverness seems to have been confined to a highly developed instinct for self-preservation, which, however, proved in the end, inadequate, and he was hanged in Prague in 1946. In those early days in Berlin he pinned his faith to Himmler and kept fairly quiet. Throughout his dreary little career he seems never to have taken a decision of his own but always to have acted as the literal-minded and joyless administrator of the death and torture sanctioned by his superiors.

kurt daluege