15 Karl Wolff Quotes

Karl Wolff quotes

1. We found a round figure of three million Jews in Poland, and then immediately after that came the Russian campaign and we found another five million Jews in Russia. How on Earth could we manage to emigrate this eight million by using long and tiresome official methods if we could not, as was planned somehow or other after the war organise a general and mass-protected and organised emigration to Madagascar? We had conquered France, after all, and we could have compensated France adequately from our other colonial possessions so we could have used Madagascar - the island was big enough to accommodate such a number of Jews - but in the war we were cut off. We had no other choice.

2. My Fuhrer, if it's not possible for you to give me a date for the wonder weapons, we Germans must approach the Anglo-Americans and seek peace.

3. My Fuhrer, I know, it is obvious from interrogations for one thing and from evidence I have from my particular field, that there are naturally differences among these unnatural Allies, but please do not be offended if I say that I do not believe the alliance will split up of itself without our own active intervention. Before that happens we shall be dead or beaten to the ground, and that must not happen - we must do something first.

4. If you repeat to the Fuhrer the story of the radio message from your agent, I won't go to the gallows alone. You and the Reichsfuhrer will hang beside me.

1. “I could feel the hard part of Mom very strongly that time. It was like a stone in her that grew bigger every time my father lost his temper, right under her heart. Feeling the stone in her calmed me down. It told me that she would always be there for me.”

2. “How good the past can look from a rest stop in a bitter future!”

3. “Yes, indeed, I am the stuff, the prize property, the recaptured trophy he will put up on the mantelpiece, in a rage every time I move a millimeter or look less polished, less tarted up than he thinks I should look. In a rage, every time I disappoint him. Which will happen every day.”

4. “Imagine! How the world has changed in only twenty years! Only evil stays the same, year after year.”

5. “I was never the mythic lucky-born after all, the post-war harbinger of hope, peace and progress. That hope and faith grew in parental minds. It all fell apart when we moved to Canada. We brought the War with us, tattooed on our souls.”

6. “Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn’t see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.”

7. “Being sick successfully is not included in society’s panoply of worthy goals.”

8. “He is hearing the uncertain passage of a broken heart, bruising itself again and again on the unjust stones. Such a heart might stumble to either bank of the stream to escape the rush of time. To the side of light, or to the infinity of dark. To virtue, or to evil. Right here, in the river of his life, curves a pool of experience where the heart baptises itself. Either it rises, dark and closed and formidable, or it thrusts forward like an opening hibiscus, its five extravagant petals still dripping tinctures of blood.”

9. “Discovery is the chance they never had, to tell, on oath, how wickedness infects a life. One’s only life. Beyond one’s will, evil comes, looking for a surprise soft spot, a place to inject its poison.”

10. “Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!”

11. “You have to be careful what seeds you sow on dirt where your roots have not yet touched the bedrock.”