Sick speech from top Nazi Heinrich Himmler’s diary dubbed the most sinister in history for its graphic descriptions of mass murder
Newly discovered records shed fresh light on the darkest speech ever made
FRESH extracts from the recently discovered war diary of SS chief Heinrich Himmler detail the most sinister speech in history which he delivered to underlings who carried out the Holocaust.
It was October 4 1943 and marked in the diary of the 'Reichsführer-SS' as a 'Group Leader meeting.'
The innocuous sounding title masked the true horror of what Himmler would say in his speech at 5.30pm in Poznan, occupied Poland.
It was the secret key speech of the entire extermination programme in which, among other things, Himmler told his executioners: "I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.
Altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character
Himmler
"It is one of those things that is easily said. 'The Jewish people is being exterminated,' every Party member will tell you, 'perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.'
"And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew.
"They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.
";And none of them has seen it, has endured it.
";Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000.
"And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.
"Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators.
"Altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people.
"And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character."
At 9.30pm that evening he dined with the SS killers and two hours later boarded his private train Steiermark for the journey back to Berlin.
Other entries from the diaries, discovered in a Russian military archive after vanishing in the chaos of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and being serialised by newspaper Bild, include two from 1938.
On March 9 that year he records a "comradely" lunch at the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich: the first such camp set up by the regime which would go on to kill 36,000 people by the time the war ended.
The next day he chronicles a visit to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside of Berlin with propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels.
And four days after that he was in the east of the country visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp where he also lunched.
Later that night he travelled to Weimar where he dined with the local Nazi Party leader Fritz Sauckel, a man who would later hang for war crimes at Nuremberg for organising slave labour.
Himmler noted in his diary: "Tea and agreement to become godfather to his son.";
Himmler was the godfather to dozens of children of high ranking Nazis during his career.
On December 18 1941, in another diary that was discovered in Russia 25 years ago, Himmler wrote that Jews in Russia were to be "exterminated as partisans."
Both that diary and the ones covering the years 1938, 1943 and 1944 -- found earlier this year in a Russian military archive at Podolsk -- detail several trips he made to the most notorious Nazi death factory: Auschwitz in occupied Poland.
On January 9 1943, his diary states that he was also in Warsaw, home to the biggest Jewish ghetto in Europe where Jews had been crammed in appalling conditions into a few city blocks before being transported for extermination.
The diary records how he was collected from the airport by an SS officer before being transported to the casino of the security police for lunch.
Then: "A talk, a drive through the ghetto, a visit to the holding area and then at 18.00 hour, departure from Warsaw."
There was not a word about the suffering of the people in the ghetto.
The details uncovered in the diary fills in an enormous gap for Third Reich scholars.
It also illustrates how much time and energy Himmler and his SS were expending in murdering defenceless people at a time when the regime was fighting hard to survive the war.
On February 12 1943 he flew to Lublin in the far east of Poland to lunch with senior SS officers including Odilo Globocnik, one of the gravest criminals of all time.
Globocnik -- called lovingly 'Globus' by Himmler -- set up the four 'pure' extermination camps of the Holocaust in 1942; Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno.
Unlike other killing centres like Auschwitz and Majdanek, which also operated as huge labour camps, these four death factories existed only for murder.
And in them Globocnik oversaw the murders of an estimated two million people.
On that visit Himmler, after dining at the Airport Hotel in Lublin, travelled to Sobibor where 250,000 people were murdered.
The diary records that on this day he visited the SS-Sonderkommando in the camp: the name given to work prisoners ordered to dispose of the dead before they too were executed and burned.
The purpose of the visit: to gauge the "efficiency" of the diesel engine gas chambers at the site.
Because no transport was due on this day the diary mentions that several hundred young women and men were brought from Lublin to be exterminated for Himmler's observation.
Ada Lichtman, a rare survivor of the camp, remembered Himmler being driven away.
"There was a huge banquet given in his honour," she recalled. "I had to decorate the tables.
"Himmler was so enthusiastic about this visit.
"When he drove away our murderers were wearing new decorations he had presented to them."
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