After the war, Hoess [Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz] was asked if he ever considered whether the people he murdered had actually deserved it. He explained:
*Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. – And besides, it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything… We just never heard anything else. It was not just newspapers like the Stuermer but it was everything we ever heard. Even our military and ideological training took for granted that we had to protect Germany from the Jews… It only started to occur to me after the collapse that maybe it was not quite right, after I had heard what everybody was saying… We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody and somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t… You can be sure that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning. – But Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.*
Source:
Stephens, John Richard. “Victims of History.” Weird History 101: Tales of Intrigue, Mayhem, and Outrageous Behavior. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. 190. Print.
Further Reading:
This is something to think about when someone calls someone else a Nazi.