Daily Inspiration Quote by Fritz Sauckel

A bureaucrat’s dodge disguised as modesty: Sauckel’s phrasing turns human contact into an administrative category, as if “personal relationships” were an optional add-on to the main business of history. The sentence is engineered to sound harmless. “As regards” is legalistic throat-clearing; “I cannot say” performs reluctance; “particularly personal intercourse” smears the idea of intimacy into vagueness. It’s not just evasive language, it’s a moral solvent.

Context matters because Sauckel wasn’t a lonely foot soldier making small talk. As the Nazi official tasked with labor procurement, he sat at the center of forced labor policy on an industrial scale. After the war, men like Sauckel routinely tried to shrink their agency by expanding their distance: they didn’t “know” anyone, didn’t “deal” with specifics, didn’t have “personal” ties. The subtext is clear: if no relationship was personal, then no obligation was personal either. No face, no guilt.

The line also reflects how authoritarian systems protect themselves: they train their operators to speak in abstractions that bleach out the human. “Intercourse” here reads less like closeness than contact, like a contaminated substance one avoids. That’s the intent: to present himself as a functionary who merely moved papers, not a man who moved bodies.

It works rhetorically because it flatters the listener’s desire for clean categories while smuggling in a conclusion: I wasn’t connected enough to be responsible. The tragedy is that mass harm is often made possible precisely by that cultivated impersonality.