Time & Perspective Quote by Fritz Sauckel

The line lands with the chill of bureaucratic denial, the kind that pretends transparency is a founding principle rather than a tactical costume. Sauckel’s phrasing - “very definitely told,” “under no circumstances” - is rigid on purpose. It doesn’t sound like a man remembering; it sounds like a man building a record. The passive construction matters: “we were told.” Agency is pushed up the chain, as if moral responsibility can be reassigned like paperwork.

Context is doing most of the heavy lifting. Sauckel wasn’t an abstract “soldier” reflecting on party governance; he was a senior Nazi official tried at Nuremberg, centrally implicated in the forced labor program that dragged millions into German factories. In that setting, a claim of “no secret chapters” is not nostalgia for openness. It’s a defensive move aimed at the tribunal: if the Party allegedly forbade secrecy, then criminal policies must have been either public (therefore, normalized) or concealed above his pay grade (therefore, not his fault). Either way, the sentence is engineered to flatten culpability.

The subtext is an attempted alibi disguised as a civics lesson. “Everything should be done publicly” invokes the language of accountable governance, but it’s delivered by someone operating inside a regime that weaponized spectacle, euphemism, and selective visibility. The Nazis were “public” about pageantry and ideology; they were surgical about what remained deniable. Sauckel’s quote exploits that gap: it borrows the moral credibility of openness to make secrecy sound like someone else’s problem.