Daily Inspiration Quote by Fritz Sauckel

A bureaucrat’s lullaby: don’t worry, the arrests were only for the guilty. Sauckel’s line is calibrated to sound like common sense, a local administrator’s mild reassurance rather than the voice of a man embedded in a murderous system. The phrase "as far as I know" is doing the real work. It’s an escape hatch disguised as modesty, the classic authoritarian alibi of the mid-level functionary: I’m not saying it didn’t happen, just that it didn’t cross my desk. In the Third Reich, that posture wasn’t ignorance so much as technique.

Then there’s the careful narrowing of the target: not Communists as such, but Communists who had "actually worked against the State". That little "actually" is a moral solvent. It implies due process, evidence, proportionality. It recasts political persecution as ordinary law enforcement, swapping ideology for public safety. And it quietly redefines "the State" as the Nazi state, as if loyalty to a regime is the same as loyalty to society.

Context matters: Sauckel wasn’t just a "soldier". He was Gauleiter of Thuringia and, later, Hitler’s chief labor recruiter who oversaw the vast machinery of forced labor. At Nuremberg, men like Sauckel leaned hard on this kind of language because it turns complicity into administrative routine. "In my Gau" localizes responsibility, shrinking a continental terror into a manageable jurisdiction. The subtext is reputational triage: I ran a clean shop; any excesses were elsewhere; any victims had it coming. It’s not a defense of innocence. It’s a defense of normalcy.