Politics & Power Quote by Fritz Sauckel

A bureaucratic shrug with a body count behind it, Sauckel's line is engineered to sound like procedure, not conquest. "The Diet" evokes the reassuring furniture of parliamentary life; "was dissolved" slips into the passive voice, as if democracy simply expired on its own. Then comes the killer credential: "by a Reich Government decree". Not debated, not voted, not even argued-just issued. Authority is presented as a clerical fact, and the reader is invited to treat legitimacy as whatever the Reich says it is.

The specific intent is normalization. Sauckel isn't trying to persuade so much as to file the paperwork of a coup, turning an act of coercion into an administrative update. The diction belongs to minutes and memoranda, not to men seizing power. That choice matters: it anesthetizes. When political rupture is narrated as routine governance, resistance is framed as irrational disruption of "order."

The subtext is the Nazi state's preferred alchemy: convert violence into legality by naming it. A "decree" becomes a moral solvent. Once the Diet can be erased with a sentence, every subsequent measure-labor conscription, expropriation, terror-can be sold as the next line in the ledger.

Context sharpens the menace. Sauckel, later notorious as Hitler's chief organizer of forced labor, speaks from inside a regime that methodically hollowed out representative institutions and replaced them with command. The sentence previews the machinery he would help run: human beings reduced to units, politics reduced to decrees, crimes reduced to documentation.