At last word came to Mr. Sheppard that the Zappo-Zapps had treacherously invited a large number of the prominent chiefs of the region to come inside the stockade, and that there they had been shot down without 1294quarter. The mission than asked Mr. Sheppard, who was also a friend of many of the Zappo-Zapps, to go and carefully investigate the whole affair, taking with him some reliable native men, who could, if necessary, corroborate the statements he made.

Negro soldiers would go to farmhouses and holler "Boche! Bache!" as if they were looking for Germans, call the men of the families out into the yards, and hold guns on them while they went in and criminally assaulted the women members of the family.

the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)

Around the middle of February, I called on Goering one evening in Karinhall. I had discovered from studying the military map that he had concentrated his parachute division around his hunting estate. For a long time he had been made the scapegoat for all the failures of the Luftwaffe. At the situation conferences Hitler habitually denounced him in the most violent and insulting language before the assembled officers. He must have been even nastier in the scenes he had with Goering privately. Often, waiting in the anteroom, I could hear Hitler shouting at him. That evening in Karinhall, I established a certain intimacy with Goering for the first and only time. Goering had an excellent Rotschild-Lafite served at the fireplace and ordered the servant not to disturb us. Candidly, I described my disappointment with Hitler. Just as candidly, Goering replied that he well understood me and that he often felt much the same. However, he said, it was easier for me, since I had joined Hitler a great deal later and could free myself from him all the sooner. He, Goering, had much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together- and he could no longer break loose.

IT WAS JUST NOON that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.

When I was in the south in the 60s, the white people didn’t really curse you out, they just tried to kill you.

Hitler liked to think that he was ‘making a front against the entire public opinion’ and that national socialism must never become the bailiff of public opinion, never its slave but its ruler. But actually Hitler was forever feeling around for the pulse of the great controlling minorities. He played with them all, coddled them all, promised all, and lied to everyone. He courted the old nationalist Hugenberg while he pampered the socialist Gregor Strasser. He cajoled his old comrade Feder, the enemy of the ‘bond slavery of interest,’ while he made terms with Schacht the banker. He made ambiguous promises to labor while he dealt with Thyssen for funds. He sent Goering to Rome to assure the Vatican that national socialism was rooted in Christianity while Rosenberg attacked religion and preached his weird forms of paganism. He played every card, worked every side of every street until he was able to put his finger on what may be called the great mass pulse and say: here lies power.

It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.

This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all those detailed to do this monstrous "work," and who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events. Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked; is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler's order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jews had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries. There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler's order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts.

At Munich, at the time of the Soviet Republic, he [Hitler] interceded with his comrades on behalf of the Social-Democratic Government and, in heated discussions, espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists.