By placing these people with foreign ideas in camps, German blood was saved. Would it have been better to have a civil war? - Karl Dönitz

Every decent German today is ashamed of the crimes which the Third Reich committed behind the nation's back. To hold the people as a whole responsible for the misdeeds of a small minority is contrary to every canon of justice. Men cannot be condemned for things of which they did not even know. The assumption that any one people is morally worse than other peoples is, in itself, a false premise, and it comes particularly unjustly from nations who, during the war and after 1945, did things which were an offence against both legal and moral justice and which resulted in the sacrifice of millions of Germans. I therefore regard it as wrong that individual Germans should be constantly indulging, in the name of the whole German people, in public self-accusations and confessions of guilt. That sort of thing does not win us the respect of other nations; nor, be it noted, has any other nation done the same thing with regard to the inhuman acts committed against us.

The Navy had done its duty to the end. Against its innermost wishes, which were for understanding and lasting peace, unconsulted and poorly equipped, it had been called upon, in 1939 to fight against the naval might of Great Britain. With the meagre forces at its disposal it had fought to the best of its ability against Britain and the United States and achieved successes out of all proportion to its strength. That it had been able to do so was in no small measure to the spirit and determination of its men, without which it would never have been able to stand up thus splendidly to the material superiority of these two great maritime powers.

Those who were in Germany in September 1939 know that the people showed no enthusiasm for war. But war nevertheless came and demanded sacrifice after sacrifice. The German soldier fought with unsurpassed devotion to duty. The people and the armed forces marched shoulder to shoulder, in victory or defeat, to the very end.