"All of us knew that people were tried expeditiously in the concentration camps and were sentenced to death, but we didn't know of innocent people being exterminated."

..

"That the Jews should be evacuated from Germany was clear. That the Jews should go to the general government in Poland was also clear. But not that they should be exterminated. After the war the Jews were to be brought to Palestine or elsewhere. The plan to evacuate them existed before the war." ..

"I am fully convinced that this trial is a mockery and that someday when you Americans have your hands full of Russian troublemaking [Marxism], you will see me and my activities in a different light."

..

[Goldensohn:] "Did not Goering introduce the first concentration camps in 1933 or 1934?"

[Goering:] "Yes, I frankly admit concentration camps for Communists and other enemies of National Socialism at that time, but certainly not with the idea of killing people or of using them as extermination camps."

..

"I think that the atrocities, if they existed and mind you, I don't believe they were technically possible, or if they were, I don't believe Hitler ordered them it must have been Goebbels or Himmler."

..

"The charge of conspiracy is a farce. It all goes back to the Versailles Treaty and the fact that Germany was forced to take steps to regain its dignity as a nation."

..

"I said in court and I repeat to you that this war was not started by Hitler or Germany but by the Allies. Your country [US] obliged England to go to war when we invaded Poland."

..

"I am sure that I will go down in history as a man who did much for the German people. This trial is a political trial, not a criminal one. If there were criminal things perpetrated by the party, or the SS, or even the army, as is charged, I certainly had nothing to do with them. It is true that my position as second in command politically next to Hitler makes such a statement seem ridiculous."

..

"But none of Himmler's subordinates ever came to me, and as far as I knew, atrocities did not exist. I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions. In 1934 I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that if I disapprove of the experimentation on animals, how could I possibly be in favor of torturing humans?"

..

From 'Nuremberg Diary' by Gustave Gilbert (a psychologist at the Nuremberg trial)

"For heaven's sake, do think I would ever have supported it if I had had the slightest idea that it would lead to mass murder? I assure you we never for a moment had such things in mind."

..

"That guy Rudenko [Soviet prosecutor] was more nervous than I was, that's a sure thing. Hoho! but he pulled a boner [made a silly mistake] when I slipped in that one about the Russians transporting 1,680,000 Poles and Ukrainians to Russia. Instead of saying, 'We are not interested in your accusations," he said, 'You do not have to bring up Soviet actions.'-'Actions," he said. Hoho! I bet he gets a hot wire from old Joe on that one!"

..

Gilbert's remark: "He mentioned off handedly that he did not think America would get away with its Negro problem so easily. This was apparently recently borrowed from Rosenberg, indicating the Nazi fear lest they die without leaving behind some heritage of racial hatred somewhere, to prove in a macabre sort of way that they were right after all."

..

"We weren't a band of criminals meeting in the woods in the dead of night to plan mass murders like figures in a dime novel."

Hermann Goering Final Statement

"But I should like to state clearly once more before the High Tribunal that I have never decreed the murder of a single individual at any time and neither did I decree any other atrocities or tolerate them while I had the power and the knowledge to prevent them."

..

"The new allegation presented by Mr. Dodd in his last speech, that I had ordered Heydrich to kill the Jews, lacks every proof and is not true either."

..

"Out of all the happenings of these 25 years, from conferences, speeches, laws, actions and decisions, the prosecution proves that everything was desired and intended from the beginning according to a deliberate sequence and an unbroken connection."