Overriding all of them, however, wa... - Richard J. Evans - Quotes.Pub

Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides.

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Richard J. Evans Quotes

to highlight the immorality of Germans abandoning their moral duty to think.

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany Quotes

A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveller from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveller invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus affair had recently led to a massive outbreak of virulent popular antisemitism. Or might it be Russia, where the Tsarist 'Black Hundreds' had been massacring large numbers of Jews in the wake if the failed Revolution of 1905. That Germany, with its highly acculturated Jewish community and its comparitive lack of overt or violent political antisemitism, would be the nation to launch this exterminatory campaign would hardly have occurred to him.

Antisemitism Quotes Germany Quotes The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. ‘Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.’24

The Third Reich at War Quotes 1939-1945 Quotes

Of all the things that made the Third Reich a modern dictatorship, its incessant demand for popular legitimation was one of the most striking.

The Third Reich in Power Quotes 1933-1939 Quotes

Legea e doar o expresie a puterii.

The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes

If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.

The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.

The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes

It was a Nazi epidemiologist who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer, establishing a government agency to combat tobacco consumption in June 1939.

The Third Reich in Power Quotes 1933-1939 Quotes

In the 1920s and early 1930s there was no doubt which newspaper in Germany had the widest national and international reputation. The Frankfurt Newspaper (Frankfurter Zeitung) was renowned the world over for its thorough and objective reporting, its fair-minded opinion columns and its high intellectual standards. If there was one German newspaper to which foreigners who wished to know what was going on in the country turned, this was it. Although its readership was not large, it was highly educated and included many key formers of opinion.

The Third Reich in Power Quotes 1933-1939 Quotes

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes

Communist Party of Germany never deviated from its belief that the Republic was a bourgeois state whose primary purposes were the protection of the capitalist economic order and the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism, they hoped, would inevitably collapse and the ‘bourgeois’ republic would be replaced by a Soviet state along Russian lines.

The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes

Yet he opposed the introduction

The Third Reich in History and Memory Quotes

The camps also became sites of scientific investigation, as the anthropologist Eugen Fischer, later a leading ‘racial hygienist’ under the Third Reich, descended on the town of Rehoboth to study its mixed-race inhabitants (he called them the ‘Rehoboth bastards’). He and his colleagues obtained skulls for craniometric studies of different races; up to three hundred of them eventually found their way to Germany.

The Third Reich in History and Memory Quotes

the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’.

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany Quotes

Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.

The Third Reich at War Quotes 1939-1945 Quotes

People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany Quotes

Two general questions are of vital importance here. They are inter-linked and to a large extent interdependent. The first is, what are the boundaries of legitimate disagreement among historians? The second is, how far do historians' interpretations depend on a selective reading of the evidence and where does selectivity end and bias begin? The answers to both are fundamental to the business of being a historian. Historians bring a whole variety of ideas, theories, even preconceptions to the evidence to help them frame the questions they want to ask of it and guide their selection of what they want to consult. But once they get to work on the documents, they have a duty to read the evidence as fully and fairly as they can. If it contradicts some of the assumptions they have brought to it, they have to jettison those assumptions...What a professional historian does is to take the whole of the source in question into account, and check it against other relevant sources to reach a reasoned conclusion that will withstand critical scrutiny by other historians who look at the same material... Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account and if necessary amend their own case accordingly. From _Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial_, 250-251

Historical methods Quotes

Cât de oribil, fantastic, incredibil poate să fie”, spunea Chamberlain..., ”că trebuie să săpăm tranșee și să probăm măști de gaze aici din cauza unei certe dintr-o țară îndepărtată, între oameni despre care nu știm nimic.” Cehoslovacia era în mod clar mai departe ca India, Africa de Sud sau Australia pe harta mentală a poporului britanic...

The Third Reich in Power Quotes

A mers până într-acolo încât să-i recomande ministrul de interne al Reichului să investigheze defectele de vedere care au dus, după părerea sa, la asemenea denaturare artistică. Acestea era, credea el (Hitler), moștenite ereditar. Cubiștii și toți ceilalți care nu respectau reprezentarea fidelă a subiectelor loraveau să fie sterilizați.

Pentru unii era prea mult. Paul Nikolaus, artist de cabaret specializat în numere cu subiecte politice la faimosul club Kadeko din Berlin... s-a refugiat la Lucerna, unde s-a sinucis pe 20 martie 1933. ”Iată, nu mai glumesc”, a scris...

In each of the following chapters, dealing in turn with policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy, the overriding imperative of preparing Germany and its people for a major war emerges clearly as the common thread. But that imperative was neither rational in itself, nor followed in a coherent way. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the regime emerge; the Nazi's headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that run through this book and binds its separate parts together. So do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the manner in which it worked; the degree to which Hitler, rather than broader systematic factors inherent in the structure of the Third Reich as a whole, drove policy onward; the possibilities of opposition, resistence, and dissent or even non-conformity to the dictates of National Socialism under a dictatorship that claimed the total allegiance of all its citizens; the nature of the Third Reich's relationship with modernity; the ways in which its policies in different areas resembled, or differed from, those pursued elsewhere in Europe and beyond during the 1930s; and much more besides.

The Third Reich in Power Quotes

The extermination of the Jews has sometimes been seen as a kind of industrialized, assembly-line kind of mass murder, and this picture has at least some element of truth to it. No other genocide in history has been carried out by mechanical means - gassing - in specially constructed facilities like those in operation at Auschwitz or Treblinka. At the same time, however, these facilities did not operate efficiently or effectively, and if the impression given by calling them industrialized is that they were automated or impersonal, then it is a false one. Men such as Hess and Stangl and their subordinates tried to insulate themselves from the human dimensions of what they were doing by referring to their victims as 'cargo' or 'items.' Talking to Gerhard Stabenow, the head of the SS Security Service in Warsaw, in September 1942, Wilm Hosenfeld noted how the language Stabenow used distanced himself from the fact that what he was involved in was the mass murder of human beings: 'He speaks of the Jews as ants or other vermin, of their 'resettlement', that means their mass murder, as he would of the extermination of the bedbugs in the disinfestation of a house.' But at the same time such men were not immune from the human emotions they tried so hard to repress, and they remembered incidents in which individual women and children had appealed to their conscience, even if such appeals were in vain. The psychological strain that continual killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children, imposed on such men was considerable, just as it had been in the case of the SS Task Forces, whose troops had been shooting Jews in their hundreds of thousands before the first gas vans were deploted in an attempt not only to speed up the killing but also to make it somehow more impersonal.

The Third Reich at War Quotes

The next day, 25 February 1945, Goebbels warned, in an article in The Reich, that, if Germany surrendered, Stalin would immediately occupy south-eastern Europe, and ‘an iron curtain would immediately fall on this huge territory, together with the vastness of the Soviet Union, and nations would be slaughtered behind it’.

The Third Reich at War Quotes 1939-1945 Quotes

Thus the pace, justification and mode of implementation of the genocide changed repeatedly from its inception in the summer of 1941. Examining the origins of 'the final solution' in terms of a process rather than a single decision uncovers a variety of impulses given by the Nazi leadership in general, and Hitler and Himmler in particular, to the fight against the supposed global enemy of the Germans. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides. What drove the exterminatory impulses of the Nazis, at every level of the hierarchy, was not the kind of contempt that stamped millions of Slavs as dispensable subhumans, but an ideologically pervasive mixture of fear and hatred, which blamed the Jews for all of Germany's ills, and sought their destruction as a matter of life and death, in the interests of Germany's survival.

The Third Reich at War Quotes

His order [Hitler's] to stand firm not only created clarity about what the army was doing but also had some effect in improving morale. On the other hand, the rigidity with which he now implemented it began to have an effect on the smaller-scale tactical withdrawals that the desperate situation frequently necessitated at various parts of the front. Gotthard Henrici in particular became increasingly frustrated at the repeated orders to stand firm, when all this brought was a repeated danger of being surrounded. 'The distaster continues,' he wrote to his wife on Christmas Eve 1941. 'And at the top, in Berlin, at the very top, nobody wants to admit it. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make blind. Every day we experience this anew. But for reasons of prestige nobody dares to take a determined step backwards. They don't want to admit that their army is surrounded before Moscow. They refuse to recognize that the Russians can do such a thing. And in complete blindness they are kneeling over into the abyss. And they will end in 4 weeks by losing their army before Moscow and later on by losing the whole war.

The Third Reich at War Quotes

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