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dee48da
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On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: "And I have loved Germany so."
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Erik Larson |
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4500046
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The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, "The election here is a farce." Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners--96 percent--voted in favor of Hitler's government. On"
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Erik Larson |
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e9462b5
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He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler
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Erik Larson |
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48c949b
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Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens. Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In
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Erik Larson |
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4f0d631
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MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The
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Erik Larson |
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6a2182b
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Coordination" occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or "self-coordination." Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if t..
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Erik Larson |
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b264de5
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One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans
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Erik Larson |
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467e750
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Elsewhere in the government, Dodd thought he detected a new and decidedly moderate bent, at least by comparison to Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels, whom he described as "adolescents in the great game of international leadership." It was in the next tier down, the ministries, that he found cause for hope."
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Erik Larson |
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61b6f6e
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I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me.
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Erik Larson |
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ce5c67f
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Neurath saw himself as a sobering force in the government and believed he could help control Hitler and his party. As one peer put it, "He was trying to train the Nazis and turn them into really serviceable partners in a moderate nationalist regime." But Neurath also thought it likely that Hitler's government eventually would do itself in. "He always believed," one of his aides wrote, "that if he would only stay in office, do his duty, and ..
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Erik Larson |
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2bd01f5
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In his dispatches Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany. "The Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and their time so taken up by pleasant entertainment, that they will have little opportunity to learn what the real situation is."
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Erik Larson |
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54d9c37
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The next day Phipps wrote about Goring's open house in his diary. "The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality," he wrote, but the episode had provided him a valuable if unsettling insight into the nature of Nazi rule. "The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naivete of General Goring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting..
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Erik Larson |
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be34eee
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He added: "With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere."
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Erik Larson |
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f476946
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Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably," he wrote. "There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate."
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Erik Larson |
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d1a64ec
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Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States "did not have a Jewish problem" of its own. "You know, of course," Dodd said, "that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life." He added that some of his peers in Washington had told him confidentially that "they appreciated the difficulties of the Germans in this respect but that t..
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Erik Larson |
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b11a1b3
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Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term "fanatical" became a positive trait. Suddenly"
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Erik Larson |
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2c1ee80
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Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will "sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales."
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Erik Larson |
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a89bfac
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of Commons
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Erik Larson |
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1baaf09
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In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. "Do you hear that?" he whispered. "Isn't it wonderful? That's what I call music."
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Erik Larson |
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d165ff2
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Chicago's merchant princes like devils. George Pullman continued to cut jobs and wages without reducing rents, even though his company's treasury was flush with over $60 million in cash. Pullman's friends cautioned that he was being pigheaded and had underestimated the anger of his workers. He moved his family out of Chicago and hid his best china. On
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Erik Larson |
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58adfda
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But one thing was quite clear..." he wrote. "[B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually,"
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Erik Larson |
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d4eee2b
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But one thing was quite clear..." he wrote. "[B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time."
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Erik Larson |
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65cc857
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DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August 12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote that while he did not approve of Germany's treatment of Jews or Hitler's drive to restore the country's military power, "fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes." --
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Erik Larson |
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8218bb5
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Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.)
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Erik Larson |
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06ee81d
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Straw Hat Day," Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule."
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Erik Larson |
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2c48735
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Eventually she would have an affair with Thomas Wolfe when the writer visited Berlin; Wolfe would tell a friend later that she was "like a butterfly hovering around my penis."
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Erik Larson |
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afb76d9
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The list of appetizers included stuffed eagles' eggs.
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Erik Larson |
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b0cc134
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Torpedoes were expensive, and heavy. Each cost up to $ 5,000-- over $ 100,000 today-- and weighed over three thousand pounds, twice the weight of a Ford Model T.
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Erik Larson |
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cdacf8c
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So many men ... think absolute isolation a coming paradise.
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Erik Larson |
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fe58cf5
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So every night," he said, "I slept with a torpedo and a puppy."
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Erik Larson |
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4c9f7b0
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Here she joined the universal struggle shared by men and women throughout time, to temper rejection so as not to lose a friend forever.
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Erik Larson |
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89cfdd3
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Five years later, during the final assault on Berlin, a Russian shell scored a direct hit on a stable at the western end of the Tiergarten. The adjacent Kurfurstendamm, once one of Berlin's prime shopping and entertainment streets, now became a stage for the utterly macabre--horses, those happiest creatures of Nazi Germany, tearing wildly down the street with manes and tails aflame.
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Erik Larson |
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7f37199
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The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where perhaps one solitary house stood out alone,
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Erik Larson |
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2869b55
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It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago "the Windy City."
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Erik Larson |
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224c1df
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The world, he said, "must face the sad fact that in an age when international cooperation should be the keyword, nations are farther apart than ever."
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Erik Larson |
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a6d9f86
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Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he "could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization."
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Erik Larson |
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11b82fa
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You had to know Putzi to really dislike him. That,
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Erik Larson |
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e3f2573
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I was inclined to think him Jewish," she wrote; she "considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness."
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Erik Larson |
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a9079d6
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Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.
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Erik Larson |
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5700f12
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There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality,
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Erik Larson |
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1ef68eb
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Cunard tickets did not identify babies by name, possibly out of quiet resentment that they traveled free.)
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Erik Larson |
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249e8a4
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In which building is the pope?" one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair. "The pope is not here, madame," the guard said. "Where is he?" "In Italy, Europe, madame." The woman frowned. "Which way is that?" Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, "Three blocks under the lagoon." She said, "How do I get there?" --
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Erik Larson |
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57d5e4d
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Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks.
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Erik Larson |
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e02c6bf
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German navy had its own tradition of assigning nicknames. One very tall commander was nicknamed Seestiefel, or sea boot. Another had a reputation for smelling bad and thus was nicknamed Hein Schniefelig, or stinky person. A third was said to be "very childish and good-natured" and was commonly called Das Kind, the child."
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Erik Larson |