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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5a50dc1 | A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was "only two years."16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: "Gott strafe England!"--whereupon the children are supposed to answer: "He will." | William L. Shirer | ||
| 9a7a291 | Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler "the worst of all," General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass--"Night and Fog Decree." This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons "endangering .. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 37115e4 | This crude, cowardly bargain seems not to have unduly bothered Hitler. If Mussolini was personally attracted to him, as Ciano said, by "something deeply rooted in his make-up," it might be said that the attraction was mutual, for the same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been to some of his closest associates, a number of whom he had had murdered, such as Roehm and Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusual loyalty to his ridic.. | William L. Shirer | ||
| aff4e43 | While surrender negotiations were under way--a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms--bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless. | William L. Shirer | ||
| a44c186 | This government was Papen's conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of the staunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and with the knowing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered the obstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 1b59d16 | The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word h.. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 4a81ca3 | No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The | William L. Shirer | ||
| a3917d4 | Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries--in France, in England, in the United States--had proved to be the backbone of democracy. In | William L. Shirer | ||
| c57aba6 | What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic "nonsense" and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These" | William L. Shirer | ||
| 96d5068 | As Gregor Strasser publicly boasted, "All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe... is good, very good for us and our German revolution." | William L. Shirer | ||
| f2f0fe1 | In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including "serious disturbances of the peace" by armed persons." | William L. Shirer | ||
| 04d5a67 | Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. --Santayana | William L. Shirer | ||
| 70bb99d | The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its businesses as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, .. | William L. Shirer | ||
| f201e43 | He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia's thirty-five well-trained, well-armed divisions entrenched behind their strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could put only two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and, according to the German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech defenses. Now | William L. Shirer | ||
| a176fea | The racial laws which excluded the Jews from the German community seemed to a foreign observer to be a shocking throwback to primitive times, but since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the salt of the earth and the master race they were far from being unpopular. A | William L. Shirer | ||
| 6c9506c | A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders. | William L. Shirer | ||
| da48aa5 | The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years, | William L. Shirer | ||
| 3472d8d | Sometimes it has seemed to me that man's main accomplishment has been to tear down, rob pollute, kill. First, his earth, Then his fellow-men. In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, .. | William L. Shirer | ||
| a1870e7 | I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses... For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49 No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 961d345 | A curious communique from the German navy today: "The High Command of the Navy announces: The commander of the Graf Spee, Captain Hans Langsdorff, did not want to survive the sinking of his ship. True to old traditions and in the spirit of the training of the Officers Corps of which he was a member for thirty years, he made this decision. Having brought his crew to safety he considered his duty fulfilled, and followed his ship. The navy und.. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 77411c7 | they knew also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians.* | William L. Shirer | ||
| 7367897 | He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.47 | William L. Shirer | ||
| 699e8ae | area | Michael Connelly | ||
| 34cbd7f | Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrify.. | William L. Shirer | ||
| c657930 | The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the "spiritual" foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a form.. | William L. Shirer | ||
| df8adac | It seems that along the Rhine front the French broadcast some recordings which the Germans say constituted a personal insult to the Fuhrer. "The French did not realize," says the DNB with that complete lack of humour which makes the Germans so funny," | William L. Shirer | ||
| 40dbcc1 | concordat, | William L. Shirer | ||
| 2a7f9e6 | Marvin found that German clergymen had taken to wearing clerical collars made of paper. They cost eight cents, can be worn inside out the second day, and are then thrown away.... | William L. Shirer | ||
| e2989e0 | Locarno | William L. Shirer | ||
| 7967ac8 | Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 686c7f2 | The Germans heard vaguely in their censored press and broadcasts of the revulsion abroad but they noticed that it did not prevent foreigners from flocking to the Third Reich and seemingly enjoying its hospitality. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 21a8d9b | And many returned who if they were not converted were at least rendered tolerant of the "new Germany" and believed that they had seen, as they said, "positive achievements." | William L. Shirer | ||
| c1571a0 | The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they made the most of it. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 9a0e28a | On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his "Peace Speech," one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world." | William L. Shirer | ||
| 536a475 | The goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state. | William L. Shirer | ||
| fc6014a | Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution." | William L. Shirer | ||
| b31a07d | particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is | William L. Shirer | ||
| c47a100 | He was now convinced that Hitler had brought the movement to a dead end. The more radical followers were going over to the Communists. | William L. Shirer | ||
| eede5c2 | Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King was the head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State. | William L. Shirer | ||
| eb60e5b | A people who had so lightly given up their political and cultural and economic freedoms were not, except for a relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 0566c61 | Hitler had never made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a German's personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business friends. | William L. Shirer | ||
| f6586fe | As the year of 1931 ran its uneasy course, with five million wage earners out of work, the middle classes facing ruin, the farmers unable to meet their mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the government floundering, the eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the befuddlement of senility, a confidence mounted in the breasts of the Nazi | William L. Shirer | ||
| d02d249 | majority in the Reichstag for any policy--of the Left, the Center or the Right--and that merely to carry on the business of government and do something about the economic paralysis he had to resort to Article 48 of the constitution, which permitted him in an emergency, if the President approved, to govern by decree. | William L. Shirer | ||
| 72307af | All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. | William L. Shirer |