Frederick Taylor > Quotes

“The two of them inspected a street barricade being built by the city’s would-be defenders and decided that it would take the approaching Soviet tanks fifteen minutes to demolish it – ‘fourteen minutes for the tank crew to stop laughing, and one minute to brush it aside’.”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“(Arbeitsunlust).”
― Frederick Taylor, The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class

“At least 30,000, possibly more, German POWs may have died in French captivity, of starvation and malnutrition, of disease and neglect and mistreatment. Around 5,000 are thought to have been killed during work on clearing minefields alone. The International Red Cross certainly considered the French, after the Russians, the most reprehensible of the major powers in their treatment of German prisoners of war.”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“Kurt Schumacher, the Hanover-based anti-Nazi who quickly became the leading figure in the post-war Social Democratic Party, was outraged. ‘Wir sind kein Negervolk’ (‘We are not blacks’) the fiery former concentration-camp inmate told Annan.”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“Götz Bergander, son of Dresden, eyewitness to its suffering, and the first objective historian of its destruction, summed up succinctly but tellingly:

What began as routine led to an inferno and left behind a signal. What seemed capable of achievement only on paper—the coming together of favorable circumstances for the attacks—was suddenly an accomplished fact.

But wasn’t that what the supporters of area bombing had always wanted? Too late came the question of whether they had really wanted it.

Or, as the painter Goya—also no stranger to horror—expressed it with even more economy: “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”
― Frederick Taylor, Dresden : Tuesday, 13 February, 1945

“Hitler’s own people ‘liberated’ from him? The Viennese and other Austrians, so many of whom had ecstatically welcomed the annexation of the country to the Reich in March 1938, now suddenly so patriotic for the Red-and-White, so insistent that they were not actually ‘German’ at all?”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“Altogether it is reckoned that around 1.9 million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers in the final months of the war and those immediately following the peace.12”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“raving maniacs, half paralysed with hunger and fear’. In collaboration with an UNRRA team, the soldiers took over a former Napola School at Feldafing, drafted many of its German staff, including cooks and medical personnel, and turned it into a refugee camp, with a nearby hotel requisitioned as hospital accommodation. The number of inmates rapidly grew to some 4,000. By the end of May 1945, the camp had experienced its first survivor wedding and those in the hospital – now moved to a former monastery – had been treated to a concert by the Kovno Ghetto orchestra, dressed in their striped concentration-camp pyjamas.”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“Through deceit, bribery, and blackmail, West German government bodies and military interests induce certain unstable elements in the German Democratic Republic to leave for West Germany . . . the Warsaw Pact member states must take necessary steps to guarantee their security and, primarily, the security of the GDR. – Declaration of the Warsaw Pact, issued 1.11 a.m., Sunday 13 August 1961 as the first barbed wire was being dragged into place along the border between East and West Berlin”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Big brother in Moscow no longer wanted to subsidise Ulbricht’s experiment. The Soviets made some concessions to the East Germans to soften the blow but, as Moscow made clear, the Soviet Union needed to make expensive changes of its own in order to improve the lot of its own people. The GDR leadership’s answer to their problem should be wide-ranging liberalisation. All this was anathema to Ulbricht. In his grim way, he was an idealist whose quasi-religious belief in a rigorous command economy constituted a lifelong article of faith. If the masses disliked such a policy, this could not be because it was wrong, but because they lacked the proper political consciousness.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“By the mid-1920s, with the currency stabilised, the economy buoyed by foreign loans, and the country enjoying relative political and social peace, Germany made a recovery. The arts and sciences flourished – Germany supplied more Nobel Prize winners in the 1920s than any other nation – and with the dead hand of the imperial censors removed, Berlin became the freest, frankest – some would say, most licentious – city in Europe.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The big difficulty was one of imagination. How to divide a modern city of almost four million, to cut streets and railway lines and infrastructure networks that had been functioning, pulsating nerves and arteries for a huge, lively centre of population – a living urban organism – for many decades, even hundreds of years? A West Berliner, then a student, toured Israel in the autumn of 1960. He was given a tour of Jerusalem, and was shocked to see a city then divided between an Israeli West and a Jordanian/Palestinian East. Their hosts showed them a wooden wall just by the Catholic Cathedral of Notre Dame. This, it was explained, had been built to stop clashes between young Jews and Arabs, who had a habit of throwing stones at each other across the border. For a few minutes, we West Berlin students discussed whether something like this would be possible at home. We rejected the thought immediately. The four-sector city of Berlin was in our opinion far too large for a strict division like that in Jerusalem – it couldn’t happen in Berlin, a metropolis that had arisen over centuries of technical progress, with extensive bodies of water and forest, with an intricate pattern of sewers, with a network of subterranean underground and city railway tunnels, inhabited by children who had no inclination to throw stones at each other, as if they were members of two hostile population groups.37”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In the years immediately following, the horrors of hyperinflation devastated Germans’ savings. In June 1920, the rate of exchange stood at 50 marks to the dollar, a year later 101 marks, and by July 1922 550 marks. Then the French invaded the Ruhr industrial area to enforce payment of reparations, and the whole German economy went crazy. In June 1923, the dollar stood at 75,000 marks and two months later at 10,000,000. By the autumn the rate of exchange reached that of one dollar = 4,200,000,000 marks.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In contrast with the West, where alternative lifestyles were by and large tolerated, in the GDR, between the sixties and the eighties, pressure on ‘hooligan’ or ‘subversive’ elements was intense. Hippies were bad enough, but probably the most serious conflict between the state and its young came in the late 1970s when punk culture spread to East Germany. It wasn’t just the clothes – the ripped garments, the fetish objects and chains – or the excessive drinking – drugs were almost impossible to get in East Berlin at this time – or the flaunting of evidence of self-harm. There was something else about punk that the authorities couldn’t stand. Perhaps it was the key phrase of the movement, ‘No Future!’ In a society where the past was uncomfortable, the present seriously problematic, but the utopian ‘socialist’ future was everything, pessimism of the kind that punks luxuriated in was considered deeply anti-social.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Schulz-Ladegast returned to the prison, after recovering from the (probably psychosomatic) illness, much strengthened. Then he was moved into a cell with another prisoner, an older man who had served in the Wehrmacht. His cellmate taught him a few survival tricks. How to handle interrogators, and above all how to keep that vital element of self-respect while remaining within the rules. He told Klaus never to obey a guard’s order immediately. They discussed how to judge that split-second pause when ordered to do something by a guard; the split-second pause that allowed the prisoner to make the guard wait, while at the same time avoiding punishment for disobedience. On such fine behavioural detail depended a prisoner’s sense of his own dignity and therefore his emotional survival.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The division of Berlin between the three wartime allies – Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union – had been agreed by the inter-Allied European Advisory Commission (EAC). This was set up in January 1944 in London. Its task was to draw up plans for the temporary administration of the defeated country, pending its political rehabilitation and the establishment of a German government. The Allied Control Commission, which would meanwhile rule Germany, would be based in Berlin.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The seventeenth of June, the day of the GDR workers’ uprising, gave its name to a long, wide boulevard in West Berlin. Formerly the Charlottenburger Chaussee, the ‘Street of the 17 June’ (Strasse des 17. Juni) runs four kilometres from the Ernst-Reuter-Platz, past the ‘Victory Column’ to the Reichstag and then the Brandenburg Gate. Its name makes many think of the uprising as a Berlin event, but in fact it was a phenomenon that spread across the length and breath of the GDR.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The Ascanian dynasty that ruled Brandenburg for centuries eventually died out. Disease, war and famine stalked the land. The Holy Roman Emperor decided to name a new ruler for this neglected area, a scion of a Nuremberg family that had flourished as hereditary castellans of that powerful imperial free city. The family was called Hohenzollern. Its members would rule here through triumph and disaster for 500 years.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“With a strength totalling almost 4,000, lavishly funded and equipped, the HVA was especially adept at penetrating West Germany with ‘sleepers’. One of these, specially trained and sent into the West in 1956 among many thousands of refugees from the GDR, was Günter Guillaume. Guillaume’s cover was that of a firmly anti-Communist Social Democrat, and so it was that over the years he rose through the ranks of the SPD to become a prominent aide to Willy Brandt and finally, in 1972, his personal assistant and constant companion. Early on the morning of 24 April 1974, the doorbell rang at the villa in Bonn where Guillaume lived with his wife (also a Stasi agent) and his children (who knew nothing of their father’s true identity). Guillaume answered the door in his dressing gown. His visitors identified themselves as officials of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, West Germany’s equivalent of the FBI or M15. ‘Are you Herr Günter Guillaume?’ asked one of the officials. ‘We have a warrant for your arrest.’ At this point, Guillaume made a fatal error. He drew himself up to his full height and announced: ‘I am a citizen and officer of the GDR – respect that fact!’ Actually, they had no conclusive evidence against Guillaume until he incriminated himself.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“One younger member of the Soviet Politburo who had voted against allowing Honecker to visit West Germany was 54-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Second Secretary of the CPSU. In 1985, after Chernenko died, he was elected First Secretary and de facto leader of the USSR by colleagues tired of gerontocracy as a system of government. The first leader of Communist Russia to be born after the 1917 revolution, Gorbachev preached reform expressed through the principles of glasnost or ‘openness’, perestroika (‘restructuring’) and uskoreniye (‘acceleration’).”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The day the Berlin Wall became a reality has often been characterised as the ‘second birth’ of the East German state, the moment at which it became truly viable. Ulbricht was right. Without the Wall, the state he and his Russian protectors had created would not have survived. With it, though horribly and permanently compromised in the court of international public opinion, at least the GDR had a chance. After the Wall was built, the haemorrhaging of the GDR’s working population from East to West Germany all but stopped. Robbed of the previous supply of new labour for its booming industries by the sealing-off of the East, in October 1961 West Germany took the radical and far-reaching step of signing a treaty with Muslim Turkey, allowing for Turkish ‘guest workers’ to fill vacant jobs.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The post-war Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten was known, with typical dark Berlin wit, as the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Rapist’.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In March 1952, the Cold War still seemed frozen solid. Then Stalin surprised the world by sending a note to each of the other three occupying powers – France, Britain and the USA – in which he offered a peace treaty and free elections in a unified Germany. A draft of such a treaty was helpfully included. This was at first sight an amazingly attractive proposal, especially for the Germans; designed, in the words of a recent German writer, echoing Mario Puzo’s Godfather, as ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse’.7 The main stipulation was that a reunited Germany, while permitted to rearm for its own defence, must not join any alliance directed against any of its former opponents in the Second World War. Adenauer dismissed the offer almost immediately. It was argued that the East German government (which would, while negotiations were going on, have constituted an equal partner to West Germany) was not freely elected. This ‘no’ to the Stalin note has since been criticised by historians, including Germans East and West, for ruining a serious chance of painless German reunification without war and thereby condemning the country to almost forty more years of division. To them it is a big black mark against Adenauer’s record.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The Stasi infiltrated dissident groups with agents whose job was to spread division and act as provocateurs, urging protesters into extreme actions that would give the state an excuse to intervene and inflict exemplary punishments.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The young revolutionary Brandt, meanwhile, moved slowly but steadily away from extremism. The murderous chaos of the Spanish Civil War, which he experienced during a visit in 1937, the bloody purges in the Soviet Union, and finally the Hitler-Stalin pact, convinced him that collaboration with the Communists was fraught with problems. Though still a Marxist, he set out on the road to the moderate, democratic socialist stance of which he became a leading post-war exponent.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was a systems man, who had come to the administration straight from running Ford Motors. He liked to know where he stood. On assuming office, he was horrified to discover that the Eisenhower administration had not developed a coherent escalation policy, or at least not one that gave an acceptable flexibility of response. Previous policy seemed as follows: basically, you fought with inadequate conventional forces until it looked like you would lose (which, because NATO’s armies were no match for Soviet might, would probably be pretty soon), after which nuclear weapons would be unleashed, with terrible consequences for the world.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“East and West tolerated each other’s official spies because each gained advantage from the agreement.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Kennedy’s brother Robert had been cultivating a relationship with Georgi Bolshakov, a personable press attache at the Soviet embassy in Washington, and had already used the man as an alternative, unofficial channel to the top leadership in Moscow. In fact, Bolshakov was a colonel in the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) and his job at the embassy a cover, as the Americans well knew. RFK had contacted his friend Bolshakov soon after the 27 October tank confrontation brought things a little too close to the edge. Within hours, messages had passed back and forth between the President of the United States and the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Since this material remains classified, we do not know exactly what was said. What we do know is that at 10.30 the following morning, Khrushchev spoke to Marshal Konev, who had hastily returned to Berlin. According to Khrushchev’s memoirs, Konev told him that the situation at Checkpoint Charlie was unchanged. No one was moving, he told the Soviet leader, except for when the tank crewmen on both sides would climb out and walk around to warm up. ‘Comrade Konev,’ Khrushchev said, ‘I think you’d better order our tanks to turn around and pull back from the border. Don’t have them go very far. Just get them out of sight in the side streets again.’ The Americans, he added, had got themselves into a very difficult situation. ‘They’re looking for a way out, I’m sure. So let’s give them one. We’ll remove our tanks, and they’ll follow our example.’19 And that was exactly what happened. The Soviet tanks withdrew. Between twenty minutes and half an hour later – just enough time to confirm high-level instructions – the Americans also pulled back.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Ulbricht became one of Germany’s most controversial politicians, making inflammatory speeches and going head-to-head with the Nazi Gauleiter of Berlin, Josef Goebbels.4 The ‘limited civil war’ between Communists and Nazis in the streets of Berlin contributed powerfully to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Ulbricht, a keen apostle of political violence, was as much responsible for this as Goebbels.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In fact, in the late 1960s – and certainly by the 1970s – West Berlin came to resemble in significant ways the ‘free city’ that had been Khrushchev’s brainwave back in 1958. True, its population of just over two million survived because of huge subsidies from the half-city’s rich ‘big brother’, the Federal Republic. But West Berlin was not West Germany. It operated under different laws and had – increasingly – a curious social and political flavour all of its own. Cut off from its economic and demographic hinterland, and from almost half its former urban area (and a third of its former population), West Berlin was truly an island in the Communist sea. The majority of established Berliners were still pro-Allies and especially pro-American. They still cheered at Christmas, when the tanks of the 40th Armoured toured Steglitz and Zehlendorf with Santa Claus in full fig in the turret and toys for the local kids.3 America was the guarantee that their freedoms would not go the same way as those of their friends and relatives in East Berlin. But the established Berliners no longer entirely dictated the tone. During the 1960s, the balance of the city began to change.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989