Ian Kershaw > Quotes

“I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about”
― Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion & Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-45

“Following a meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a man who had 'courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church' - went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“What Hitler did was advertise unoriginal ideas in an original way. He gave voice to phobias, prejudice, and resentment as no one else could. Others could say the same thing but make no impact at all. It was less what he said, than how he said it that counted. As it was to be throughout his ‘career’, presentation was what mattered.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“Hitler’s model for domination and exploitation remained the British Empire. His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It must be possible to control the eastern territory with quarter of a million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400 million Indians. Russia would always be dominated by German rulers. They must see to it that the masses were educated to do no more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for them was in the German interest. The”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such eccentricities of behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. ‘He always needs people who can translate his ideologies into reality so that they can be implemented,’ Pfeffer is reported as stating. Hitler’s way was, in fact, not to hand out streams of orders to shape important political decisions. Where possible, he avoided decisions. Rather, he laid out – often in his diffuse and opinionated fashion – his ideas at length and repeatedly. These provided the general guidelines and direction for policy-making. Others had to interpret from his comments how they thought he wanted them to act and ‘work towards’ his distant objectives. ‘If they could all work in this way,’ Hitler was reported as stating from time to time, ‘if they could all strive with firm, conscious tenacity towards a common, distant goal, then the ultimate goal must one day be achieved. That mistakes will be made is human. It is a pity. But that will be overcome if a common goal is constantly adopted as a guideline.’ This instinctive way of operating, embedded in Hitler’s social-Darwinist approach, not only unleashed ferocious competition among those in the party – later in the state – trying to reach the ‘correct’ interpretation of Hitler’s intentions. It also meant that Hitler, the unchallenged fount of ideological orthodoxy by this time, could always side with those who had come out on top in the relentless struggle going on below him, with those who had best proven that they were following the ‘right guidelines’. And since only Hitler could determine this, his power position was massively enhanced.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“Hitler’s technique of throwing out a torrent of statistics – correct, fabricated, or embellished – to support an argument made countering it extremely difficult. Adam, struck – so he later claimed – by Hitler’s ‘lack of education (Unbildung)’, inability to confront reality, and readiness to resort to lies to get his way, retorted provocatively that if that was the case, there was little point in worrying any longer about the western”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“Consistent only with his own warped and peculiar brand of logic, he was prepared to take measures with such far-reaching consequences for the German population that the very survival he claimed to be fighting for was fundamentally threatened. Ultimately, the continued existence of the German people – if it showed itself incapable of defeating its enemies – was less important to him than the refusal to capitulate.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“For what becomes clear – without falling into the mistake of presuming that he was no more than the puppet of the ‘ruling classes’ – is that Hitler would have remained a political nonentity without the patronage and support he obtained from influential circles in Bavaria. During this period, Hitler was seldom, if ever, master of his own destiny. The key decisions – to take over the party leadership in 1921, to engage in the putsch adventure in 1923 – were not carefully conceived actions, but desperate forward moves to save face – behaviour characteristic of Hitler to the end.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“Most people in Europe in 1950 held views that seventy years later would be regarded as anathema. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (arising from their catastrophic breach during the Second World War) had been adopted by the United Nations as recently as December 1948, but there was little popular understanding of what it meant in practice. Racist views and blatant racial discrimination were widely accepted and scarcely seen as remarkable. Few people of skin colours other than white lived in European countries. Capital punishment was still in existence, and executions were routinely carried out for people found guilty of the worst crimes. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence. Abortion was illegal. The influence of the Christian churches was profound, and attendance at church services still relatively high. By the time post-war children approached old age, human rights were taken for granted (however imperfect the practice), holding racist views was among the worst of social stigmas (though less so in Eastern and Southern than in Western Europe), multicultural societies were the norm, capital punishment had disappeared from Europe, gay marriage and legal abortion were widely accepted, and the role of the Christian churches had diminished greatly (though the spread of mosques, a feature of modern European cities almost wholly unknown in 1950, testified to the importance of religion among Muslim minorities).”
― Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017

“Nationalist conflicts and ethnic-racial tensions were greatly intensified by the territorial settlement of Europe that followed the First World War. The architects of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, however good their intentions, faced insuperable problems in attempting to satisfy the territorial demands of the new countries formed out of the wreckage of the old empires. Ethnic minorities formed sizeable parts of most of the new states in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, offering a potential base for serious political disturbance. Almost”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“The army leadership, taking these wishes of Hitler on board and also bearing in mind the outcome of the war games, had already adjusted its strategic thinking when, on 18 February, Hitler spoke of the favourable impression he had gained of Manstein’s plan the day before.42 The die was now cast. By chance, the basic thoughts of the amateur had coincided with the brilliantly unorthodox planning of the professional strategist. Further refined by the OKH, the Manstein plan gave Hitler what he wanted: a surprise assault in the most unexpected area which, though not without risk, had the boldness of genius. The”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis were ‘working towards the Führer’, whose authority allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the occupied territories. Academics – historians at the forefront – excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east. Racial ‘experts’ in the party set to work to construct the ‘scientific’ basis for the inferiority of the Poles. Armies of planners, moved to the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring. Hitler had to do no more than provide the general licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings. Winston Churchill (1901)”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, revolution, and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“German military losses in the last phase of the war were immense, as high in the last ten months of the war as in the four years to July 1944.”
― Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance & Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944-45

“There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing. The politicians of Weimar’s parties were well on the way to reaching that point in 1930.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“He was a quiet man behind the scenes who, at another time in another place, might have become a company secretary. But Bouhler, still bearing a walking disability – and perhaps psychological scars – from the serious injuries to his legs sustained towards the end of the war which had prevented him from pursuing an officer’s career in the army as his father had done, was ambitious.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“And among the most bizarre aspects of the ‘total war’ drive in the second half of 1944 was the fact that at precisely the time he was combing out the last reserves of manpower, Goebbels – according to film director Veit Harlan – was allowing him, at Hitler’s express command, to deploy 187,000 soldiers, withdrawn from active service, as extras for the epic colour film of national heroism, Kolberg, depicting the defence of the small Baltic town against Napoleon as a model for the achievements of total war. According to Harlan, Hitler as well as Goebbels was ‘convinced that such a film was more useful than a military victory’. Even in the terminal crisis of the regime, propaganda had to come first.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“Hitler swallowed the boundless adulation. He became the foremost believer in his own Führer cult. Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“In the west, too, the Reich would have to be strengthened. The French would ‘have to bleed for that’. But there it was a strategic, not an ethnic, question. ‘We must solve the ethnic (völkischen) questions in the east.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“For Hitler, the daily routine was unchanged from that in the Wolf’s Lair. At meals – his own often consisted of no more than a plate of vegetables with apples to follow – he could still appear open, relaxed, engaged. As always, he monopolized dinner-table topics of conversation on a wide variety of topics that touched on his interests or obsessions. These included the evils of smoking, the construction of a motorway-system throughout the eastern territories, the deficiencies of the legal system, the achievements of Stalin as a latter-day Ghengis Khan, keeping the standard of living low among the subjugated peoples, the need to remove the last Jews from German cities, and the promotion of private initiative rather than a state-controlled economy.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“Germans in high places and low were meanwhile already laying the foundations of their apologia, attempting to establish distance between themselves and the crimes of Nazism.”
― Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance & Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944-45

“His only real affection seems to have been for his dog, Foxl, a white terrier that had strayed across from enemy lines. Hitler taught it tricks, revelling in how attached it was to him and how glad it was to see him when he returned from duty. He was distraught late in the war when his unit had to move on and Foxl could not be found. ‘The swine who took him from me doesn’t know what he did to me,’ was his comment many years later.123 He felt as strongly about none of the thousands of humans he saw slaughtered about him. The emptiness and coldness that Hitler showed throughout his life in his dealings with human beings were absent in the feeling he had for his dog.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 1: 1889-1936 Hubris

“In Würzburg, Gauleiter Otto Hellmuth, generally seen as one of the more moderate Party bosses, was all set to go ahead with implementing the ‘Nero Order’. It would, indeed, be pointless though, he admitted, if there were no chance of a change in the situation at the last minute. He asked Speer when the decisive ‘miracle weapons’ were going to be deployed. Only when Speer told him bluntly: ‘They’re not coming’, did he agree not to destroy the Schweinfurt ballbearing factories.143”
― Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance & Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944-45

“That the notion of 'national community' gained its definition by those it excluded from it...”
― ian kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“Without the Reichswehr’s ‘discovery’ of his talent for nationalist agitation, Hitler had every prospect of returning to the margins of society – an embittered war veteran with little chance of personal advancement. Without his self-discovery that he could ‘speak’, Hitler would not have been able to contemplate the possibility of making a living from politics. But without the extraordinary political climate of post-war Germany, and, quite especially, the unique conditions in Bavaria, Hitler would have found himself in any case without an audience, his ‘talent’ pointless and unrecognized, his tirades of hate without echo, the backing from those close to the avenues of power, on whom he depended, unforth-coming.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler

“The war could have been over had the French government been bold enough to send at least the forty divisions it had promised the Poles into action against the far smaller German forces left guarding the western front in September 1939.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“Hitler held forth, among other things, on his theory that cancer was caused by smoking.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“the introduction of the Yellow Star met with general approval but, in the eyes of some, did not go far enough, and needed to be extended to Mischlinge as well as full Jews. Some said the Yellow Star should also be worn on the back.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“It seemed to us that we were witnessing a total break in the evolution of mankind, the complete collapse of man as a rational being. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (1986)”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949