Robert Gellately > Quotes

“The Soviets were content to give Hitler the green light for an assault on Poland because they saw ways of capitalizing on it. German forces invaded Poland on September 1, and as expected, Britain and France issued an ultimatum that two days later led them to declare war on Germany.17 The Kremlin had wanted to coordinate with Berlin regarding plans for the attack on Poland, but given the shocking speed of the German advance, it had no time. Poland was already in the throes of defeat on September 17 when the Red Army ignobly invaded from the east. Stalin relished finally getting into Poland, for the initial Bolshevik crusade to bring revolution to Berlin, Paris, and beyond had ended at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. At that time Polish forces had stopped and encircled the Red Army, taken more than 100,000 prisoners, and begun driving out the invaders until an armistice was reached in October. Poland celebrated the great battle as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” but now in 1939 the Red Army was back. Poland, Stalin said in early September, had “enslaved” Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and other Slavs, and when it fell, the world would have “one less bourgeois fascist state. Would it be so bad,” he asked his cronies rhetorically, “if we, through the destruction of Poland, extended the socialist system to new territories and nations?”18”
― Robert Gellately, Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War

“Alf Lüdtke’s recent study shows on the basis of soldiers’ letters sent to their families back home, that in fact most people in the country ‘readily accepted’ Hitler, and they widely cheered the goals of ‘ “restoring” the grandeur of the Reich and “cleaning out” alleged “aliens” in politics and society’.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“Himmler encouraged Gestapo and Kripo to do their bit, and in 1936 a new ‘Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion’ was created to register all homosexuals investigated by police.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“The Nazi effort to foster the relationship between the police and society took many forms, including a new public relations event, the ‘Day of the German Police’. It was held for the first time just before Christmas in 1934, and every year across Germany thereafter around that time to show the gentler and social side of the police, who collected money for the charity ‘Winter Help Works’.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“According to the Himmler–Thierack agreements in 1942, the justice system was in the future mainly for Germans only.150 Their agreements went a long way in recognizing the validity of ‘police justice’. Execution orders for Poles, usually carried out as soon as possible and beyond appeal, were formulated in such a way as to make clear that the decision was made by the police, not the courts.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945,”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“Given this framework, he necessarily plays down Hitler’s role, and concludes among other things that ‘what Hitler and the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans’ pre-existing, pent-up antisemitism’. What he calls the ‘great success’ in persecuting the Jews, resulted ‘in the main’ from ‘the preexisting, demonological, racially based, eliminationist antisemitism of the German people, which Hitler essentially unleashed’.14”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“She remembers how she ‘wanted only to see the good’ and the rest she ‘simply shoved aside’.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“a police official in SS uniform, probably a member of the Gestapo, turned up in a senior high school class in the Stuttgart area. He was there to explain the background of ‘shootings “because of resistance” one could read about from time to time in the press’. He said simply, that while courts worked well when hard evidence could be found, the police had to act when there was insufficient evidence. They knew how to recognize guilt and were not bound by rules of evidence as were judges, so that the police could become the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner. Lest students worry unduly, they were assured that the police did not execute anyone without ‘previously thoroughly examining’ the case.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany